An intrinsic versus a relational hierarchy

First, congratulations on what you have achieved so far. The parallels that you have drawn already between Kuhnian science and the history of ethics are indeed most striking. However, one disagreement that I have with you right now is the notion that a hierarchy in human society was in any way scrapped. We still seem clearly to have many hierarchies in place today, between richer and poorer people, more educated and less educated people, the degrees to which different people contribute to the body of research in a particular field, humans over animals, and so on. What has changed is not really the presence of a hierarchy, but the nature of that hierarchy. The old hierarchy was based on notions of the intrinsic worth of things. This proved to be difficult in assessing the worth of a human being, because it was previously assumed that the intrinsic worth of a human being had to do with such things as her social class and gender. Social class was only ever an accident of birth, and could never determine the worth of a human being, either intellectual, metaphysical, spiritual, moral, or so on. The same goes for the notion that one's gender somehow indicated something deep about a person's intrinsic worth. That view has clear metaphysical difficulties that the other anomalies eventually brought into sharp focus. But for now simply focusing on social class alone, it is clear that we still have different classes of people in society. It is simply that now we accept a certain equality of opportunity for people to climb the ladder from one class to the next.

As such, the hierarchy has moved from an intrinsic model of human worth, to a relational model. Your position in the hierarchy is no longer determined by where you start off in that hierarchy, but on what you do to earn your position from that starting point. This is a relational way of determining the worth of a person, because it arises from a relation between what other people want and what you can deliver to them. That's the capitalist laws of supply and demand. Your 'worth', at least as far as it is cashed out in terms of the hierarchy of classes, is determined by the supply of what you have to offer the world, versus the demand that the world actually has for it. If you can pull off a really low supply/demand ratio, then you can really climb up the social ladder. I presume that people who are born into upper classes do indeed have more opportunities to progress in this way than people who are born into lower classes. But this does not stop a lower class person from striving enough to reach an upper class, even if her struggle is greater than that of an upper-class person. Nor does it stop an upper-class person from lowering his own class through indolence or a simple lack of ability in some area. Because the hierarchy is now relational rather than intrinsic, it is more dynamic and responsive to changes in the environment, hence fitter, more viable or more robust.

In this respect, therefore, the change in the nature of the structure of the society can be seen as evolutionary. In fact, the evolutionary step seems straighforwardly Darwinian in the sense that it constitutes survival of the fittest. The new society is fitter than the old society, so it won out, but in order to do so, it had to change its morality accordingly, away from a hiearchical model. The enlightenment ethics in many ways challenges the hierarchical view, and it did indeed remove many important hierarchies that impeded social progress. But society in many respects still seems just as hierarchical now as it did before.