Moral progress: Kuhn or Popper?
The main thing of which I require clarification in my mind now is, how do societies actually adjudicate between competing moral paradigms? This was the question I was asking myself before we finished reading Kuhn and started reading Popper. It seems to me to be of importance, because otherwise an a priori moralist is simply going to assert that society chooses the better option, involving himself in circularity. But we must know how it is that society chooses the better option, or the argument is meaningless.
In this regard, analogies with Kuhnian science hardly prove fruitful. In fact, Kuhn himself has very little to say about this process, even as it pertains to science, except that which is, in his own words, 'brief and impressionistic'. Basically, apart from the nature of the scientific community itself, there are four main arguments that are appealed to:
If there are any non-banal analogies there to be drawn, they do not seem very straightforward. Falsification would seem to be the better criterion for adjudication of paradigm choice, which really means that moral progress is more like Popperianism than it is like Kuhnianism.
First, falsificationism for Popper makes absolutely no supposition about a pre-paradigm stage like Kuhnianism does. Furthermore, it would be extremely odd if any human society ever had a pre-paradigm stage for its morality. It sounds rather like the external reviewer's counterexample of a premoral social order to which ethics must contribute. One could argue that any such stage in a society was an example that there was not one society, but many, and that in order for them to become one society, they needed to adopt a shared set of mores. Second, new experiences in human history do indeed seem to introduce genuine falsifying instances of the presuppositions of a current ethos. Hence capitalism falsified the hierarchical ethos, including the more that permitted slavery. Indeed, industrialised agriculture and animal research seem to be falsifying the old ethos regarding animals as well. Animals used to be considered solely the property of human beings, where the only more that really protected them was one that forbade out-and-out cruelty or sadism towards them. For most of the rest of human history, the welfare of animals and humans was tied together much more, so that the animals lived very well on the farm or in the wild. In that context, this more seemed all that was necessary to protect them. But modern-day factory farming and greatly increased use of animal research has falsified this original ethos, because it is clear that untold--and seemingly unjust--suffering can be caused to animals without presupposing any motives of sadism or cruelty.
I therefore think that the criterion of falsifiability should be what I go with as my analogy with the philosophy of science. But make it clear why you are going with Popper instead of Kuhn in the book, making your comparisons and contrasts accordingly.
In this regard, analogies with Kuhnian science hardly prove fruitful. In fact, Kuhn himself has very little to say about this process, even as it pertains to science, except that which is, in his own words, 'brief and impressionistic'. Basically, apart from the nature of the scientific community itself, there are four main arguments that are appealed to:
- The new paradigm solves a scientific problem that has caused the crisis in the old paradigm.
- The new paradigm preserves a relatively large share of the solved problems of the old paradigm.
- The new paradigm predicts the existence of new phenomena that the old one did not even take into account.
- The new paradigm has a greater aesthetic to it.
If there are any non-banal analogies there to be drawn, they do not seem very straightforward. Falsification would seem to be the better criterion for adjudication of paradigm choice, which really means that moral progress is more like Popperianism than it is like Kuhnianism.
First, falsificationism for Popper makes absolutely no supposition about a pre-paradigm stage like Kuhnianism does. Furthermore, it would be extremely odd if any human society ever had a pre-paradigm stage for its morality. It sounds rather like the external reviewer's counterexample of a premoral social order to which ethics must contribute. One could argue that any such stage in a society was an example that there was not one society, but many, and that in order for them to become one society, they needed to adopt a shared set of mores. Second, new experiences in human history do indeed seem to introduce genuine falsifying instances of the presuppositions of a current ethos. Hence capitalism falsified the hierarchical ethos, including the more that permitted slavery. Indeed, industrialised agriculture and animal research seem to be falsifying the old ethos regarding animals as well. Animals used to be considered solely the property of human beings, where the only more that really protected them was one that forbade out-and-out cruelty or sadism towards them. For most of the rest of human history, the welfare of animals and humans was tied together much more, so that the animals lived very well on the farm or in the wild. In that context, this more seemed all that was necessary to protect them. But modern-day factory farming and greatly increased use of animal research has falsified this original ethos, because it is clear that untold--and seemingly unjust--suffering can be caused to animals without presupposing any motives of sadism or cruelty.
I therefore think that the criterion of falsifiability should be what I go with as my analogy with the philosophy of science. But make it clear why you are going with Popper instead of Kuhn in the book, making your comparisons and contrasts accordingly.
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