Moral Progress and Immanent Critique

Abstract

Abstract This chapter assembles the preceding chapters’ arguments to defend an simmanent epistemology of judgments of moral progress and regress. It elaborates this via five theses: (i) that the rational criteria for such judgments are immanent to the transition being judged; (ii) that some of these criteria are available prior to, (iii) some only in the midst of, and (iv) some only retrospectively and after the transition itself; and (v) that moral articulation is ongoing and open-ended. It embraces as non-viciously circular the idea that the moral concepts used in judging the successes and failures of moral articulation are themselves prior results of moral articulation. It draws comparisons with related accounts of moral progress and immanent critique in Elizabeth Anderson and Rahel Jaeggi. It develops Charles Taylor’s notion of “reasoning through transitions” and illustrates this through a case study of Raphael Lemkin’s invention of the concept and term, “genocide,” in 1942.