by Alex Hill and Jaime Sevilla

In this article we describe our attempt at understanding the role of moral philosophy in bringing about major moral shifts.

In the first section we explain the research questions and hypotheses we were interested in evaluating. We then summarize what we learned in two areas — women’s rights and animal welfare. We finish with a reflection on the usefulness of this exercise.

Key insights

We propose two alternative explanations for the role of moral philosophy in moral progress: generation of novel insights versus legitimization of existing ones.
Some proxies we found to distinguish between the hypotheses: independent ideation, direct quotation of (non) philosophical work, and a priori versus empirical approaches.
In the case of women’s rights, it seems like philosophical work was important to generate novel insights, but the evidence is only weak.
In the case of animal welfare, it seems like philosophical work has mostly been useful for legitimizing existing ideas rather than developing new insights, but again the evidence for this is only weak.

In total we spent about ~8 hours doing research for this project, between the two of us.

Hypotheses and methodologies

As we started this project we were trying to better understand how moral philosophy affects moral progress.

The three crude hypothesis that we were testing are:

H1 Philosophers generate novel moral ideas from 1st principles
H2 Philosophers synthesize, legitimize and popularize existing ideas
H3 Moral progress happens more or less independently of moral philosophers

We most likely expect reality to conform to a mix of these three, but trying to gain better insight on their relative importance seemed like a valuable exercise.

In particular, having a better understanding of this question would allow us to ascertain what (if any) kind of moral research is better to pursue / fund.

To perform a first cut on this question, we resolved to:

Decide on some key moral milestones
Search for historical records of steps towards that milestone, both philosophical work and other records
Make an educated guess as to whether the importance of related philosophical work for the achievement of the milestone is explained better by H1, H2 or H3

The two examples of moral progress we looked at first are women’s political rights and animal rights. Some other examples we considered were ...

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