As you’ve described it, Adaptiveness is very economic. But there are lots of social changes that are hard to explain economically. For example, the expansion of political inclusiveness in the West (Monarchy → Limited Voting Rights → Universal Manhood Suffrage → Universal Suffrage).
And there is a plausible economic story for the creation of Jim Crow (rich whites trying to prevent poor whites from forming a political coalition with poor blacks). But I’m unpersuaded that there’s a compelling economic explanation for the end of Jim Crow.
As you’ve described it, Adaptiveness is very economic. But there are lots of social changes that are hard to explain economically. For example, the expansion of political inclusiveness in the West (Monarchy → Limited Voting Rights → Universal Manhood Suffrage → Universal Suffrage).
There are subfields within economics that attempt to explain precisely these kinds of “social change” using standard microeconomic theory (for instance, public choice).
As kings from medieval times sought to lessen their dependence on the nobility by soliciting the support of town burghers, so did the state in more modern times emancipate itself from the bourgeoisie by enfranchising and buying the votes of successively broader masses of people.
Public choice is an excellent attack on the naive view that all politics is aimed at “improving society as a whole.” And regulatory capture of agencies like the Civil Aeronautics Board, allowing airline rate setting that favored established airlines, is an expected outcome according to public choice theory. But the CAB was abolished eventually.
More broadly, the expansion of so-called “minority rights” is not well-explained by economic theory. Even with the moral justifications supporting employment discrimination law, it is not accurate to say that prohibiting some reasons for hiring and firing workers is more efficient. At best, economic efficiency is unaffected.
I don’t know, but my first guess would be that these are cases where the oppressed gained enough power and ambition that it wasn’t worthwhile to oppress them anymore.
As a rule, giving some group a vote is easier than taking it away from them. That’s a natural ratchet mechanism. You don’t need to posit a historical trend towards better morals. There’s always going to be one political party that would be better served at the moment by extending the vote to some group; and sometimes they’ll have the power to do it.
We certainly can define “moral progress” that way, if we wish. It’s just a phrase, we can define it any way we like.
But we should take care, after so doing, not to assume that the properties we would naively associate with moral progress apply to the referent of “moral progress.”
In particular, a lot of people who talk about moral progress seem to believe it has something to do with people getting better over time by the speaker’s standards. If any path involving one-way ratchets is by definition moral progress, then there exist paths of moral progress that involve people getting worse over time by most speakers’ standards, so they ought to give up that belief if they’re going to use that definition.
It may be more productive to use a term less subject to misunderstanding.
Yeah, my point is less interesting than I intended. Maybe a little to much “not my true rejection” on my part, since I think moral progress is a coherent (but false) assertion based on entirely different reasoning.
We can say that universal suffrage is not moral progress if it usually leads to countries bankrupting themselves after people realize they can vote themselves money, and then being unable to solve the problem because moral posing wins more votes than reason and compromise.
As you’ve described it, Adaptiveness is very economic. But there are lots of social changes that are hard to explain economically. For example, the expansion of political inclusiveness in the West (Monarchy → Limited Voting Rights → Universal Manhood Suffrage → Universal Suffrage).
And there is a plausible economic story for the creation of Jim Crow (rich whites trying to prevent poor whites from forming a political coalition with poor blacks). But I’m unpersuaded that there’s a compelling economic explanation for the end of Jim Crow.
There are subfields within economics that attempt to explain precisely these kinds of “social change” using standard microeconomic theory (for instance, public choice).
-Anthony de Jasay, The State
Public choice is an excellent attack on the naive view that all politics is aimed at “improving society as a whole.” And regulatory capture of agencies like the Civil Aeronautics Board, allowing airline rate setting that favored established airlines, is an expected outcome according to public choice theory. But the CAB was abolished eventually.
More broadly, the expansion of so-called “minority rights” is not well-explained by economic theory. Even with the moral justifications supporting employment discrimination law, it is not accurate to say that prohibiting some reasons for hiring and firing workers is more efficient. At best, economic efficiency is unaffected.
I don’t know, but my first guess would be that these are cases where the oppressed gained enough power and ambition that it wasn’t worthwhile to oppress them anymore.
As a rule, giving some group a vote is easier than taking it away from them. That’s a natural ratchet mechanism. You don’t need to posit a historical trend towards better morals. There’s always going to be one political party that would be better served at the moment by extending the vote to some group; and sometimes they’ll have the power to do it.
If there are one-way ratchets in the moral environment, why can’t we define moral progress as going further into the one-way ratchets?
We certainly can define “moral progress” that way, if we wish. It’s just a phrase, we can define it any way we like.
But we should take care, after so doing, not to assume that the properties we would naively associate with moral progress apply to the referent of “moral progress.”
In particular, a lot of people who talk about moral progress seem to believe it has something to do with people getting better over time by the speaker’s standards. If any path involving one-way ratchets is by definition moral progress, then there exist paths of moral progress that involve people getting worse over time by most speakers’ standards, so they ought to give up that belief if they’re going to use that definition.
It may be more productive to use a term less subject to misunderstanding.
Yeah, my point is less interesting than I intended. Maybe a little to much “not my true rejection” on my part, since I think moral progress is a coherent (but false) assertion based on entirely different reasoning.
We can say that universal suffrage is not moral progress if it usually leads to countries bankrupting themselves after people realize they can vote themselves money, and then being unable to solve the problem because moral posing wins more votes than reason and compromise.