Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 10 student in Warrnambool, Victoria, Australia.
The two thinkers approach the question of how moral knowledge changes from genuinely different starting points, and what their disagreement reveals is philosophically important. The first thinker holds that moral knowledge progresses in a manner analogous to scientific knowledge: through the accumulation of evidence, the testing of principles against cases and the gradual revision of moral beliefs when they fail to account for morally relevant features of experience. Historical expansions in the scope of moral concern — the recognition of rights for previously excluded groups — are taken as evidence that moral knowledge is genuinely developing rather than merely changing. What this position correctly identifies is that moral change is not always arbitrary: some moral revisions are recognisably improvements in the sense that they account for morally relevant considerations that were previously ignored. The second thinker is sceptical of the progressive model. Moral change, on this account, reflects shifts in social power, cultural values and historical contingency rather than genuine epistemic progress. What looks like moral progress from within a particular tradition may simply be the replacement of one set of cultural commitments with another, without any neutral standard by which to judge the replacement an improvement. What this position correctly captures is that the progressive model is vulnerable to a circularity problem: progress is defined as movement toward correct moral beliefs, but the standards used to identify correctness are themselves the product of the moral tradition doing the judging. Where each position runs into difficulty is instructive. The first thinker’s progressive model does not adequately address the circularity objection: if our current moral beliefs are the standard by which we judge past beliefs as mistaken, what prevents a future tradition from judging our current beliefs similarly? The second thinker’s sceptical position, taken to its conclusion, seems to make moral criticism across cultures or historical periods impossible, which is a position most people cannot hold consistently. What the disagreement reveals is a genuine epistemological problem in moral philosophy. Moral knowledge appears to change, but the nature of that change is contested. The most defensible position requires distinguishing between moral change that can be shown to account for previously ignored morally relevant features and moral change that cannot. This is a difficult distinction to apply in practice, but it is the distinction that the progressive model needs and that the sceptical position cannot make.