Moral change : towards a person-centric model

Abstract

In this project, I raise three methodological issues with contemporary studies of moral change and moral progress. The first concerns how philosophers typically think about moral history. The second regards the dominant explanatory model of how people change their moral views, and the last deals with prescriptions for moral intervention. Addressing each issue, I provide three new theories to replace current ones. Finally, I propose the “person-centric” model of moral change as a new paradigm for studying the historical transformation of morality.

First, the currently dominant conception of moral history is what I call the “problem-solving conception of moral progress,” which sees moral history as a process in which our ancestors apply liberal values to solve moral problems and make progress. This conception, however, neglects the conflict of the values we live by and the moral change dynamics that conflict engenders. In place of this conception, I propose the dual character conception of moral change. This alternative conception highlights how our exercise of some moral values entails the neglect and sacrifice of other conflicting values, which generates moral predicaments we do not usually anticipate when operating from the problem-solving conception.

Second, current accounts follow either methodological individualism or structuralism in identifying the major processes underlying moral view change. One key process is how people reason about new sorts of morally relevant information in light of given social and psychological contexts. Drawing on evidence from moral psychology, I show how current accounts only consider first-order moral reasoning, in which individuals process the moral information they receive, and thus fail to account for second-order moral reasoning, whereby people retrieve their centrally held values and concerns in order to decide whether they should endorse a moral view. Therefore, current accounts miss out on the agential experiences most crucial to people’s moral view change.

Next, the prevailing conception of moral intervention assumes a top-down, elitist power structure, in which the intellectual community imposes its moral views upon the public and people only accept or resist them. One major challenge of this structure is its illiberal consequences: Carrying out top-down interventions entails the possible erosion of individual freedom and liberal-democratic rights, which leads many liberal thinkers to doubt the very idea of intervention. My response is that elitism is not the only option for moral intervention, and I provide a new conception, which is grounded in people’s desire for wellbeing and their self- generated impetus to attain it. Then, I develop a new framework to show how the intellectual community can aid people to reach their desired life and society.

These three criticisms point to the same issue with contemporary studies of moral change: Instead of following a knowledge-centric model and focusing on establishing more moral claims, we should approach the study of moral change from the values and concerns crucial to one’s life, and identify morally significant struggles and experiences from them. This constitutes the core of the “person- centric” model as a new paradigm for studying the historical transformation of morality.