This book is about making moral progress. It’s about making things better, morally or ethically.
Our focus is on improving how we think about ethical issues. This should improve what we think about them, and how we feel about them. Since we act on the basis of what we think, thinking is the place to start.
To think better, to improve our moral beliefs, we will improve our skills at thinking about moral arguments: what they are, how to find them, how to explain and present them.
Most importantly, we will improve our skills at evaluating arguments. Not everything said about morality is an argument, and not all moral arguments are good ones. Indeed, some are very bad, in many ways. We will get better at separating the good moral arguments from the bad, and explaining exactly what the differences are.
These critical skills will help us be constructive. They help us create and present better moral arguments, and critique arguments we develop along the way, to abandon or revise and improve any bad ones. This is how we’ll make steps towards moral progress.
This video illustrates some of the book's approach to evaluating moral arguments:
Here is the Brief Contents:
I. CONCEPTS & TOOLSII. OBSTACLES & OBJECTIONSIII. PRACTICE & APPLICATIONSIV. PROGRESS & CHANGE
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Moral Progress: Concept, Measurement, and Application
sponsored by the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, (Springer)
Conference theme
Many philosophers and other scholars believe that, in spite of all the natural and moral evil that occurs every day and everywhere, there is moral progress. Is this belief just an assumption or a postulate, or is it also ‘evidence-based’? Most believers in moral progress think that moral progress in some domains might go together with moral stagnation, or even regress, in other domains. And moral progress might occur in some parts of the world, but not in others. Regardless of whether moral progress is overall or partial, global or local, the question arises how we can determine that it really takes place? How do we establish that a subsequent state is morally better than a preceding one? The most exciting question is, of course, how we can establish whether or not there is overall moral progress.
prof.dr. Bert Musschenga, e-mail: a.w.musschenga@vu.nl.
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/resmgr/grantreports/2013ethicsreport.pdf
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