This essay discusses two ways in which an agent can make progress with respect to value: self-cultivation and aspiration. The self-cultivator becomes a more coherent version of the person she was before, acquiring beliefs or desires or habits or skills that serve her antecedent valuational condition. The aspirant, by contrast, acquires new values. The existence of aspiration is under pressure from those who would assimilate it either to self-cultivation, or to a change in value that is done to a person rather than a change that is her own work. I show that those two options cannot be exhaustive by discussing liberal arts education; it is, I argue, paradigmatically aspirational.

This essay offers a “nonideal” case for giving institutional priority to markets and private contracting in the basic structure of society. It sets out a “robust political economy” framework to examine how different political economic regime types cope with frictions generated by the epistemic limitations of decision-makers and problems of incentive incompatibility. Focusing on both efficiency arguments and distributive justice concerns the essay suggests that a constitutional structure that prioritizes consensual exchange is more likely to sustain a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.

In this essay we provide a brief account and interpretation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments showing that it departs fundamentally from contemporary patterns of thought in economics that are believed to govern individual behavior in small groups, and contains strong testable propositions governing the expression of that behavior. We also state a formal representation of the model for individual choice of action, apply the propositions to the prediction of actions in trust games, report two experiments testing these predictions, and interpret the results in terms directly related to the model. In short, we argue that the system of sociability developed by Adam Smith provides a coherent non-utilitarian model that is consistent with the pattern of results in trust games, and leads to testable new predictions, some of which we test.

The debate over whether philosophy makes progress has focused on its failure to answer a core set of “big” questions. I argue that there are other kinds of philosophical progress which are equally important yet underappreciated: the creative development of new “philosophical devices” which increase our ability to think about the world, and the broadening of philosophical topics to ever greater adequacy to what matters. The conception of philosophy as defined by a narrow “core” set of questions is responsible for skepticism about progress, as well as for philosophy’s “marketing problem” — its failure to reach the general public. I argue for abandoning the distinction between “core” and “marginal” questions. The greater openness of philosophy to methodological diversity and diversity in topics, especially applied topics, will make a distinct kind of progress: in the breadth and completeness of the questions asked, phenomena investigated, and theories generated. Such openness may also make philosophy more hospitable to more diverse practitioners. This would also be conducive to progress, in the sense of reaching true answers to philosophical questions: greater diversity of philosophical practitioners has epistemic benefits, such as increasing objectivity.

The concept of social progress I hope to rehabilitate will be local, far from locally complete, and permit only modest extensions; it will be pragmatic rather than teleological. In this way, it will hope to avoid treating the multiplicity of goods as if there were always the possibility of comparing them on a single scale, to abandon the idea of a final state toward which history is tending or should tend, and to substitute piecemeal accomplishments for utopian ends. Its emphasis on local comparisons will allow it to forgo sweeping historical comparisons, those juxtaposing the “enlightened” with “lesser breeds without the law,” or the “ancients” with the “moderns.” A restrained pragmatic concept of social progress honors the insights of critics of the notion of social progress, seeing them as questioning alleged presuppositions that can be given up.

I critically consider four purported economic-efficiency arguments for egalitarian redistribution of income or wealth. (1) Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest aggregate happiness” criterion has been used (by Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou, Abba Lerner, and more recently Richard Layard) to argue for wealth transfers toward the poor based on the supposition that they register higher happiness from a marginal dollar. Drawing from Vilfredo Pareto and Lionel Robbins, however, I argue that modern economic theory is not about individual happiness, let alone aggregate happiness, and therefore does not support (nor refute) any happiness-based case for wealth redistribution. (2) Theories based on a “social welfare function” misapply the economic way of thinking in a different way. (3) Other writers have framed redistribution as a public good, and public goods provision by the state as a voluntary collective means of satisfying individual preferences, thereby using modern economic theory to formulate a rationale for redistributive policies based on Pareto-efficiency. I criticize this rationale for resting on suppositions about actual preferences that are self-immunized against falsification. (4) James Buchanan made a related case for taxing inheritances based on the supposition that in constitutional deliberation behind a veil of ignorance we would agree to such a policy based on our preference for a certain kind of fairness. I find this argument non-economic, equally unfalsifiable, and no more plausible than alternative suppositions about our common preferences. The economic way of thinking does speak clearly, however, about how taxes on income or wealth discourage its production, the more so the higher the marginal tax rate.

When people reason on the basis of moral rules, do they suppose that in the absence of a prohibitory rule they are free to act, or do they suppose that morality always requires a justification establishing a permission to act? In this essay we present a series of learning experiments that indicate when learners tend to close their system on the basis of natural liberty and when on the principle of residual prohibition. Those who are taught prohibitory rules tend to infer natural liberty while those taught permission rules tend to infer residual prohibition. In mixed cases, where learners are taught both types of rules, there is some tendency to suppose that natural liberty is the default. Both natural liberty and its denial can be learned; is there a reason to adopt one system of moral rules or the other? We argue that systems of social morality based on a principle of natural liberty have a striking advantage over their competitors: they are well adapted to effectively exploring the constant novel circumstances that arise in open, dynamic, societies.

Enlightenment era optimism that technological and educational developments offer a progressive path to plenty and liberation supports a hope that human toil may be progressively reduced. The Development Thesis defended by G. A. Cohen is a piece of that Enlightenment optimism. The Development Thesis holds that productive forces tend to develop throughout history. The tendency for such an increase in productive forces to occur is, according to Cohen’s argument, due to persistent facts about human nature. If Cohen is correct, there is a tendency toward progress of an important sort, and this progress is due in significant part to human nature. But the development of productive forces also destroys nonhuman natural value. In the era of the Anthropocene this is occurring on a planetary scale. The simultaneous development and destruction entails that claims of progress must rely on an all-things-considered judgment. But due to the plurality of the relevant values, which cannot be compared according to a common metric, rational disagreement about the existence of progress and our progressive nature can be expected to persist.

Trust is important for a variety of social relationships. Trust facilitates trade, which increases prosperity and induces us to interact with people of different backgrounds on terms that benefit all parties. Trade promotes trustworthiness, which enables us to form meaningful as well as mutually beneficial relationships. In what follows, I argue that when we erect institutions that enhance trust and reward people who are worthy of trust, we create the conditions for a certain kind of moral progress.

This essay examines the ethics of boycotting as a social response to injustice or wrongdoing. The boycotts in question are collective actions in which private citizens withdraw from or avoid consumer or cultural interaction with parties perceived to be responsible for some transgression. Whether a particular boycott is justified depends, not only on the reasonableness of the underlying moral critique, but also on what the boycotters are doing in boycotting. The essay considers four possible interpretations of the kind of act in which boycotting consists: the avoidance of complicity, protest speech, social punishment, or social coercion. Each interpretation provides a plausible account of at least some cases of boycotting, yet each raises distinct challenges to justifying boycotting activities.

Adam Smith argues that virtue falls into two broad categories: “justice,” which he calls a “negative” virtue because it principally comprises restraint from harming or injuring others; and “beneficence,” which he calls “positive” because it comprises the actions we ought to take to improve others’ situations. Smith’s conception of justice is thus quite “thin,” and some critics argue that it is indeed too thin, since it fails to incorporate substantive concerns for the well-being of others. In this essay, I lay out Smith’s conception of justice and offer a way to understand it that attempts to comprehend the various things he says about it. I then offer a cluster of objections drawing on criticisms that might fall under the heading of “social justice.” Finally, I suggest how Smith might respond to the criticisms by outlining a Smithian conception of what I call “ultimate justice.”

Liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment understood that surplus moral constraints, imposed by invalid moral norms, are a serious limitation on liberty. They also recognized that overcoming surplus moral constraints — what we call proper de-moralization — is an important dimension of moral progress. Contemporary philosophical theorists of liberty have largely neglected the threat that surplus moral constraints pose to liberty and the importance of proper de-moralization for human emancipation. This essay examines the phenomena of surplus moral constraints and proper de-moralization, utilizing insights from biological and cultural evolutionary thinking

This essay argues that liberty generates progress via the generalized increasing returns to commercial activity. These increasing returns to expanding commercial activity follow from the gradual, cumulative process of institutionalizing particular liberties. As a society adopts an institutional framework from accumulated liberties, there is greater scope for productive specialization and social cooperation under the division of labor. Greater scope for market exchange also delivers social norms and commercial values that tolerate experimentation and innovation. Taken together, the accumulation and institutionalization of liberties gives rise to generalized increasing returns to commercial activity. It is through this cumulative process that the creative powers of a free civilization are unleashed, delivering societies from poverty and subjugation.

Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously (though perhaps not intentionally) devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites, preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human (and therefore requiring care, as a positive duty of the slave owner, as a man cares for his children, who cannot care for themselves), or else as being other than human (and therefore being spiritually no different from cattle or horses, and therefore requiring only the same considerations for maintenance and husbandry). The interest of the historical narrative presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior ideologies can prove extremely persistent.

Advocates of social equality need to develop an account of the society they favor. I have argued elsewhere that social equality should be conceived negatively: in terms of opposition to asymmetric and alienating relations such as hierarchy, domination and social exclusion, rather than in terms of a positive model of equality. This essay looks in detail at social exclusion, or rather “differential social inclusion,” and especially at the mechanisms that create exclusion and bind excluded groups together, and the consequent effects these mechanisms have on the reinforcement of inequality of opportunity and failure of social solidarity. Possible policies, such as improved social mobility, assertive self-affirmation, validation of subcultures, integration, and the creation of a large public sector are considered as possible responses to differential social inclusion in order to move closer to the idea of a society of equals.

What is progress and what is not progress? We can talk about progress in lots of different arenas; we will focus primarily on economic and scientific progress, but also make brief reference to cultural and moral progress. In our discussion, we want to distinguish, especially, between overall, long-term progress and narrower, shorter-term progress or regress. We will refer to these as “global” and “local” progress, respectively. Of course, one can also regress; therefore, we will also look at instances where progress, along some dimension, slows or even moves backwards. Generally, such regress is local, and often still in a context of broader, global progress. In scientific progress, for example, there are many instances of short-term progress which, if not completely discarded or disproved, are at least substantially modified or fundamentally challenged. And yet, those research paths, even when later abandoned, still contributed to the overall progress of the field. In that sense, the regress (that is, rejection or modification of previous theories) is corrected by, but not in conflict with, the overall progress. In the case of economic progress, the concept of regress usually takes on a different form in which things that aren’t advancing progress don’t necessarily stop it, but are simply retarding progress — that is, making the rate of progress less efficient. The consequence, we suggest, is that when talking about economic progress, objections to certain consequences of economic progress (for instance, income inequality — a type of regress, in our terminology) should not be cordoned off and dealt with independently, but should be incorporated into the way we think about economic progress itself — as instances of local regress within a context of global progress. We explore the effects of these different relations between progress and regress to suggest some of the challenges those seeking to broaden the standard measure, GDP, to incorporate other social values of well-being will face moving forward.