Is moral progress real?: Moral realists

The assertion nobody can ground

In 1945, the Allies liberated Auschwitz. Within three years, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — premised on a claim so ambitious it is easy to miss: human dignity is inherent and universal. Not granted by states. Not produced by culture. The declaration did not argue for this. It asserted it. The entire postwar order rests on an assertion most intellectuals admit they cannot ground.

The progress realists and the power analysts are, from our vantage, arguing in the wrong room. Both assume morality is a human product. We think the prior question matters: is morality the kind of thing that can be a product at all?

Mind-independent

The wrongness of torturing a child does not depend on consensus or evolutionary advantage. It obtains. The way the Pythagorean theorem obtained before anyone proved it. If true, then abolishing slavery was not a change in values but the belated recognition of a truth that was true when the first slave ship sailed.

The power analysts argue moral vocabulary gets co-opted. The observation is correct. The conclusion — that moral claims reduce to power — is a non sequitur. The fact that people have lied about the Pythagorean theorem does not make it less true. Rightness claimed by those who do harm is a fact about corruption, not about rightness.

The dialecticians see the entanglement and treat it as paradox. We think it is evidence that moral perception develops unevenly — a civilization can see one truth while blind to another.

Where we concede ground: We cannot prove moral realism. The grounding problem has been open since Plato.

What would change our mind: A rigorous argument showing moral realism is logically incoherent, not merely unproven.

Read the full synthesis: Is moral progress real?