The past is full of moral catastrophes.
The good news is that people seem to be getting better. Moral catastrophes like slavery, mass violence, genocidal war, the use of torture as punishment, and the denial of political equality are way less common today than they were in the past. As Michael Huemer argues, this is a sign of our collective progress toward adopting better, objectively correct values.
The bad news is that people seem to be getting better, which suggests that we are probably living through moral catastrophes that we cannot recognize because we haven’t made enough progress yet. Evan G. Williams writes about this in “The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe”. He argues that even if it’s pretty unlikely that any particular practice is wrong, it’s also pretty plausible that something we’re doing is seriously wrong. Williams then writes,
Our descendants may well view us with the same repugnance as we view our slave-owning forefathers….The fastest way to end this catastrophe, so that our wrongdoing will stop sooner rather than later, is to build a society that makes rapid intellectual progress and is flexible enough to take decisive action when the need is recognized. (981)
On his view, this requires the cultivation of a marketplace of ideas that is more effective at enabling good ideas to outcompete bad ideas. Williams emphasizes the importance of investing in education, effectively communicating scientific theories to people, and discouraging social norms that make it hard for good ideas to gain wide currency.
The bad news about Williams's bad news is that there are also barriers to progress within education, science, and culture. For example, it’s often unclear how much education actually promotes learning (see here and here). And it’s unclear that science is set up in a way that really rewards or advances the ideas that have the most merit (see here). And it’s unclear that increasing exposure to different viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas actually makes people better at evaluating claims in a nonpartisan way.
I think Williams is right about our present circumstances, and the value of institutions that foster 'rapid intellectual progress.' So what would an investment in intellectual progress look like?
Here are two new models that aim to improve our current approach to intellectual investment. First, consider Collinson and Cowen's proposal for a discipline of Progress Studies. And second, there's Minerva's innovative approach to effective education. Avoiding moral catastrophe will not only require that we rethink our institutions, it also requires rethinking how we rethink things.