Abstract: We often conceive of the progress of a system as its decreasing distance to some goal state. When climbing a mountain, you are making progress in virtue of decreasing your distance to the summit. Call this the teleological conception of progress. Some philosophers view the moral progress of societies analogously. Our moral norms, beliefs, and institutions are making progress in virtue of coming ever closer to the ideal norms, beliefs, and institutions. Pragmatists instead see moral progress in terms of problem-solving. Changes to our norms, beliefs, and institutions count as progressive not in virtue of decreasing distance to their ideal counterparts, but because they help resolve problems, crises, and conflicts which beset us in the present.
Contemporary progress-pragmatists (Roth, Kitcher, Jaeggi), harkening back to Dewey, argue for their conception of moral progress via the rejection of the teleological conception. But it is not clear if this inference is valid, because the teleological and pragmatic conceptions of progress are not exhaustive alternatives. In this talk I will clarify the relationship between the teleological and pragmatic conceptions of progress and thereby establish the argumentative burden of the pragmatist.
First, I will distinguish three ways in which progress can fail to be teleological: (i) there is no intrinsic maximum in the dimension of progress, (ii) there is a plurality of dimensions of progress, and (iii) dimensions of progress are context dependent. Only (iii) would establish pragmatism. Second, I will argue that moral progress plausibly fails to be teleological because of (i) and (ii), but that there are no prima facie good arguments for (iii). Finally, I will argue that accepting (iii) in the case of moral progress threatens to undermine the rationality of making moral progress.