CANCELLED – (“Moral Progress, Difficulty and Blame“)
The guest talk by Sacha Golob is CANCELLED, unfortunately.
How should we analyse moral progress – for example, the abolition of slavery? This paper proposes a treatment of progress as a societal learning process. I further argue that this learning process is well understood via the concept of ‘moral difficulty’. I distinguish several relevant forms of difficulty, taking the case of Abraham LIncoln’s development in the 1850s as a key example. The results make good sense of our conflicted feelings towards such figures, as well as diminishing complacency regarding our own views. I close with the account’s implications for culpability: opposing Fricker’s view, I highlight the ‘privilege of complexity’ in judging past figures and suggest that questions of blame are profoundly complicated by ambiguities over the granularity of historical narration.