Understanding Moral Evolution: Challenges and Philosophical Responses

Crisis of Morality: Factors and Foundations

As societies lived in isolation, moral standards were stable, but they plunged into crisis when the following factors emerged:

• Within society, movements arise that are critical of existing standards or their foundations. Protest movements have clashed with established rules at different historical moments.
• Social or cultural changes raise moral problems that previous frameworks cannot solve. New technologies, for instance, have introduced moral dilemmas unthinkable just a few years ago.
• The emergence of great moral or religious figures who present a new way of understanding life and attract enormous support. The most widespread religious traditions have great personalities who originally taught new ways of living. They all appear as reformers challenging existing beliefs.
• Contact with other moral systems and cultures, which can undermine confidence in the infallibility of one's own.

Knowing that other societies had lived differently caused feelings of unrest and uncertainty.

Some moral frameworks dogmatically resisted these challenges, entrenching their rules, while others sought to rationally justify their arguments, claiming universal validity. Thus arose the philosophy of morality.

Philosophical Approaches to Ethical Theory

• From Aristotle, ethics has been linked with human nature. Aristotle held that the specificity of human nature was reason, and thus ethics was identified with living according to reason. This was a deductive reasoning from the essence of being human.
• However, to give substance to this reasoning and address real-world complexities, Aristotle also followed an inductive process. He studied the morality of his own society and observed what was happening in other cultures.
• Scholastic philosophers attempted to deduce a moral framework from the idea of "nature," often referring to God as the supreme legislator.
• Kant used a transcendental method. He posited the existence of moral law within us and investigated how such knowledge was possible.
• Max Scheler developed a phenomenological theory of values.

While all the methods above are useful and valid, the goal is to develop an ethical theory with moral universality. For this, we can employ the hypothetical-deductive method, similar to its use in science.

Ethics emerges as a theory to solve moral problems, developed from inductive knowledge drawn from history, psychology, culture, or any other science. It aims to be sufficiently corroborated and achieve universal acceptance.

The study of humanity's moral experience, as outlined in the law of ethical progress, provides a sufficient basis for claiming that the suggested ethical model may be desirable for anyone freed from major obstacles: extreme poverty, fear, ignorance, dogmatism, and hatred of one's neighbor. These are the obstacles that exert a decisive influence on moral development.