Moral Progress Through the Lens of Optimization

An essay covering one of my favorite units in Prof. Mara Bollard's Phil 302 - Moral Psychology. Hopefully you can learn a few new frameworks to think about understanding and evaluating progress

Introduction to Moral Progress

What is moral progress? Why should we care about it? I will now attempt to convince you about why we should care, and the rest of this blog post will be dedicated to understanding mechanisms to initiate and evaluate moral progress.

So why should we care? I do not think it would be uncontroversial to state that society, in its current state, is not perfect and that working towards making it “better” would be a productive use of time. Rather, controversy would arise over what aspects are flawed and what “better” is. If most people would care about making the world “better”, regardless of their definitions, then understanding how to initiate and evaluate progress is something we should care about.

Let’s begin our study of moral progress with the following case study.

Imagine a post-Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) society where all basic needs, such as housing, food, etc., are met through automated processes. In our current society, where humans need to produce to survive, status norms value those who can create greater value (I think it's enough to think of this in terms of economic value) over those who can't. In our imaginary (or not so imaginary, depending on who you ask) society, such status norms instead value creativity, expression, and good nature. For example, rather than tracking and sorting students based on standardized academic performance (which often reflects socioeconomic advantages), schools would place equal emphasis on fostering each student's unique forms of creative expression and their contributions to classroom harmony.

To evaluate the changes that happened in this case study, let's discuss some frameworks for evaluating moral progress.

Frameworks for Understanding Moral Progress

In A Better Ape, Kumar and Campbell identify two fundamental types of moral progress. Inclusive progress expands our moral circle to encompass previously excluded groups, extending moral consideration to those once seen as outside our sphere of concern. Egalitarian progress, in contrast, reduces unjust hierarchies and power imbalances within groups already part of our moral community. Both types depend heavily on improvements in the psychological "ingredients" of our moral minds—how our basic capacities for empathy, respect, and moral reasoning can be refined and expanded through rational deliberation and cultural learning.

Importantly, Kumar and Campbell argue that moral progress is best understood locally rather than globally. Rather than trying to assess whether humanity as a whole is becoming more moral, we should examine specific instances of moral improvement within particular contexts and timeframes. This local focus allows for more precise evaluation while avoiding the philosophical challenges of establishing universal moral truths. It helps us understand how moral progress occurs through incremental improvements in our moral psychology and institutions.

While Kumar and Campbell emphasize social integration as the primary driver of moral progress, May argues in his commentary Moral progress for better apes, that deeper psychological mechanisms—particularly moral emotions—play an even more fundamental role. May contends that mutual trust and respect are essential foundations that enable moral progress to occur. Without these emotional preconditions, integration may be ineffective or even counterproductive.

May’s two most relevant observations are:

1. Moral emotions like trust and respect create the psychological conditions necessary for integration and reasoning to successfully drive change. The gay rights movement succeeded in part because gay individuals were already embedded in relationships of love and trust within their communities before coming out.

2. Integration alone is neither necessary nor sufficient for moral progress. May points out that meaningful change can occur without physical proximity (like through respectful online discourse), while forced integration without underlying trust can increase conflict.

Mechanisms for Creating Change

Affective mechanisms are psychological processes through which emotions and emotional responses shape moral behavior and social change. These mechanisms operate through both immediate emotional reactions and longer-term emotional dispositions, influencing how people respond to moral situations and how they engage with changing social norms. One particularly important affective mechanism that drives moral progress is Lordean anger.

In The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle, Myisha Cherry argues that Lordean anger, a form of moral anger distinct from destructive rage, helps facilitate norm change by giving people both hope and motivation to challenge existing social structures. This constructive form of anger has several key properties that make it effective for creating change. First, it gives people hope that social behavior can improve rather than leaving them resigned to current conditions. Second, it provides confidence to speak up against mistreatment rather than remaining silent in the face of injustice. Third, it generates willingness to take social risks by confronting harmful behavior regardless of the status of those involved.

Unlike bitter rage or vengeful anger which can lead to destructive outcomes, Lordean anger is proportional and directed at changeable behavior rather than persons. This targeted nature makes it an effective emotional tool for promoting positive change, as it focuses on transforming social standards rather than merely punishing wrongdoers. It motivates people to address systemic problems while maintaining the possibility of redemption and change for those who perpetuate harmful behaviors.

Moral Progress as Optimization

Having explored frameworks and mechanisms for understanding and implementing moral progress, let's examine how viewing moral progress as an optimization process can further illuminate the mechanisms of moral change.

Background

At its core, optimization is the process of making something as effective as possible given certain constraints. When you're trying to find the best route to work, you're optimizing for factors like time, traffic, and fuel efficiency. Similarly, societies attempting moral progress are trying to optimize their ethical frameworks and practices, though the "objective function" is far more complex than travel time.

The key challenge in optimization is that we often can't see the entire landscape at once—we have to make local decisions based on limited information. This parallels Kumar and Campbell's argument for focusing on local moral progress rather than trying to optimize globally. Just as a hiker might climb toward what looks like the highest nearby peak without being able to see if it's the tallest mountain in the range, societies make moral progress by taking steps that appear to lead to improvement from their current vantage point.

Learning from Machine Learning: The Adam Optimizer

To make this concrete, let's examine how modern machine learning systems optimize, using the popular Adam optimizer as a metaphor for moral progress. While the mathematical details aren't crucial, the core principles offer surprising parallels to moral change in societies.

Momentum: Balancing Tradition and Change

The Adam optimizer uses "momentum" – it considers not just the current direction of improvement, but also the history of previous changes. This creates a balance between responsiveness to new information and stability. Similarly, successful moral progress often requires balancing revolutionary change with respect for tradition. The civil rights movement, for instance, gained traction partly by appealing to deeply held American values of equality and justice while pushing for radical social change.

Adaptive Learning Rates: Context Sensitivity

One of Adam's key features is its ability to adjust how big of a step it takes based on the local landscape. In steep areas, it takes smaller, more careful steps; in flat areas, it can move more boldly. This mirrors how societies must calibrate the pace of moral change to their context. Some changes, like extending voting rights to women, required persistent effort over decades, while others, like the recent shift in attitudes toward same-sex marriage, occurred relatively quickly once certain social prerequisites were in place.

Another Mechanism of Moral Change

Understanding moral progress as optimization helps illuminate another key mechanism of moral change:

Conservative vs Progressive Forces

Just as optimization algorithms need momentum and responsiveness to new information, societies need both conservative forces that maintain stability and progressive forces that push for change. The tension between these forces isn't merely an obstacle to progress—it's a crucial part of how societies "optimize" their moral frameworks while maintaining social cohesion.

This idea can be further understood through Kelly and Westra’s essay Moral progress is annoying. They argue that our norm psychology—the cognitive mechanisms that help us navigate social rules—creates inherent resistance to change, even when it represents a genuine moral improvement. This resistance manifests as what they call "affective friction," the uncomfortable feelings of irritation and defensiveness that arise when confronting new moral norms. Kelly and Westra show how moral progress requires navigating between progressive forces pushing for change and conservative forces maintaining stability. The irritation and pushback that often accompany moral progress aren't just obstacles to be overcome, they’re features of a system that helps societies maintain cohesion while still allowing for meaningful change.

Back to the Case Study

Equipped with the frameworks and intuition to evaluate moral progress, let us now analyze the case study we started with.

I argue that this constitutes genuine moral progress, using the frameworks in Kumar & Campbell, because egalitarian and inclusive moral progress is present here. We see the overturning of unjust social hierarchies (in terms of status) because being able to generate greater value is highly correlated to the socioeconomic status you were born into. Likewise, groups, such as people with disabilities, or neurodivergent people, would see little to no social discrimination, increasing the sphere of status to which people belong. This would be because such "differences" between what our current society deems as "normal", would not affect one's ability for creative expression and goodness.

How could this change be brought about? The affective mechanism of what Cherry calls "Lordean anger", could help facilitate this norm change. In a post-AGI society where basic needs are met, people would feel justified moral anger towards those who continue to treat others poorly despite the removal of economic pressures and competition. This anger has what Cherry identifies as constructive properties: it would give people hope that social behavior can improve, confidence to speak up against mistreatment, and willingness to take social risks by excluding or confronting those who act harmfully, regardless of their previous status. Unlike current society where economic dependencies might force people to tolerate bad behavior from wealthy or powerful individuals, this transformative anger would help enforce new social standards based on character and conduct.

Now what would be some barriers in the face of this progress? Kelly and Westra’s "affective friction" could be a significant barrier to this moral progress. When social norms around status and merit begin shifting away from productivity-based values, those currently benefiting from the existing system would experience strong negative emotional responses rooted in their norm psychology. As Kelly and Westra explain, even seemingly minor norm changes can trigger "anxiety, awkwardness – and anger" when they disrupt established social expectations. In a post-AGI world, elite groups accustomed to deriving status from their economic output would face a dramatic misalignment between their internalized norms and new social standards valuing creativity and character. This affective friction could manifest as active resistance, with privileged groups interpreting the norm change as threatening to their identity and interests. Their irritation and defensiveness could "backfire" and, as the authors note, even transform into "powerful political backlash under the guise of fighting injustice." Those with existing power might deliberately work to preserve productivity-based status norms by limiting AGI's democratizing potential, turning what could enable moral progress into a tool for entrenching current hierarchies.

Conclusion

Viewing moral progress through the lens of optimization provides insight into how societies actually improve over time. Just as optimization algorithms navigate complex landscapes with limited information, societies work to make incremental improvements while grappling with uncertainty about what truly constitutes "better." This framework helps explain both the mechanisms driving moral change—from Lordean anger to affective friction—and why progress often follows an uneven, nonlinear path.

References

Kumar, V., & Campbell, R. (2022). A better ape: The evolution of the moral mind and how it made us human. Oxford University Press.

May, J. (2023). Moral progress for better apes. Biology & Philosophy.

Kelly, D., & Westra, E. (2023). Moral progress is annoying. Aeon Essays.

Cherry, M. (2022). Case for rage: Why anger is essential to anti-racist struggle. Oxford University Press.