“What is Political Progress?”

Progress is both a necessary and a dangerous idea. It is necessary to motivate political action oriented to the future, and it is dangerous because the pursuit of progress has often given rise to episodes of paternalism, colonial domination and narratives of civilisational superiority. In this lecture, I try to defend a more critical account of progress. I start by distinguishing between moral and political progress, then explore the relation between political progress and justice. I suggest that we make political progress not when we approximate an ideal of justice that is always known to us, but when the political institutions we construct reflect what we learn from the trials and failures of the past. To outline how such learning processes might take place, I defend the idea that the basic function of justice is to regulate the coercive use of power. I further explain how we should understand progress in the norms of justice as the result of cumulative processes of evolution of different views of how power ought to be exercised.

Symposium Panel:

Philip Kitcher, Columbia University

Catherine Lu, McGill University

Daniel Wodak, University of Pennsylvania