The idea of ‘progress’ raises quite some philosophical and moral puzzles. The idea of progress pervades modern life, spelling out a direction where we should be heading. But what this direction is or can be, remains unarticulated. We are moving ‘forward’, without knowing where moving forward will take us. One of the reasons for this lack of clarity seems to be the belief that progress ensues from science and then spills over into other societal domains, such as technology, economy, and politics. 

This panel will address the following research question: 
How to understand progress as a normative concept?

In this panel, papers will be presented that address the multi-faceted issue of progress, with the aim of better descriptive and normative understanding the concept, so we are better able to understand where progress will or can take us.

Below we will give a short sketch of the different domains.

Science: The belief in progress is usually related, if not equated, with advances in science. An often implicit assumption seems to be that the accumulation of descriptive knowledge, allows for an increasing amount of control over nature and society. This belief is criticised for being hubristic and extractivist. Such critique firstly disputes the promise that science facilitates progress. Secondly, it also suggests that existing approaches have a normative basis that remains implicit and unspoken. 

Technology and innovation: Progress in the realm of technology is usually seen as a side-effect of scientific advancement. Empirical and normative research has pointed out that technologies and innovation are characterized by many normativities. Indeed, technologies serve and mediate values and innovations are undeniably goal-oriented. This raises questions regarding the question what technological progress means or should mean.

Moral progress: In ethics, there seems no clear account of progress. On the one hand, ethicists seem reluctant to address the issue of moral progress, arguably because progress is associated with contingency and as such falls outside of the scope of the discipline of ethics. But it is likely, that ethicists have the desire that society follows up on their findings, making progress still a main driver for activities in the field of ethics. On the other hand, there are theoretical approaches that explicitly address the issue of moral progress. Most of these approaches appear to be based on pragmatist philosophy. Whether denied or acknowledged, for all ethical inquiry it is a methodological question of how to progressively arrive at more convincing theoretical descriptions.

Politics and society: Progress made in the domains of science, technology, ethics, and economics is considered to somehow spill over into society. How this transfer takes place is unclear, which makes it hard to think about the democratisation of progress. How can society articulate a direction for progress? 

Conceptual progress: The idea of progress turns out to be conceptually confounded, it is clearly performative but it does not indicate an explicit normative direction. In that sense, the idea of progress might easily deviate from progress. As such, a conceptual recalibration of ‘progress’ is necessary.

This panel continued from parallel session IV track 8 part 1