Modern life is characterised by a shared belief that we are moving forward, that ‘we’ – that is, humanity – are progressing to a better life. Even those people who demonstrate to point at the serious global problems we are currently facing – and there are still many of these, such as climate change, war, pandemics, racism, and social injustice – appear to entertain the belief that we can divert potential catastrophes if we are willing to act. The dominant approach to progress is to see progress as the result of spillovers from scientific activity: scientific findings motivate technological development, the design of organisations, and the decisions taken within these organisations. This paper introduces a deliberative approach to the pursuit of societal progress, which serves as an alternative to the shared but problematic belief that progress spills over from scientific activities. This deliberative approach is based on the idea that societal values expressed in deliberative processes should be accounted for in the design of formal institutions and new technological innovations. There are serious challenges to the efficacy of this approach, firstly, because society cannot be identified as a singular collective with an unambiguous set of values and, secondly, because the development of institutions and technologies can have consequences that are unpredictable and undesirable. To cope with these challenges, the deliberative approach to progress needs to be seen as a large-scale societal experiment in which values can be further substantiated in the context of institutions and technologies. Of these values, moral autonomy stands out as the key value that facilitates progress: institutions and technologies ought to be designed in such a way that facilitate individual to become autonomous.

This presentation is part of the panel The Ethics of Progress