Both Better Off and Better: Moral Progress amid Continuing Carnage

To victims of twentieth-century atrocities, my argument may seem sinister and hollow. To intellectuals who equate sophistication with cynicism, it will appear naive and perhaps shallow. To seekers after perfection who find each number wanting because it falls shy of the infinite, it will be a lesson in futility. But to the rest of us, what I have to say may serve as a useful reminder of how fortunate we are to live today and not even just a few hundred years ago. It may also evoke reasonable hopes for the future and establish a standard by which to measure the magnitude of the tasks on the road ahead.

I wish to show that in spite of the misery and wickedness that still remain in the world, the human race has enjoyed significant moral progress over the course of history. Only fools would deny that, on the whole, there has been striking material progress. But many believe, quite wrongly, that there is no connection between material and moral advancement or even that growth of comfort entails loss of character. At the very least, the ways in which being better off contributes to being better are poorly understood and inadequately appreciated. I hope to be able to clarify the connection.

The facts fall considerably short of proving John Stuart Mill's nineteenth-century hope that humankind is by nature a "progressive being." ¹ There is no assurance that the positive changes achieved through centuries of effort will continue or that we have once and for all escaped the threats of nuclear annihilation, ideological repression and murderous intolerance. I have, moreover, no desire to deny or explain away the evidence against moral improvement. Progress is not universal and unrelenting, and its presence is perfectly compatible with individual wickedness, with some continuing institutional discrimination and with pockets of unmitigated nastiness. Yet one can deny its reality only by selective inattention, by the application of unreasonable standards, or by astonishing ignorance of history.

Let me begin by acknowledging that the twentieth century is full of events ranging from the lamentable to the awful. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but it is clear that two world wars, the Holocaust, Stalinist purges, Japanese concentration camps, and the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" terminated the lives of more than 100 million individuals. Massacres in Cambodia, genocide in sundry African countries, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and other horrors added more than ten million dead in the last twenty years. Injustices against women and minorities continue everywhere. Religious intolerance, ethnic hatreds, and national rivalries contribute to the misery of hundreds of millions of people. Random violence erupts even in the most civilized countries, and fraud, lying, cheating and coercion constitute ways of life all over the globe.

These facts cannot be denied. But they must be understood. The staggering number of those who died in wars in the last hundred years, for example, must be related to the vast increase in the human population since 1800. This does not explain or justify the killing, but it places it in historical context. Probably there were fewer than 100 million people alive at the time of the Great Plague. That many people killed in Descartes's day would have left few if anyone to reproduce the race. In the twentieth century, by contrast, the number constituted but a relatively small percentage of the global population. Moreover, a single evil intention without the aid of advanced technology can spell the doom of only a few victims; with access to weapons of mass destruction, it can destroy tens of thousands of people.

We must also consider that morality does not progress at the same rate everywhere. Offsetting massacres by Hutus and Tutsis cannot be blamed on civilized or morally advanced nations. Many of the horrors of Cambodia and Iraq must be laid at the door of dictators, who are among the...