Let me illustrate the interplay between enhancement and changed circumstances, and the powers of cultural forces, by way of looking at two areas in which further moral progress is possible: our relationship towards the distant needy and our relation towards non-human animals. In each of these areas, both the education of capacities and virtues and changes in the circumstances of morality can contribute to the achievement of moral progress. Since evolutionary considerations, which I shall situate within the factors that can bring about moral progress, are only one factor among many, parts of my discussion of the examples are not related to evolution. That I chose examples that fit the metaphor of the expanding circle particularly well does not mean that I conceive of moral progress exclusively in terms of this metaphor.

Moral Obligations towards the Distant Needy

According to Singer, acknowledging that we have moral obligations towards people who are far away from us amounts to an expansion of the circle of moral concern. Has humanity achieved this expansion? It seems that some progress has indeed been made. Today, a considerable number of individuals living in affluent countries tries to help people who are suffering in the world’s poorest countries by donating money or doing paid or unpaid work for governmental and nongovernmental organisations. I assume that in most cases, these donations and practical engagement express the recognition of certain obligations towards those who are being helped. These obligations can be conceived of as positive duties to help (see Singer 1972), or as negative duties to stop harming (see Pogge 2004).Footnote 11 The circle of moral concern thus seems to have expanded to include the distant needy. However, we can also observe behaviour that casts doubt on this claimed expansion. Most people do not feel obliged to refrain from buying their children luxury goods instead of using that money to provide basic goods for African children, for example.Footnote 12 Also, the donations people make are often very small and almost not felt by the donors. Moreover, the majority of citizens of rich countries support the exploitation of workers in countries such as Bangladesh, including the practice of child labour, with the choices they make as consumers. Such behaviour and attitude shows that the moral progress that has been made in this area is very limited. How might further progress be achieved?

Changes in the Circumstances of Moral Practices

Let us consider the circumstances of moral practices first. Here relevant factors include increased knowledge about the causes of poverty, an increase in possibilities for helping the poor, including better knowledge of these possibilities and assistance in making use of them, as well as personal experiences, for example during a trip through a poor country.Footnote 13 For instance, knowledge about international trade can lead people to the conclusion that the current system puts poor countries at a disadvantage and that the majority of the population of those countries is indirectly harmed by everyone who supports a government that in turn supports the current global order (Pogge 2004). Such a view can motivate people to put pressure on governments and non-state actors to change that system, which manifests specific power relations. Furthermore, new technological possibilities enable new ways of organising help, for example via online platforms.

Asked how he came to be so concerned with the issue of global justice, Thomas Pogge answered that it was a trip through Asia that made him aware of how immensely people were suffering in some parts of the world (conversation with Pogge at the Carnegie Council on January 19th 2012).Footnote 14 Such experiences have the potential to affect people in a way that changes their moral beliefs.Footnote 15 Having seen the immense suffering with one’s own eyes, one might think differently about issues such as global justice or duties towards the poor.

What is the role of evolutionary explanations? Such explanations provide a reason for questioning intuitions such as the one, which is widespread, that we have greater duties towards our family and friends than towards strangers (see Greene 2007, 47). Once we learn that having such an intuition was adaptive for our ancestors, we should think about whether there are good reasons for this priority of duties, and whether our duties towards strangers are not stronger than is usually assumed. As Singer puts it: “What we take as an untouchable moral intuition may be no more than a relic of our evolutionary history” (1981: 70). “Biological explanations of ethics” can make us “think again about moral intuitions which we take to be self-evident moral truths but can be explained in evolutionary terms” (Singer, 84). I think that there are reasons for prioritising our duties in the way most people do, for instance the fact that usually we are more capable of helping those who are close to us, and the fact that we cannot give the children of others the same love that we can give to our own children. However, due to the internet, the existence of international organisations and the possibility to set up projects on a small scale there is a lot that we can do for people in other parts of the world, and this provides us with reasons for accepting relatively strong obligations towards them as well.

Moral Enhancement

I just identified parts of the circumstances of morality that can be the motor of moral progress. Now I shall consider ways in which moral enhancement, in its traditional form, is able to advance progress in this area. The focus will be on moral education, but other traditional forms of enhancement will be touched upon in passing. It seems to me that an important task of moral education in this regard is to encourage children and adolescents to imagine the suffering of people in extremely poor countries such as Niger or Sierra Leone. This is a use of “induction”, the educational method that consists in attempting to make someone imagine what it feels like for another person to be in distress. Training the imagination in this way seems to be crucial for getting people to care about a group they did not care about (much) previously. Humans can thereby transcend their evolutionarily based bias towards their own group and come to react with strong emotions to the fact that people whom they do not know and who live far away from them are suffering. As we know from recent empirical studies, emotions play a crucial role in making moral judgements (see e.g. Greene et al. 2001; Greene and Haidt 2002; Greene 2005; Prinz 2006; Young et al. 2010). The training of emotions, which is a crucial component of moral education, and the training of the imagination should not be conflated, but they are closely related.Footnote 16 Induction is used to further the “development of guilt and moral internalization in children” (Hoffman 2000, 10). Training of the imagination can moreover expand the scope of emotional reactions. If we can bring it about that children become adults whose “emotional buttons” (Greene 2007, 47) are pushed by the suffering of distant strangers, the expansion of the circle will likely be more substantive than the one we have achieved so far. My suggestion is that a sentimentalist way of expanding the circle has to accompany the rationalist way described by Singer. But of course it is highly unlikely, and perhaps also not desirable, that the bias will ever be overcome entirely. There are evolutionary limits to the capacity of caring for others.

The possibility of training our imagination in the way described supports the claim that we have a capacity for phenotypic plasticity. Humans are in principle able to adapt to the highly globalised world they have created, for instance by strengthening their ability to imagine what it feels like to suffer from extreme hunger and thirst, thereby broadening the scope of their emotional dispositions. This kind of training of the imagination has not only a place in moral education, but also in the moral enhancement of adults.

On a virtue ethical account, moral progress requires the cultivation and broadening of virtues such as benevolence, generosity, justice, sympathy and respect. As Williston argues in connection with climate change ethics, becoming more virtuous requires not to restrict the moral community in ways that are unjustified, for example by failing to recognise members of future generations as members of that community (2011, 158). In the case of the distant needy, who, unlike the members of future generations, exist, it is uncontroversial that they ought to be seen as members of the moral community.

Of course moral education has to be complemented by the development of complex reasoning capacities, since agents who lack such capacities cannot address complex moral problems. Regarding our duties towards the global poor, we need these capacities for deliberating about how to weigh those and the duties we have towards members of our family, friends, and fellow citizens, for deciding which organisation to support or work for, what kind of changes in the international trade system to push for and so forth. While emotions can make us aware of our duties towards the poor and motivate us to help them, reason is needed for making the right decisions regarding what actions to take.

The Interaction of Enhancement and Changes in the Circumstances

I have suggested that both changes within the circumstances in which we think, feel and act morally and ways of educating moral capacities and virtues can contribute to moral progress in the area of our relation to distant strangers. How are the two related and which is more important?

The availability of knowledge about the causes of poverty, for instance, depends on the existence of people who do research on this topic and on people who make the effort of making the results of that research publicly available. It is desirable that those people do these things in a morally responsible way, and moral education, if successful, results in agents who take moral concerns seriously. Also the motivation to carry out this kind of research and make it publicly available can be the result of moral education, but such research might also be motivated exclusively by non-moral interests such as an interest in economic processes, or even by immoral interests such as an interest in how the poor could be exploited even more effectively. The availability of possibilities to help depends on people who create these possibilities, for example by setting up charities or development projects to which people can contribute. Again, by investing in moral education we make it more likely that there will in the future be sufficient people who do these things.

At the same time, moral education depends, for instance, on knowledge about people’s suffering and its causes. In the course of moral training, children and adolescents are confronted with paradigmatic cases of immense suffering, become aware of possible ways to relieve that suffering, get an insight into how their own life is related to the lives of those who are suffering, acquire tools for deliberating about how to counteract extreme poverty and so forth. In addition, existing power regimes limit the chance to recognise strong duties towards the distant poor.

It is, therefore, very likely that moral progress in this area is brought about by the interplay of features of the circumstances and moral education or enhancement. This insight counts against views that focus one-sidedly on either the circumstances or enhancement. Modifications that lead to a moral improvement of the motives of agents, which is how Thomas Douglas understands moral enhancement (2008, 229), cannot bring about moral progress on their own. The view that urgent problems such as climate change can be attributed exclusively to the motivational deficits of people (Douglas 2008, 230) is overly simplistic.

Moral Obligations towards Animals

Jamieson mentions the animal rights movement as an example of local moral progress (Jamieson 2002a, 22). For Singer, once the circle of moral concern encompasses also most non-human animals, its expansion is complete and human reason has reached a triumphalist victory over evolutionary biases.Footnote 17 According to Singer, “[t]he only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism” (1981: 120; see also 1995). Unfortunately the conditions in which most of the animals that are used for food are kept have not improved much since Jonathan Safran Foer described them in his bestseller Eating Animals in Safran-Foer 2009. As Nigel Pleasants writes in his article about the abolition of slavery, the exploitation of animals for food is an example of an immoral practice that is generally accepted, despite the knowledge about the enormous suffering it causes (2011, 147). If we look at it from this perspective, our relationship with animals seems like an area in which moral progress is urgently needed, rather than one in which substantial progress has already been achieved. Let us again consider separately some features of the circumstances that are relevant for making moral progress in this area and the progressive potential of moral education. What Singer wrote in 1981 still holds: “The expansion of the moral circle to non-human animals is only just getting under way” (Singer, 121).

Changes in the Circumstances of Moral Practices

Factors that can effect people’s beliefs about the moral acceptability of practices such as factory farming, testing medicines and cosmetics on animals, keeping animals in zoos or breeding fish in aquacultures, include, but are of course not limited to, increased (or better available) knowledge about the conditions in those farms, laboratories, zoos and aquacultures, knowledge about animals’ capacities for suffering and knowledge about how much we share with other animals.Footnote 18 It is with regard to the last kind of knowledge that evolutionary theory comes in. It provides us with reasons for accepting our animal nature and rejecting the view that there is a radical discontinuity between Homo sapiens and other primates. Primatologists such as Frans de Waal have spent countless hours observing our closest evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos, and suggest interpreting their behaviour as exhibiting retributive emotions, empathy and an impulse to help (de Waal 2006, 18 ff.). No matter if the social behaviour of non-human primates is regarded as different from human morality only in degree or in kind,Footnote 19 the observations of primatologists make us aware of the continuities between other primates and us. This awareness can change our attitude towards them. Perhaps the Great Ape Project will gain more adherents in the future (http://www.greatapeproject.org).

Relevant experiences include seeing a factory farm, slaughterhouse or animal lab from the inside, and observing animals, seeing how their behaviour reveals sensitivity and intelligence. Examples of relevant social exchanges are conversations with animal activists or people working in for example a factory farm, and debates among friends about topics such as vegetarianism or veganism. Such experiences, conversations and debates can change our moral beliefs and thereby the way we act. We might become vegetarians, found or join a vegan society, organise a campaign against zoos, or stop buying cosmetics that were tested on animals. The possibility to produce meat in the lab is an example of a new technological possibility that changes moral practices and can contribute to moral progress.

As mentioned above, Pleasants has pointed out another way in which the circumstances of morality matter. As he argues convincingly in his article about the abolition of slavery, the abolition of a harmful institutionalised practice requires the existence of a plausible alternative, which in the case of slavery was wage labour. The ability to point to an alternative that is available and superior lifts objections to a harmful institutionalised practice “out of the realm of merely moralistic expression and into that of efficacious radical social criticism” (2011, 156). Although the abolition of for instance factory farming still seems to be a long way off, it is at least possible that an alternative to this practice will continue to take shape, gradually gaining widespread recognition as plausible and superior. Once more and more people come to see that factory farming is by no means necessary in order to feed the world’s population, criticism of this practice may become more widely respected and effective.Footnote 20

Moral Enhancement

How can moral education contribute to moral progress with regard to our relationship with animals? One example is the use of “induction” in relation to animals. This involves for instance the attempt to make a child who has hurt an animal to make her imagine what it would feel like to experience similar harm. Induction highlights the distress of the victim as well as the action that caused it (see e.g. Hoffman 2000, 10).

Like in the case of our responsibilities towards the distant needy, training the imagination in this way is crucial. Within the course of moral education, children should be encouraged to imagine how it must feel for an animal to live in a small cage, to stand the whole day in their own faeces, to be separated from their offspring, to be experimented upon and so forth. We can conceive of this also in terms of cultivating certain virtues. By strengthening our imagination and our capacity for empathy, we can extend our altruistic tendencies beyond the limits that can be explained by evolutionary forces.

Currently animals are sometimes used in the classroom with the purpose of advancing children’s moral development, in particular the development of empathy (see Daly and Suggs 2010). On the condition that the well being of those animals is guaranteed, making children sensitive to the needs and interests of animals could extend this practice. In this extended version of the practice, there would be animals in classrooms not only for the development of empathy in general, but also for the development of empathy in relation to non-human animals in particular. This requires that teachers have the appropriate attitude and regard the animals not merely as instruments for developing empathy in humans, but also as creatures that ought to be the object of moral concern.

Drawing once again on Pleasants’ article about slavery, it would make a big difference if children learned about practices such as using animals for food, research etc. in a manner that was not value-neutral. While our children learn at the same time what sort of practice slavery is and that it is morally wrong, they usually learn that animal products serve nutritional and other functions, and it is only later that they might begin to question such use of animals (Pleasants, 152). Those vegetarians and vegans whose children learn simultaneously what animals are used for and that this use is morally problematic, or wrong, are a small minority. Following that minority in making children aware of the ethical questions related to the use of animals from early childhood onwards would be a big step towards moral progress in this area.

The Interaction of Enhancement and Changes in the Circumstances

Since the general point about the interaction between capacities and circumstances should be relatively clear by now, I shall set out only briefly how the educational means just described interact with features of the circumstances. People who have been trained to care about the well being of animals are more likely to make the effort to inform the public about cruel practices, to popularise the results of scientific research on the capacities of animals and to look for alternatives to current practices. Information about such alternatives, about animals’ capacities and about the ways in which many animals are currently being treated can be used in moral education. The use of the method of induction as applied to animals requires adults who are capable of empathising with animals and for whom animals are objects of moral concern. The different kinds of knowledge listed above can contribute to such an ability and attitude in adults who did not require them during childhood. Like in the case previously discussed, moral enhancement and changes in the circumstances are mutually supportive.