Circling the Good

Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Was he right? Some skeptics might question whether there even is such a thing as “the moral universe.” What we call morality, they may say, is nothing more than the subjective judgments of people in various times and places. Customs or religious teachings may impose a high degree of uniformity within a particular society, but cultures differ, and there is no basis for saying that one has gotten it right and the other wrong. It would therefore be an illusion to think that the shift from one conception of morality to another amounts to progress, for there are no moral truths toward which progress can be measured. A different kind of skeptic might accept that there is a “moral universe”—that is, that some moral judgments are true and others are false—but deny that we today are morally better than people in ancient civilizations or that there is any long-term trend bringing us closer to j ... Read full article.