The Standpoint of Moral Progress

A Defense in Kantian Spirit
Jan Patočka Memorial Lecture with Axel Honneth

The IWM Jan Patočka Memorial Lecture series was inaugurated by Hans-Georg Gadamer in 1987. It honors the work and legacy of Jan Patočka, co-founder and spokesman of the civil rights movement Charter 77 and widely considered one of the most influential modern philosophers of Central Europe. Previous speakers include Nancy Fraser, Lord Dahrendorf, Edward W. Said, Albert O. Hirschman, François Furet, Jacques Derrida, Leszek Kołakowski, and, most recently, Chantal Mouffe and Aleida Assmann.

Today, the idea that there has been moral progress in human history is highly controversial and contested. Many intellectuals from various camps consider it impossible, if not immoral, to claim that there has been anything in the historical past that can be called an improvement in moral attitudes and the application of moral principles. The reasons for this strong rejection of the idea of moral progress are either empirical or normative: either it is claimed that the historical facts strongly contradict such progress, or that there is no sufficiently impartial perspective from which to judge such progress. This lecture will try to show that both objections can be refuted if one has a proper understanding of the perspective from which to claim a past process of moral progress; this perspective must not only be constantly self-critical, but must also construct the history to be told about the moral past very differently from all previous such narratives.

Axel Honneth is Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University; until the end of 2018 he was Professor of Social Philosophy at Goethe-University and the Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. His books in English include: The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict (MIT Press, 1996), Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (Columbia University Press, 2015), The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (Polity, 2017) and The Working Sovereign. Labor and Democratic Citizenship (Polity, 2023).

IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Vejvoda will introduce the speaker and moderate the event.