Substantial revisions were made to this essay in October 2026.
Anyone who knows physics has little difficulty naming the major figures (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc.) who made the breakthroughs in the field that pushed human knowledge forward. The same goes for manifestly successful sciences like chemistry (Lavoisier, Mendeleev) and biology (Darwin, Watson and Crick).
Yet few agree about whether any philosophers made key discoveries contributing to the progress of human knowledge. Most people know the big names who raised and analyzed big questions, from Socrates on. Yet most think the field of philosophy looks more like a centuries-old debating society than a team of explorers who have opened up new vistas of knowledge.
This is especially true when it comes to questions about right and wrong, questions in the field of ethics. Why have scientists made so much widely recognized progress in their field, while philosophers have made so little in the field of ethics?
One reason for the stagnation in philosophical ethics is that many in the field don’t even agree that moral questions can be answered objectively. Questions about right and wrong are often thought to be the province of taste or a matter of opinion. If there are no moral truths to discover, then obviously there can’t be progress in our knowledge of these truths.
So it’s refreshing that recently, a set of prominent public intellectuals has emerged to try to answer moral questions using a scientific approach. In recent years, thinkers like Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, and Michael Shermer have published popular books that, in whole or in part, try to lay the foundations of a rational morality. But their attempts have failed to noticeably move the needle of progress in ethics.
Scientific breakthroughs require the bravery to seek out new truths untrammeled by prejudice, convention, or preconception. It means the willingness to ask new questions and to call out one’s peers for having asked the wrong questions. While Harris, Pinker, and Shermer deserve credit for trying to resurrect the idea of scientific ethics, their efforts still bear the marks of a dangerous conventional assumption about the very questions ethics aims to answer.
There are many reasons for the stagnation in philosophical ethics that we cannot explore here. But it’s important to highlight the role of the recent thinkers’ conventional assumption about the field’s subject of study. It inhibits ethicists from seeing connections to other scientific disciplines, keeping progress in the field frozen.
The conventional view: morality asks questions about social relationships
What does ethics actually study?
We can see Pinker’s view of the subject of ethics from the way he contrasts morality with another set of norms. In the bestselling Enlightenment Now, he writes: “Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and” — note the contrast — “much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.”1 Pinker’s idea, that moral questions concern proper interactions among people, as opposed to questions of practical wisdom about one’s own happiness, is a conventional view shared by most ethicists today.
In the same book, Pinker includes a final chapter about “humanistic” morality. Most of his prominent examples of moral and immoral behavior concern social relationships: Should we tell other people lies or tell the truth? Should we heal them or kill them? Should we work to establish welfare policies, or not? Science, he thinks, can provide the basis for a form of morality that identifies the means to the end of the greatest happiness of the greatest number of other people. (“Utilitarian” philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick proposed and developed a view like this over a century ago.)
Michael Shermer, in The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People, sounds the same basic themes about morality as Pinker. Shermer proposes that we model morality on public health science, which gives us detailed factual information about the consequences of policies on society as a whole. His social focus comes from the same assumption as Pinker’s, the idea that “[m]orality involves how we think and act toward other moral agents.”2
In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris builds the issue of proper relationships with others directly into the definition of morality: “the problem of human cooperation seems almost the only problem worth thinking about. ‘Ethics’ and ‘morality’ . . . are the names we give to our deliberate thinking on these matters.”3
Each of these thinkers also stresses that moral rules are impartial rules that are meant to treat one’s own interests as equal in importance to the interests of others. This may sound like a demand that morality provide a rationale for respecting the equal rights of other people. Their actual meaning is that one is not even considering a moral question unless one discards any concern for one’s own welfare.
This view that morality concerns only impartial regard for everyone’s interests as a means to guiding interactions with others is a deeply entrenched academic assumption about the very subject of morality. And none of today’s popular advocates for scientific morality seem willing to challenge it. This is unfortunate, because the assumption betrays an artificially narrow, myopic view of what ethicists need to study.
Why rival views have to share a subject
Is morality by definition about how to interact and cooperate with other people? If so, millennia of apparent moral codes don’t count as moral codes.
It’s true that some of the most influential ethical theories of the last few hundred years are focused on interpersonal behavior. But this is peculiar to the philosophical assumptions of a relatively small span of human history. Consider an example from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, concerning the practices of a primitive tribe that likely echo those of its primordial ancestors:
Contrast us with the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos that govern what men and women may eat. In order for their boys to become men, they have to avoid foods that in any way resemble vaginas, including anything that is red, wet, slimy, comes from a hole, or has hair. It sounds like arbitrary superstition mixed with the predictable sexism of a patriarchal society. . . . But the Hua seemed to think of their food rules as moral rules. They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called “a religion of the body.”4
The Hua’s moral thinking is obviously incredibly primitive. But thinking about morality as rules for achieving “purity” and avoiding “pollution” is not only characteristic of remote, isolated tribes. Haidt notes how the same guidance is offered by the Hebrew Bible, with its variety of dietary and sanitary commandments. Today’s traditionalist Christians have their fair share of the same kinds of rules: no drinking alcohol, no masturbation, no impure thoughts.
One might say that religious rules are still about the believer’s relationship to his imagined God. But that’s a stretch. Following them does not even affect God, let alone encourage some kind of cooperation with him. Anyway, these rules certainly aren’t about how to relate to other people.
The modern conventional assumption that morality is by definition about rules for interpersonal behavior also suggests that some of the most revolutionary rational ethical theorists weren’t really thinking about ethics.
Natural science, the systematic attempt to explain the natural world, first emerged in ancient Greece around the same time as Western philosophy. This is when philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle advanced the first systematic philosophical theories of ethics, theories almost entirely uninfluenced by religious superstition. While these codes surely included principles to guide one’s interaction with others, they also included many exclusively self-regarding virtues, virtues like temperance, prudence, and pride. Today’s ethicists would chalk these up as mere rules of practical wisdom, not moral virtues.
Notably, the ancient Greeks saw ethics itself as inclusive of practical wisdom, because they saw it as a set of principles for living a virtuous, i.e., excellent, life. It is not an accident that “ethics” comes from the Greek word for character: a man’s character is his disposition to act in a certain way — whether it’s the disposition to be moderate in eating or drinking, or to practice justice toward others.
One can of course strongly object to many aspects of religious or classical ethics. But it’s important that the possibility of objection and disagreement presupposes a common subject, a fact of the matter to disagree about. Heliocentrists may have objected to geocentrism for its use of epicycles to save the idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe from refutation. But both views had to be views about the location of the Earth for the disagreement to be real, rather than a case of changing the subject or talking past each other. Certainly the modern idea that morality consists in rules for interpersonal behavior is one view about the subject of morality. But what is the subject that its advocates disagree with the older theories about?
The actual subject: questions about what life to live
The question all ethicists are actually concerned with, regardless of their proposed answer, is a question faced even by the most primitive humans. But we’re most familiar with the question in its modern form.
Consider a young person who deliberates about which career to adopt. Should he choose a career he loves or the one his parents find respectable, or should he just join the religious order his church thinks is holy? According to the conventional academic view, he’s struggling with a practical question, but not necessarily a moral one. But there is a moral question here — the same one so many previous generations of philosophers have been struggling with.
It’s the sort of question that fascinated Socrates when he queried his fellow Athenians relentlessly about what it means to live a life of virtue, offering some answers but leaving many questions open. Plato and Aristotle followed in his wake. Both were concerned about whether a life in pursuit of pleasure, or of honor, or of money, or of something else best conduced to a form of successful living. Their answers proposed competing theories about what choice of values makes for an excellent life: one focused on cultivating knowledge of a supernatural dimension, the other focused on virtues that serve one’s happiness on Earth.
Whether they hold the theories of the ancient Greeks, a religious theory, or the more modern utilitarian theories, all of these moral thinkers are trying to answer the basic question: How should I live? Aristotle says we should live to achieve eudaemonia, or flourishing; St. Augustine says that we should live in devotion to God; and the more modern utilitarians say we should do what benefits the greatest number of others. Even if some of the answers focus specifically on our interpersonal behavior, not all do. And the questions are about how we should manage our own personal character to achieve one or another vision of a noble life.
One sign that ethics is about the life most worth living is in the emotions different people experience when they live up to or fail to live up to very different moralities. Feelings of guilt, pride, anger, and admiration are all distinctively moral emotions in a way that others like frustration, fear, and anticipation are not. They result from implicit judgments of moral praise and condemnation we make of both others and ourselves. Yet we see equivalents of these emotional responses among practitioners of many different theories besides the interpersonal behavior theory.
For example, a religious person who believes that drinking alcohol is wrong but who drinks anyway won’t just feel frustrated; he will feel guilty and try to repent. If he believes sexual pleasure is wrong, he will feel a kind of righteous pride if he is able to practice a celibate life and condemn others who don’t. If religious moral judgments about the vice of this personal behavior weren’t moral judgments, it’s not clear why the believer would feel such obviously moral emotions, as opposed to mere frustration or unhappiness.
By the same token, as someone who thinks that virtue aims at the pursuit of one’s own happiness, I can tell you that I have felt guilt — and pride — about things I’ve done that affect nobody’s happiness but my own. Yet this response is inexplicable on the assumption that morality exclusively concerns questions about interpersonal behavior.
So that young person struggling with whether to pursue his career for his own happiness or to join a religious order is struggling with an intimately moral question. It’s fundamentally a question about whether it is courageous and good to decide one’s own path in life by oneself for one’s own sake, or instead a kind of sinful pride that must be tamped down by holy humility. Depending on which decision he makes, he’ll end up adopting different values and feeling different moral emotions as a result.
The questions of ethics are the questions about which values to adopt to live the best kind of life. But in failing to see the broader subject matter, ethicists are forestalling any hope of making progress in answering these questions.
Why scientific fields shouldn’t narrow their subject arbitrarily
When scientific thinkers study a subject, they understand that not all thinkers will understand it in the same way. So typically, they work to circumscribe it in a way that allows disagreement to exist, and therefore to be settled. Settling disagreements is crucial to making progress.
Consider, for instance, physicists’ study of heat. Before they could agree about the ultimate causes of heat, they had to be able to isolate the phenomenon they sought to explain. Heat is that property whose presence or absence determines whether things burn or freeze, whether we feel sensations of hot and cold, whether a thermometer rises or falls. Some scientists thought these effects were caused by a fluid (“caloric”) that moved through entities, while others thought they were the result of the motion of tiny particles (the kinetic theory).
What would have happened if the caloric theorists had simply defined “heat” to mean the fluid they hypothesized? They would have regarded kinetic theorists as not even disagreeing with them, but as simply changing the subject. Kinetic theory, in turn, would be understood as declaring that heat does not exist. To decide, as physicists eventually did, that the kinetic theory was the proper answer to questions about heat, “heat” needed to be understood broadly enough to describe the phenomena that these theories disagreed about.5
Ignoring that ethical theories disagree about what makes for the best life is tantamount to ignoring that the caloric and kinetic theories are rival theories of heat. Physics progressed because those competing theories were actually adjudicated against facts about the relevant phenomenon. Could ethics be failing to progress because it’s not looking at the relevant phenomenon?
Sometimes a whole scientific discipline starts out with an overly narrow conceptualization, and its progress is made possible by widening it. Consider one of the most defining moments in the history of science: Copernicus’s proposal that to best account for our observations of the heavens, we should abandon the idea that Earth is at the center of the universe. Instead, he proposed that the Earth moved around the Sun, and was therefore to be classed with the other planets that had already been observed to wander across the sky. Part of what made this Copernican revolution possible was a willingness to redefine the concept of “planet” to include not just the stellar wanderers like Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and others, but Earth itself, which had previously been understood in opposition to the planets.
What did this new, wider concept make possible? In the ancient world, there was little reason to see a commonality between the Earth and the other planets. But Copernicus and Galileo realized they needed to capture the broader similarity they had observed. If they and other scientists had not, they would have failed to learn as much as they did about the Earth by studying other planets. Most notably, Newton cashed in on the connection when he realized that the laws of motion the other planets were observed to follow also applied on the Earth. Newton’s resulting mechanical theories went on to revolutionize not only science but industry and technology as well. Had scientists not seen the similarities between Earth and other planets, these revolutions would not have been possible.
By the same token, when today’s ethicists fail to see the important similarities between what they regard as strictly moral questions (about values at stake in our relationships with others) and what they regard as mere self-regarding questions of practical wisdom, they miss out on how answering the first set of questions might be informed by answers to the second.
Part of the skepticism about answering moral questions is that the language of ethics is highly abstract and obscure. What is a “duty” — a mysterious force that pulls on us to perform certain actions regardless of our choices? There is no similar mystery — or skepticism — about questions of practical wisdom, which are understood as answerable by noting the causal impact of various actions on one’s own health and happiness, without reference to any mysterious forces.
By myopically constraining morality to questions about interpersonal behavior, ethicists fail to see how their questions relate to broader questions in other recognizably scientific disciplines, like economics, psychology, and biology. Indeed, the practice of science as such is concerned with questions of “right” and “wrong” — questions about the right and wrong theory to adopt in the face of the evidence.
How much could ethics progress if it looked for connections to these broader issues, rather than freezing its subject on the mysterious answers offered by only certain recent theorists in their field?
A scientific revolution about “morality” needs to unfreeze the concept
The error of today’s ethicists is a mistake that Ayn Rand called “the fallacy of the frozen abstraction,” which she described as “substituting some one particular concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs.”6
Their mistake is especially inexcusable because the history of ethics did not begin with the narrower concept and only fail to broaden it. Philosophers began their inquiry with the broader concept that dealt with moral virtues and vices of all kinds. Today’s thinkers didn’t decide to narrow the subject of their field because they found new arguments to dismiss the similarities between the views of John Stuart Mill and the views of Aristotle. They did it with full knowledge of Aristotle and of the entire Greek tradition — and of the continuity in subject matter between these periods, but without good reason for thinking this continuity was irrelevant.
So this isn’t simply failure to progress; it’s regression. And for those who are cognizant of the broader history, the regression comes from a sheepish timidity that’s not in keeping with the spirit of science.
In our own time, Rand boldly broke with the frozen concept of “morality” and formulated an ethical theory defining a set of virtues that are exclusively aimed at promoting one’s own life and happiness. In her view, one needs to practice virtues of rationality, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride because each involves a commitment to recognizing important facts that are required for living one’s own life successfully. In her view, even the virtue of justice, which concerns the importance of recognizing facts about the character of other people, is important because of the role others play in one’s own life and happiness.
If we want new and better answers to our ethical questions, we need to better understand the basic phenomena that give rise to these questions in the first place. A philosopher who counts as the Galileo or Lavoisier or Darwin of ethics must be willing to unfreeze the concept of morality and let it grow as the evidence requires. Scientific courage demands nothing less.
Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), 414.
Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015), 11.
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010), 55.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage, 2013), 14.
For more on the development of the concept “temperature” in light of developments in scientists’ study of heat, see Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Travis Norsen, “Scientific Cumulativity and Conceptual Change: The Case of ‘Temperature,’” PhilSci-Archive, 2010, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8332/.
Ayn Rand, “Collectivized Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964), 94.