Which theory of moral evolution should social scientists choose?1

Abstract

The issue of moral, social and political evolution is a basic chapter of the social sciences and has given birth to a great variety of theories. Beyond their diversity, these theories belong to two basic types. The first disregards, to a large extent, the role of ideas in evolution. Either it ignores their existence or it treats them as dependent variables: as being basically reactions of the social actors to changes in their environment. The second, by contrast, treats ideas as independent variables. It starts from the assumption that the explanation of moral, social and political evolution should take into consideration the capacity of human beings to propose and endorse interpretations of the world and to define programs of action. The first model is basically mechanical; the second is programmatic and rational, in the sense that it sees ideas as rationally selected. This second model has been convincingly illustrated by Durkheim and Weber. The processes they have identified can be discerned in the case of evolutionary phenomena characteristic of our time, such as the extension of rights in democratic societies.