The arc of the moral universe

Abstract

This essay, which will appear in Subjugation and Bondage, ed. Tommy Lott (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming), is from a larger manuscript I worked on for several years, then put aside. I wrote the first draft for a 1986 symposium on “Moral Realism” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and presented subsequent versions to philosophy colloquia at Carnegie-Mellon University and Columbia University, the Western Canadian Philosophical Association, the Harvard Government Department’s political theory colloquium, New York University Law School, the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, the Bay Area Group on Philosophy and Political Economy, the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy, an Olin Conference on Political Economy at Stanford University, the A. E. Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and the Universidade Federal Fluminens. I am grateful to audiences at each occasion for comments and criticism. I especially wish to thank Robert Brenner, David Brink, Robert Cooter, Michael Hardimon, Paul Horwich, Frances Kamm, George Kateb, Ira Katznelson, Harvey Mansfield, Amelie Rorty, Charles Sabel, Michael Sandel, T. M. Scanlon, Samuel Scheffler, Anne-Marie Smith, Laura Stoker, and Erik Olin Wright for helpful suggestions. Karen Jacobsen, Anne Marie Smith, and Katia Vania provided invaluable research assistance. I received research support from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship, and MIT’s Levitan Prize in the Humanities, generously supported by James and Ruth Levitan. 1. The Souls ofBluck Folk (New York Vintage, 1990), p. 188.