How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study

Abstract

History is really complicated. I think it’s an important virtue to be able to stick your neck out and say ‘I think x was mostly caused by y’ - but underneath statements like that there’s a huge cloud of possibilities and entanglements and holes in the data. The first reference you come across via EA networks may be pretty poor. I told some people in the EA space that I was researching the decline of footbinding. Two people independently suggested a relevant chapter of a book to me (without claiming that it was good). The people were both philosophers, and the book they suggested was also by a philosopher, which is probably partly why they had heard of it. I think the relevant chapter isn’t actually worth reading if you want to understand why footbinding declined: it doesn’t mention economics at all, and seems to equate the prohibition on footbinding with the end of footbinding as a practice, which is quite confused. This wasn’t much of a problem for me given that I also read other stuff - but if instead of doing a research project I had just wanted to learn something interesting about footbinding, I might have come away with quite a misleading picture of what happened. My takeaway is: don’t assume that because someone is smart, the single reference they have on a topic they don’t know much about is any good.