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“Does moral progress occur incrementally? Or is it the result of sudden, punctuated social change? Given that cultural evolution, unlike biological evolution, can be guided by deliberate human innovation, both incrementalism and punctuation would seem to be live options.

... incrementalism does not mean embracing a stultifying conservatism that favors tradition over reform. Incremental, progressive moral evolution can be relatively fast and even quite groundbreaking. That is, positive moral revolutions do take place—such as the gay rights revolution ... Typically, large-scale moral progress begins with small-scale “experiments in living.� Instead of trying to re-design the culture of a society as a whole, small groups of people use moral reasoning to re-design the sub-culture of their local tribes. If the results of experiments are positive, then they can be adapted elsewhere and scaled up for larger and larger portions of society.

That being said, it’s possible that incremental moral change will not be sufficient to deal with the most serious threats to human survival. For example, perhaps something quite different—a moral black swan—is needed to address the problem of anthropogenic climate change. For this reason, we cannot be too confident that strategies that have worked in the past will also work in the future.”