Material progress is key to expanding our moral circle. The aff’s progress makes conditions better!

Bryan Walsh, “The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past,” Vox, 03-20-2023, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23627382/progress-climate-change-poverty-global-health-doom-industrial-revolution-vaccines

How progress can solve the problem of being human

On January 6, 1941 — 11 months before Pearl Harbor — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his State of the Union speech. But it’s better known by another name: the Four Freedoms speech.

As much of the world was engulfed in what would become the greatest and bloodiest conflict in human history, Roosevelt told Congress that “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

There are human values that can’t be captured in dry economic statistics: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If our world had somehow become as rich and as long-lived as it is today with a system of political liberties and human rights frozen in 1820, we might barely consider it progress at all.

Except that we have seen startling improvements in everything from political liberty to democratic representation to human rights to even the way we treat some (if not all) animals.

In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.

One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them.

But in the decades that followed FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech, things changed radically, thanks to the defeat of fascist powers, the spread of civil rights within existing democracies, and eventually, the collapse of the communist world.

Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China.

That doesn’t mean that the liberal democracies that exist are perfect by any means, the US very much included. Nor does it mean that periods of advancement weren’t followed by periods of retrenchment or worse. Progress, especially in politics and morals, doesn’t flow as steadily as a calendar — just compare Germany in 1929 to Germany in 1939.

But all you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.

Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.

But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.

These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.

The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one — that, ultimately, is what the Malthusian Trap means. In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.

We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense.