Change is one of the most striking features of morality. More than 2000 years after Heraclitus formulated his thoughts on the fundamental law of cosmos and human life, his words are echoed in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (Marx and Engels 1888: 6). This quote captures the nature of moral change as a two-edged sword. It is a source of both fear and hope. Change can destroy what we care about and hold sacred, and it can be the herald of hope for the downfall of ruthless tyrants and empty gods. It can clear the ground for a better life. It is undoubtedly the latter meaning Marx and Engels had in mind. They saw the holy of their time as a means of sedating the poor and working classes, so they did not rise against those in power to change the basic structures of society, which were harming them gravely. Marx and Engels were in other words criticising and asking for an overturn of what their society called good in order to be true to what is good.

When someone, like Marx and Engels, like Singer, like Yousafzai, like Thunberg, is criticising the values and ideals of their society, how can that be done? What leads to the overthrow or gradual change of moral beliefs, ideals and values? Why, in Scandinavia, for instance, did it cease to be a father’s moral duty to chastise his children, when they misbehaved? What made feuds in most of Europe stop being ethically and legally permitted? On what grounds did the demand for legal equality for homosexuals arise in parts of the Western world? In other words: What can we learn about morality by exploring moral changes, and how are we to understand the dynamics, structure and normativity of moral change? These are the central questions of this book, and its aim is to give a philosophical account of moral change.¹

Moral change, however, is not only an intellectually fascinating phenomenon. It also raises moral worries directed at ethical normativity: When once it was considered natural that some humans were slaves, when once it was proof of a woman’s innocence in the accusation of being a witch that she drowned, when thrown into a lake with her hands and legs bound, and when the colour of a person’s skin has been and continues to be a reason for how just or unjust that person is treated, how can we then trust our current moral beliefs and practices? On what grounds can we allow ourselves to judge and act, if all we have at our disposal are the criteria and measuring rods of such fluid and most likely ethically flawed practices? To understand the nature of moral change and address moral worries and sceptical challenges to ethical normativity is important for several reasons. One reason lies in the importance of hope for human life. Humans need to believe that it is possible to make a positive difference in their lives and in the world in order to have the courage and stamina to act, both individually and collectively (Moody-Adams 2017: 1). It is such hope and courage to act, and act politically, that the moral and sceptical worries can threaten to undermine, if they are not addressed. This book is therefore also an investigation into hope.

It is further important to address the moral worries because democracies, their leaders and their citizens have to strike a balance between, on the one hand, mastering a respectful political, cultural, moral and religious pluralism and, on the other hand, mastering legitimate critique of different political, cultural, moral and religious beliefs, traditions and practices. Another way of expressing this is that a healthy democracy—in order to both be and survive as a democracy—needs to avoid dogmatic fundamentalism (insisting there is only one true morality, ideology and form of life) and cynical, laissez-faire subjectivism (allowing ‘might to be right’ or that ‘anything goes’). It is a balance that is hard to find, and which is often challenged in a globalised world where various forms of transnational and international politics, trade, migrations, corporations and conflicts take place. In a democratic society it is also important that we are able to justify, also often morally, the laws we pass, the institutions we create and some of the judgements and decisions we make, because our governments and legal systems are not self-justified or morally guaranteed by a God demanding blind obedience. The legitimacy of such a society’s institutions arises from being of service to, not only the people, but people. Therefore, it is important to discuss how we can steer clear of both dogmatic fundamentalism and cynical subjectivism.

The belief that it is possible to avoid subjectivism in questions of how we should live is at odds with what Jaeggi argues is a dominant trend in philosophy since Rawls and Habermas, namely that the ethical content of forms of life cannot be criticised or deemed better than other forms of life, because in modern societies there is an irreducible and incommensurable ethical pluralism (Jaeggi 2018: ix):

Philosophy has thus withdrawn from the Socratic […] question of how we [are to] lead our lives [and this question] has been consigned to the domain of unquestioned preferences or irreducible and unchallengeable identities. As with taste, there is no quarrelling with forms of life. (Jaeggi 2005: 65)

This book belongs to another, equally influential trend in current philosophy, that has, for example, Nussbaum as one of its prominent voices, which argues that there is an irreducible pluralism of forms of life, but these are not, or, as I will argue, at least not fully, incommensurable. Sometimes we do succeed with ethically and politically fruitful debates, critiques and quarrels over forms of life. I thus share Eldridge’s intuition that:

it is at least plausible to suppose that there may be a middle way between dogmatic appeals to sources of value that are independent of human life, on the one hand, and taking human life to be nothing but a matter of unconstrained competition for purely subjective satisfactions, on the other. (Eldridge 2016: 15)

The investigation undertaken in this book is philosophical, and accordingly, the methods applied are philosophical. The understanding of philosophy underlying it—its theoretical frame—is Wittgensteinian (Wittgenstein 2009: §§89–133; Kuusela 2008).² This choice of frame is made because Wittgenstein’s later work displays great sensitivity to the fluid and contingent traits of human life and their consequences for normative and epistemological issues. The conception of normativity found in his work further manages to avoid both dogmatic foundationalism and subjectivism and relativism (Stern 2003: 201; Crary 2007b; Kuusela 2008: 95–286). I have also taken my initial methodological lead from Wittgenstein’s advice, delivered in the form of a straight order: “Don’t think, but look!” (Wittgenstein 2009: § 66). When we seek philosophica...