On becoming more left-wing

From socialdemocrat to Hayek and back

Dan Williams has just unpaywalled his post on becoming less left-wing (disclaimer: I haven’t read the other two posts, because I irrationally refuse to pay for Substack). Reading it prompted me to reflect on my own ideological journey over the past decade. So I want to outline a very similar process I went through as an undergrad until today.

My story starts out much like Dan’s, I also drifted away from the left a bit in my early twenties, for many of the same reasons he did. Which makes sense, since we’re both analytic philosopher guys of the same generation (we’re pretty close in age, I think?). But then I ended up becoming more left-wing again.

Since the post summarizes more than ten years of ideological change, the account is extremely stylized. Some of the books are not mentioned in the real order I read them in. But I don’t think I would have the writing patience for a thorough autobiography, and it would read in a much more messy way.

(Since his story is just about becoming less left-wing, and mine is more subtle, becoming first less left-wing and then more left-wing, it means that I’m the more subtle thinker and that this story shall prove a Total Leftist Victory beyond any shadow of a doubt. OkI’mkidding.)

My undergrad. From socialdemocrat to Hayek (2015-2018)

Like Dan, I grew up firmly on the left, particularly a socialdemocrat. I didn’t know much about politics until around the time I started to study philosophy, because before that I wanted to be a physicist, and if you were into physics it was cool to be a Sheldon Cooper-type around the early 2010s. Anyways, I didn’t end up continuing my physics undergrad, because I was terrible at math and the formal stuff.

Then, as I went to undergrad in philosophy (2015 to 2018), I got very into utilitarian ethics (particularly due to Peter Singer, but I always had inclinations towards it, I pretty much derived utilitarianism by myself in high school…) and Rawlsianism. Maybe I was a Marxist for a couple of weeks, since most of the undergrads were marxists. Some were Maoists or Stalinists. Latin America is a peculiar place.

While switching into philosophy, I also became very excited in the early 2010s when the Spanish political parties Podemos and Ciudadanos appeared on the scene and promised to challenge the traditional left- and right-wing parties. I became disillusioned with them pretty quickly, just a couple of years later. But they did raise my level on interest about how to “run a society”.

Anyways, political philosophy classes led to me believe that much of our world’s wealth and power structures are fundamentally unjust. I saw existing property holdings and inequalities as morally arbitrary, and thought of giving any inheritance I might get away from my parents to cost-effective charities. After all, no one chooses their birth circumstances, their nationality, their parents, or their natural talents. To my younger self, sweeping redistribution and bold social programs seemed very justified and very morally urgent. I was confident that, given the right ideals, we could engineer a much better society for everyone.

(I distinctly recall commuting to class on the bus, stewing in righteous anger that people around me dared to smile given all the poverty and suffering in the world. Given factory farming. Given wild animal suffering. If they knew!! Grr. 🙄)

Like Dan, I had a turning point halfway through undergrad, when I started reading more outside the recommendations that my teachers gave, and outside my narrow left-wing political authors. I realized I had fervently demonized “mainstream economics” without actually studying it. Some friends who were doing economics were defending libertarianism, and I couldn’t let it go. I *had* to convince them of utilitarian rawlsianism!

Now, most leftists initially dismiss economics as neoliberal propaganda. A few of us decide that this shouldn’t be like that, and to learn it for ourselves. So I begrudgingly cracked open some top economic books recommended by Reddit, Goodreads, and some other places, determined to refute the dark arts of Econ 101 with pure liberal egalitarian facts and logic.

So, among other books, I read Free to Choose by Milton Friedman and Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick. I found them “meh”, since the solutions to some social problems seemed troubling. Like replacing social programs with private charity. Maybe that kind of private-charity voluntarism flies in the Protestant U.S., where philanthropy is a bigger thing, but in places like Spain or Latin America, I doubt private charity alone would catch most people who fall through the social and economic cracks. And what happens in an economic recession, when donations dry up? This all seemed too flimsy a safety net.

But I also read Friedrich Hayek, and he was the biggest influence of putting me off utopian social projects. Particularly the article The Use of Knowledge in Society strongly put me off central planning and constructing utopian societies. I found The Road to Serfdom and other books to be weaker than his core argument there. Through that, I saw how prices act as signals conveying dispersed knowledge in society, and that no central planner could ever possess all the local information that markets aggregate through their price signals. Thomas Sowell influenced me in similar ways. I learned that incentives really matter, that people respond to rewards and constraints in predictable ways, and that people tend to cheat the system, often undermining well-intentioned policies. Also that well-intentioned policies can be worse than the market, so we can have both market failures and state failures. I now see that society is more like an ecosystem, a jungle, than a piece of engineering. This view helps explain why Soviet communism failed, and why the US succeeded.

Similarly, Karl Popper famously drew a line between “utopian” and “piecemeal” social engineering. Utopian engineering tries to rebuild society wholesale according to an ideal blueprint, assuming humans will conform to lofty ideals. This is found in Plato, Hegel, and Marx, but also to some extent in ideal theorists like Rawls. Popper warned this approach is pretty perilous, as it flattens social complexity and invites unintended chaos through the unforeseen consequences of social policies. I came to agree. History is littered with attempts at radical social transformation that ended in tragedy. So my Rawlsian-utilitarian zeal for designing the perfect society was met with a cold dose of humility. I saw the wisdom in Popper’s advocacy of incremental reform. Better to fix one institution at a time, test changes on a small scale, and learn from failures, than to stake everything on a grand revolutionary social plan. This also mixed better with my piecemeal, reformist socialdemocrat sensibilities and my rejection of violent revolutionary marxism anyways.

I also signed up to an Introduction to Economics class, where we read Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics textbook. I came to appreciate stuff like incentives, markets, and tradeoffs. Things that a class on political philosophy often doesn’t even talk about! Thinking more in terms of supply and demand, opportunity costs, and equilibrium seemed very enlightening and that economists were actually seeing things that left-wing people were missing in their theories. And they also use pretty much utilitarianism for policymaking! I started to think that economists were right and leftists were wrong.

Through this, I came to accept some sobering truths that left-wing critiques often downplay. For example, that poverty is humanity’s default state and only unprecedented economic growth (largely under industrial capitalism) lifted most of us out of extreme poverty. In 1800, over 80% of people lived in extreme poverty. Now, that number is around 10%. That astonishing enrichment wasn’t achieved by socialist planning, but largely by industrialization, markets, innovation, and growth. This forced me to give the idea of “growing the pie” rather than “distributing it better” its due. Without it, the lofty leftist social goals wouldn’t even be fundable. By the end of undergrad, these experiences had shifted me to a more centrist (even lightly libertarian-curious) stance.

I am also now more realistic about limits due to our evolved human nature. Part of it was due to reading a bit of biology and philosophy of biology. My entry to Darwinism were the New Atheists: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, but also the metaethical debunking of morality through evolution discussions of Richard Joyce and Sharon Street. I became more realistic about the constraints of human nature (after all, we evolved in small tribal bands, not in giant altruistic cooperatives), and about the complexity of society.

(I also recently did an interview on the conservative, anti-feminist, right-wing undercurrent of New Atheism, about the stuff mentioned in my blog post about woke culture…)

To be honest, I was also probably a bit annoyed with socialists, virtue signaling, and a bit of “woke culture” such as cultural appropriation. That probably contributed a bit too.

But don’t worry, this story doesn’t end with me running off to join the Ayn Rand Fan Club.

Return to welfarism

Despite absorbing some libertarian-ish ideas, I never lost my underlying egalitarian impulse. Even during my Hayekian phase, I still felt that extreme poverty, rampant inequality, and casual discrimination were deeply wrong.

Over time, and probably because I kept working on moral and political philosophy, I broadly returned to a Rawlsian “distributive justice” paradigm. One core belief I never abandoned is what we could call “luck egalitarianism”, the idea that much of what people have (or lack) in life is due to pure brute luck, not merit, and that injustices of luck call for redress. To put it simply, a lot of today’s wealth distribution lacks moral justification. Being born in a rich country or inheriting your parents’ fortune is like winning a lottery you never even entered. Meanwhile, someone born in a poor village or into an oppressed minority faces uphill battles through life, through no fault of their own.

Some part of today’s distribution of wealth is still downstream of past injustice, sometimes conquest, colonialism, or enclosure of common resources. But sometimes more simply inherited privilege, the arbitrariness of birth, and closed borders. So, even as I came to respect markets for creating wealth, I didn’t start worshipping existing wealth as inherently deserved or necessarily virtuous. I can applaud the innovation of some entrepreneurs, to some extent, but I still think it’s morally a bit crazy immoral that billionaires exist alongside people who can’t afford food or medicine.

My Master’s Degree. Human Nature and Human Culture (2019-2022)

I did my Master’s at King’s College London. I already briefly mentioned my interest in darwinism and human nature. Well, one class in particular was particularly impactful on me, Philosophy of Psychology, and it was about research on human nature. We discussed how evolution shaped our behavior (kin altruism, tribalism, reverse dominance hierarchies, see here for summary). We read Darwin, Chris Boehm, Sarah Hrdy, and more. I also read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes in my free time. We also got assigned a chapter from a fascinating recent book, Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success, which is all about the theory of cultural evolution, how human societies transmit knowledge and norms.

Some ideas were starting to take shape. For that class, I wrote a horribly written but extremely well-researched essay on the limitations of our moral psychology for achieving moral impartiality. It cited Hayek and Popper on piecemeal social engineering, Henrich on cultural evolution, Joyce on kin altruism and other predispositions, Persson and Savulescu on transhumanism… and another interesting new book, Allen Buchanan and Rachell Powell’s The Evolution of Moral Progress, which was recommended by the lecturer after they read my essay. (Tanking that essay made me lose on the Distinction mark for my masters’ degree, but that essay would turn out to become the basis for my PhD project. So things turned out fine, I guess!)

I also wrote my master’s thesis on the topic of Moral Uncertainty, so I read Will MacAskill’s PhD thesis and pretty much everything that had been written on moral uncertainty up to 2019. Both of these things will come back later.

Covid and... a second masters?? (2020-2021)

While I was doing my master’s in King’s College London, there’s this thing called Covid-19 that, uh, kinda happened. Cities like London are expensive and dangerous when there’s a pandemic, and my family rightly predicted that Covid was going to last for a while. So I left for rural Spain, where my parents live.

I had to find something to do while preparing my PhD materials, so I decided to sign up for a master’s in Political Philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. It was not too expensive, and I decided to wait the situation out to see if in-person classes would be running. They never did. I did my entire master’s online while living with my parents and saving some money for my PhD.

Anyways, to summarize, this master’s in political philosophy raised my level of interest in questions of global distributive justice, made me take the welfare of future generations seriously, made me drop my libertarianism further, and get even closer to just pure utilitarianism.

During that time, I also drafted some essays and research proposals on questions of human nature, human culture, and the feasibility of “realistic utopias” in the face of realistic human constraints. I also went on long walks on the empty countryside while listening to audiobooks of long books by Joseph Henrich, such as The Secret of Our Success and the then-just-released The WEIRDest People in the World, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, and many others. This would become the basis for my PhD project.

My PhD, moral progress and non-ideal theory. (2022-now)

Being one of the few philosophers who has ever read some economics, it’s appropriate that I’ve ended up doing my PhD at the London School of Economics, the home institution of Hayek and Popper.

How does my PhD project fit with my politics? Well, first, part of it has to do with questions of human nature. Since we’re talking about how that affected my politics, I will just summarize by saying that I have grown to appreciate more deeply what Allen Buchanan and Rachell Powell have written on moral inclusion, and the plasticity and flexibility of the moral mind. In their articles and books on moral progress, Buchanan and Powell emphasize how human morality can expand to include more beings in the circle of concern – other races, other genders (or sexes), the LGBTQ+, even nonhuman animals and future generations – but perhaps this only happens when we are under the right material conditions. (Here’s a summary of some of the things I’m working on)

Although I don’t believe in any naive teleology or linear historical path of development, I have come to see some arc of human progress as bending toward greater inclusion and other morally good values. In the last couple of centuries, we have abolished slavery, extended rights to women and minorities, started recognizing the interests of animals, and perhaps we will soon care for digital minds or future generations. This would seem like a silly and impossible dream if we’re too narrow about our conception of human nature that just focuses on tit-for-tat, kin altruism, etc. It’s a vision that I call “impoverished naturalism”, contrasting with a “broad social naturalism” that can accept the emergent complexity of (relatively peaceful) societies composed of millions of strangers.

Moral inclusion, moral circle expansion, or whatever you want to call it, has partly tempered my cynicism by reminding me that genuine moral improvements have happened and can continue to happen, at least if we nurture the social and economic conditions that make people more empathetic and open. Many forms of moral inclusivity flourish mainly under conditions of peace and prosperity, instead of war or zero-sum competition, which links back to the importance of economic and technological progress in enabling such moral progress. I think it’s a feedback loop and a virtuous cycle.

Second, theorizing about moral progress is an effort in non-ideal moral theory. Ideal moral theory asks what the correct principles are under favourable conditions (or with full compliance, full information, and so on). But even if we got those principles exactly correct, it doesn’t follow that we are “simply set.” We would still face the distinct questions of how moral change actually happens, why people and institutions so often fail to comply, and what kinds of reforms, incentives, and material conditions make better compliance more likely over time. So a theory of moral progress has to engage with those non-ideal constraints: partial compliance, disagreement, motivational limits, friction, the causal pathways by which moral norms and practices improve, etc. This idealization comes from Rawls.

Non-ideal theory, by contrast, goes from the “here and now” into making things better, taking into consideration our flawed world and our non-moral impulses. Several people (Charles Mills, Laura Valentini, Michael Huemer) have argued that doing ideal moral theory is kinda useless (here’s Huemer’s brutal takedown).

I personally believe that the ideal system is utilitarianism, since it’s one of the few systems that respects axioms like transitivity and completeness, but also believe that people won’t adhere to its requirement of moral impartiality due to their biological egoistic and nepotistic moral impulses, so I get annoyed.

But anyways, it might be better to find a non-ideal system that people will adhere to, than an ideal moral system that people won’t adhere to and try to boycott. So why not theorize from the “here and now”? Thus, researching moral progress, and borrowing from empirical moral psychology.

So keep an eye out for some of my future academic articles and a book on these topics in a couple of years? ;)

Effective Altruism - Making Moral Philosophy Real?

There are two important undercurrents that I haven’t yet mentioned in all of this, and that are pretty important. I thought it made narrative sense to talk about them here at the end. I now want to talk about how Effective Altruism and Transhumanism fit in this picture.

I’ve been engaged with Effective Altruist ideas since the very beginning, in 2015, as I read Singer on global poverty and animal welfare. Obviously, it meshes easily with utilitarianism, but with far more pragmatism about actually taking steps for a more moral world. Which helps, because I hate when philosophy is stuck in the ivory tower.

As I moved back to Europe from Latin America, and particularly moved to the UK, I began engaging with EA more and more. Year by year, I keep becoming more acutely aware that tons of our current practices are deeply unethical, and that we can do better if we put our minds to it. For example, I came to see factory farming as a brutal moral atrocity happening on an almost incomprehensible scale (80 billion animals each year live and die in miserable conditions to stock supermarket shelves, just because we like their taste). I also recognize the often ignored moral emergency of global poverty and preventable disease. Millions of people still die from preventable causes, simply for lack of attention, from us (relatively) rich people, and from the very rich.

Effective Altruism has given me a practical outlet for morality beyond writing papers, going to the occasional protest, or engaging in the social media outrage of the week. (That’s a bit of the problem with the left, they should organize into a movement rather than getting outraged online or doing another reading group on Marx). I started donating to highly effective charities, originally signed up for The Life You Can Give pledge in 2015 or so. Now I’m signed up to the Giving What We Can pledge instead. You should, too!

I am now prioritizing researching topics that touch on areas like global poverty, animal welfare, future generations, digital minds, existential risk, etc. and want to dedicate my career to having large positive impact. EA helped square the circle for me. It’s a circle where people are less tribalistic (e.g. I could acknowledge the lessons of economics, Hayek and Popper about constraints, trade-offs, and unintended consequences) while still campaigning for very radical improvements, often much more radical than the left, in fact.

Also, we can’t undersell the importance of actually having a sense of community (even though it might mostly be an online community, hi EA Twitter!) as opposed to the somewhat hopeless feeling that you’re working on this stuff by yourself.

Disco Elysium is so relatable. (Just interpret “communism” as “leftism”)

Transhumanism - Bringing Big Projects Back

If human nature is constraining our political projects... just change human nature, duh!

This seems obvious to me, although it draws a lot of irrational ire from a lot of people.

Transhumanism is the idea that we should use technology to enhance the human condition, potentially eliminating aging, expanding our intellectual and moral capacities, and transcending our parochial biological limitations. I always had a propensity to accept these ideas, and I don’t think there are any particularly good arguments against them (at least as a matter of principle, there can be plenty of problems in application).

I find transhumanism pretty intuitive, perhaps given my own propensity for utilitarianism and related (memetic?) ideas. If our goal is to reduce suffering and increase welfare, we shouldn’t shy away from getting technology to do it. Why not cure aging, if we can, and save billions of future lives? Why not develop AI to dramatically improve human welfare (while managing its risks)? Why not explore ways to “upgrade” humanity and even spread life beyond Earth? Why not create digital minds that live happily ever after?

I think that transhumanism has kept my spark of optimism for “big projects”, though this time grounded in scientific possibility rather than political ideology. We don’t have to jump into all of it at once, of course, we can iterate and be piecemeal.

In a way, transhumanism allowed the return of a certain idealism in my worldview: a confidence that, with human ingenuity, we really can transform the human condition for the better. This differs from my college utopian socialism in that the focus of change is technology, not government legislation alone. Although of course I also believe in law, institutions, social norms, etc.

But the scale of ambition of ending involuntary death, vastly increasing happiness, expanding moral consideration to new forms of sentient life, is, if anything, even greater. Crucially, we should aim for this ambition to be inclusive, to seek to elevate everyone (and even non-humans), not just a privileged few.

Conclusion

So, if someone asks me whether I’m “left-wing,”, I’ll say yes, in fact, ideologically, I probably am an extreme left-winger, advocating for great global redistribution of wealth, the abolition of factory farming, giving pretty much equal weight to future people than current people (only discounting for uncertainty and not discounting them morally). I even think woke values are good overall and that they haven’t gone far enough! Even if woke people in practice don’t live up to their values. So I remain deeply progressive in my ideal goals, I want to see a world with almost zero suffering, welfare beyond our wildest dreams, and biological freedom for all beings.

And yet, the perspective is not so simple. I’ve absorbed too many perspectives to fit neatly on what most people think is the political spectrum. I’ve become nuancepilled. I’m more centrist in my appreciation of what we’re up against: decently rigid biological human nature, huge societal complexity, and the danger of unintended consequences of our policies. In that sense, I have become less left-wing by shedding part of the package of assumptions that the modern left-wing tribe holds. I don’t deem state intervention as a panacea, or put capitalism as the root of all evil.

So, where have I arrived? My position branches in two, depending on whether I’m doing ideal or nonideal theory. If you ask me ideally, I’ll tell you about longtermism, about tiling the universe with some form of hedonium or whatever. If you ask me non-ideally. I will recognize the standpoint of where we currently are, with limited information, and I will recognize that we can make huge moral mistakes.

My ultimate position is a blend of the “be morally ambitious” ideas I get from EA and transhumanism, with the “but remember human limitations” caution I get from economics, Hayek, Popper, Sowell, and other guys. If that sounds like a loose, eclectic creed... well, it kinda is. But I think it’s a plausible ideology, particularly for our era of rapid technological change.

Surely, my political views haven’t settled. That comes with the territory. If, like me, you work on political philosophy, I think it would be dogmatic to settle into something. You want to theorize about different topics one by one (e.g. what do abortion, gun rights, and animal welfare have to do with each other? Conceptually, nothing, yet they usually come as a package. You should be wary of ideological packages).

But I do recognize that I find a set of ideas particularly attractive, even if I am not sure how they fully fit. I like Rawlsian egalitarian liberal political philosophy, at least from time to time. I find bullet-biting-utilitarianism to be the most plausible moral view, given my skepticism about a lot of moral intuitions (due to them being of dubious biological, cultural, or self-serving trustworthiness) and an ambitious search for moral coherence across all thought experiments and scenarios at once, it pretty much requires adhering to ideas such as the axioms of transitivity and completeness. So, as you can see, I also like metaethics and moral epistemology. I like questions about human nature and nurture. I like questions about institutions and niche construction. Lately, I am becoming a bit of a technocrat, since I think that people are voting by “vibes” and pandering to populism, which is not great.

All of this, and more, informs my political views. I am an eclectic guy.

Mentioned Works

(Thanks to ChatGPT for finding links to each of the works, because I couldn’t be bothered otherwise)

Economics Turn

• Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. 1980. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

• Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society” The American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–530. (Also in Individualism and Economic Order, 1948.)

• Hayek, Friedrich A. 1944. The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge.

• Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

• Popper, Karl R. 1944/1957. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge.

• Popper, Karl R. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge.

• Sowell, Thomas. 1980. Knowledge and Decisions. New York: Basic Books.

• Mankiw, Gregory. 1997. Principles of Economics. Fort Worth, TX: Dryden Press / Cengage.

• Our World in Data. “World population living in extreme poverty” and “A history of global living conditions”

Ethics and Effective Altruism

• Singer, Peter. 1972. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (3): 229–243.

• Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: HarperCollins. (Multiple updated editions; major anniversary ed. 2015; revised ed. 2023.)

• Singer, Peter. 1979. Practical Ethics. Cambridge University Press. 1st ed. 1979; 3rd ed. 2011.

• Singer, Peter. 2005. “Ethics and Intuitions” The Journal of Ethics 9 (3–4): 331–352.

• Singer, Peter. 2009. The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. New York: Random House.

• MacAskill, William. 2015. Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference. London: Guardian Faber

• MacAskill, William, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord. 2020. Moral Uncertainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• MacAskill, William. 2022. What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View. London: Oneworld (UK).

• Huemer, Michael. 2019. Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism. New York: Routledge.

• My Substack article on moral circle explosion, about considering invertebrates and future digital minds as worthy of moral consideration.

Human Nature, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology

• Darwin, Charles. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.

• Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Dennett, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon & Schuster.

• Joyce, Richard. 2006. The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Street, Sharon. 2006. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” Philosophical Studies 127 (1): 109–166.

• Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 2009. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon.

• Greene, Joshua. 2013. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. New York: Penguin Press.

Cultural Evolution and Material Progress

• Henrich, Joseph. 2015. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Henrich, Joseph. 2020. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Morris, Ian. 2015. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve
  Princeton University Press.

• Galor, Oded. 2022. The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
  Bodley Head–Vintage (UK).

• Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking.

• Pinker, Steven. 2018. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Viking.

• Rosling, Hans. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. London: Sceptre.

Moral Progress

• Buchanan, Allen, and Rachell Powell. 2018. The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Buchanan, Allen. 2020. Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism
  MIT Press.

• Sebo, Jeff. 2025. The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why
  W. W. Norton.

• Sauer, Hanno. 2023. Moral Teleology: A Theory of Progress. Cambridge.

• Peter Singer. 2011. The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Original 1981. I recommend the revised edition with new preface and afterword from 2011.

• Persson, Ingmar, and Julian Savulescu. 2012. Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Persson, Ingmar, and Julian Savulescu. 2008. “The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity” Journal of Applied Philosophy.

• Pearce, David. 1995. The Hedonistic Imperative.

• Bostrom, Nick. 2019. “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis” Global Policy 10, no. 4. 455–476.

• My article on the LSE Blog, summarizing some of this stuff. (Substack mirror)

• My bibliography review, surveying all this academic literature and more. (Substack mirror)

Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory

• Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Mills, Charles W. 2005. “Ideal Theory as Ideology” Hypatia 20 (3): 165–184.

• Valentini, Laura. 2012. “Ideal vs. Non-ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map” Philosophy Compass 7 (9): 654–664.

• Huemer, Michael. 2016. “Confessions of a Utopophobe” Social Philosophy and Policy 33 (1–2): 214–234.