oral Progress is on the decline.  And that is rather striking; for there is a perfectly good sense in which there has been increasingly greater equality in society.  This much already tells us something extremely important, namely that the measure of moral progress cannot be explicated simply in terms of equality.  And we have lost sight of this fundamental truth in the rightful press for equality across gender, race, and sexual orientation.  So we would do well to distinguish between virtuous equality and vapid equality. 

Moral Progress is on the decline precisely because vapid equality has been given priority over virtuous equality.  One sign of vapid equality is the idea that all opinions should be accorded equal worth.  No one really believes.  Indeed, it is virtually impossible for a sane and sober-minded person to believe this.  With good reason, I rarely accord much weight to the hoodlum on the street.  Similarly, I rarely accord much weight to the views of those who have no experience whatsoever regarding the matter about which they are expressing an opinion.  Surely, I am right about this. 

Vapid equality has come about because virtuous equality has been viewed as racist or sexist or homophobic. Virtuous equality takes seriously the view that the intentions with which a person behaves matters greatly.  Vapid equality, by contrast, focuses primarily upon the behavior.  As a result, we have the following absurd situation: On the one hand, rappers use the word “nigger” in the lyrics to their music and they count upon white youth to buy their music.  On the other, it is viewed as inappropriate for precisely these white youth to utter the word “nigger” while singing along to the lyrics.  If a white is not a racist for listening to music peppered with the word “nigger”, then how exactly is he a racist for merely saying that word along with the rapper?

Zero-tolerance is yet another instance of privileging vapid equality over virtuous equality.  Here, too, intentions are ignored.  The policy does not distinguish between the bully and the person who is protecting himself or another from a bully.  At the very outset, any policy that collapses the distinction between bullying and self-defense should be considered utterly untenable.  But in the name of vapid equality, precisely such a policy has been embraced by one school district after another. In the meantime, we are undermining a fundamental aspect of child development, namely the differentiation between good and bad intentions. 

There can be no moral progress in society if we obliterate the significance of the difference between good intentions and bad intentions in terms of what a person does.

Of course, there are instance where we have bad intentions no matter what.  Barring something utterly fanciful and thoroughly improbable, rape cannot take place with good intentions.  By contrast, it most certainly is possible to have good intentions even in the case of having killed the wrong person. 

To state the obvious, the idea that we should respect the humanity of all individuals regardless of their physical features is a most noble one.  But that noble idea has morphed into what is untenable, namely that the obvious absence of certain capacities (such as hearing or sight) should not be countenanced as an absence but merely a difference.  Accordingly, it is now said by some that there is nothing wrong with intentionally bringing a child into the world who does not have the capacity to see or to hear.  This is none other than a form of perverse narcissism.  I mean Frederick Douglass might as well have argued that since he went from slavery to freedom and excelled beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, everyone should take that route; for surely slavery builds character. 

A defining feature of DeafGeoff, a former student of mine, is that he is deaf.  Correctly assessing his accomplishments as a DJ requires that I take seriously the fact that he did not let his being deaf stand as an impediment to his becoming a DJ.  But this makes no sense if we do not acknowledge that there is a significant difference between having the capacity to hear and not having it. 

Moral progress consists in our acknowledging that deaf people and blind people can exhibit extraordinary talent and make formidable contributions to the good of society.  This is virtuous equality.  Vapid equality, on the other hand, has us paying lip service to the incredulous by saying that being able to hear and not being able to hear are simply two different and equally desirable capacities.  The stunning part of it all is that this line of thought is being taken seriously. 

Vapid equality is born of the deep recognition that horrendous misjudgments were made in the past and the deep, deep determination that such mistakes not be made in the future.  That, needless to say, is quite laudable.  But vapid equality succeeds only by imposing a moral grid that trivializes the extraordinary powers of discernment that are a defining feature of our humanity. 

Our human powers of discernment can be used for bad and they can be used for good.  We set ourselves up to be pawns in the hands of evil by deadening our powers of discernment.  And it is this truth that brings me to the title of this essay.

It is a dizzying fact that with more access to knowledge than ever before we are making stunningly stupid mistakes.  And it is this truth that I take as rather poignant evidence that moral progress is coming to an end. 

The decline of moral progress is easily missed because we have allowed for equality to be the sole measure of moral progress.  Equality by itself, though, is simply not a measure of excellence.  After all, we can all be equally moral scoundrels.   Needless to say, nothing can be more incongruous than a bunch of moral scoundrels all patting themselves on the back because there is equality among them. 

Virtuous equality requires courage and marvelous powers of discernment along with an unshakable resolve to do what is right.  of the past and vows never to make mistakes like that again.  This is the stuff that made for moral progress.  It is utterly foolish to think that once in place moral progress is sustainable by a conception of equality that undermines the very gifts of human excellence that made moral progress possible in the first place.  Not happening.