Moral Progress as Liberal Hegemony

1 Introduction

One might be tempted to derive a standard of moral progress from a theory of the good.^[1] A theory of the good tells us where we want to go, morally speaking, and we make progress whenever reality comes closer to that standard. What is better simply follows from what is best. Yet the idea of a singular ‘best’ outcome is difficult to square with the remarkable plurality of human societies. It also comes with some nasty baggage: historically, the discourse of progress has frequently been used to disparage and coerce societies perceived as backward. We might therefore opt to abandon the idea of progress altogether. But slavery, child labor, inter-ethnic violence, extreme gender inequality, racial hierarchies, and anti-gay hatred, among many other moral failures, persist globally. If improvements on all these fronts are moral imperatives, then we seem to need a way of characterizing what such improvements would look like, i.e., a notion of progress. How can we make substantive judgments about progress while, at the same time, avoiding the trap of intercultural arrogance?

Jaeggi argues in Progress and Regression that we can fulfill both of these objectives. Her stimulating proposal is to model progress in ‘processual’ terms. We make progress when we achieve change in a particular way – one that involves ‘learning’ and ‘problem-solving’ – rather than by “arriving at a specific, pre-determinable good” (15).^[2] As Jaeggi sees it, the advantage of this approach is that, by abandoning outcomes for process, it allows us to accommodate the “multiplicity” of forms that progress may take (16). Different societies confront a variety of different “problems,” and these problems themselves admit of a variety of different “solutions” (9). As she puts it, her approach aims “between teleology and contingency” (15). Thus, she argues that a processual account liberates us from holding up all societal trajectories against a singular ideal. On the other, she argues that her processual standard still provides “immanent criteria that transcend local contexts” (17).

Below, I raise some doubts about whether Jaeggi’s processual proposal can support substantive judgments of progress without privileging liberal values and outcomes over their alternatives. To privilege those values is perhaps not to become a hegemon in the strongest sense, but it does nudge us uncomfortably in that direction. In this respect, I suggest, a comparison with a near cousin of Jaeggi’s approach – that of John Dewey – is informative. Dewey’s view also centers on a pluralistic model of ‘problems’ that yield diverse, context-sensitive improvements. Indeed, Jaeggi herself openly aligns herself with Dewey. But Dewey’s view also depends on an open embrace of core liberal principles that seem to entail invidious cross-cultural judgments. Jaeggi thinks that she can avoid this prospect, but the comparison with Dewey presents a number of reasons to doubt this. On a speculative note, I conclude that the notion of progress itself, as a normative ideal, seems inextricably linked to certain core liberal commitments. In that respect the idea of progress may involve liberal hegemony by nature, in at least a weak sense of the idea.

2 Worries About Jaeggi’s Processual Standard

Jaeggi sees progress as a “non-teleological … process of ‘growth or enrichment’” (117). It is non-teleological in the sense that it “does not consist in arriving at a specific pre-determined state or in realizing a specific pre-determinable good. Progress is instead a mode, a way in which change occurs – or fails to occur, in the event of regression” (15). It is in this latter respect that progress is “processual” rather than teleological or “substantive.” This distinctive process is one of “ … self-enriching experiential learning. By contrast a change will count as regressive when it is characterized by a failure to learn and a reactive insulation against experience” (33). But because different societies confront different challenges, different forms of learning will be appropriate, and will yield different outcomes (16). Hence progress will be a contextually sensitive standard.

Jaeggi worries, however, that a purely local standard cannot do justice to the moral weight of our progress judgments. If progress judgments are valid “only within a particular [local] framework” then they become inert. “Politically, it not only leaves us toothless, but also deprives us of the ability to provide explanation and critical analysis …” (124) Jaeggi is therefore concerned to show that her processual standard provides criteria that “transcend context” (16) and that yield substantive verdicts where they should. As examples, Jaeggi cites cases such as the end of chattel slavery in the U.S., the defeat of Nazism, and the end of legal intra-marital violence (32). Jaeggi thinks, not only that her theory will yield a clear verdict in these cases but that these verdicts will have a universal quality, that is, that they will hold independently of any ‘localized’ moral assumptions. And, of course, the theory needs to yield the right verdict, that is, the verdict which is consistent with what we (and by ‘we’ I mean the primary audience for Jaeggi’s book and this journal) antecedently believe about such cases. Put more simply: if the theory doesn’t yield a definitive ‘regression’ verdict on the Nazis, then it is implausible on its face.

Clearly much depends on how to understand the process of ‘self-enriching experiential learning.’ In ordinary epistemic settings, the concept of learning is closely tied to an independent standard of truth. Conventionally speaking, to learn biology is to acquire beliefs that scientists judge to be true according to the best evidential standards. Likewise, to choose a moral case, the 20th Century expansion of women’s rights does on its face appear to be a learning process. But that intuition rides on the pre-existing conviction that women are morally entitled to the rights they received. The worry for Jaeggi, however, is that this conviction is in fact a partial description of a process-independent moral standard of truth or validity. Most naturally: we ‘learn’ about women’s rights in the sense that our beliefs better track the moral truth that women deserve rights. If we abandon our independent standard of moral validity, then we cannot specify which processes are genuinely learning processes and which are not. But that undermines the central idea behind Jaeggi’s processual approach. Outcomes rather than process become the primary theoretical mover.

Throughout the book, Jaeggi’s moral compass points explicitly leftward, and she aims to provide an account of progress and regression which casts right-wing movements as pathologies of a certain sort. In the terms of her theory, they represent clear failures to learn, sustained only by “blockages” of experience (32) and an “avoidance of reality” (151). Trumpists in the U.S. and AfD supporters in Germany, for example, would argue that mass immigration has been a failed experiment that has eroded social unity and increased exploitation. From their point of view, a mass crackdown on immigrants, and a much more restrictive immigration policy, reflects the lessons of recent history. An anti-immigrant stance, from their point of view, is learning based on experience. Like Jaeggi, I think they are dangerously wrong about all this, and that their worldview represents a kind of unlearning rather than learning. However, if asked, I would explain my judgment of unlearning in terms of what I regard as the moral and factual wrongness of right-wing views about immigration. These moral and factual views are not linked, exactly, to a clearly articulated ideal of the perfect society. But they are judgments of substantive outcomes in a clear sense, and therefore the judgment of a learning failure is linked to process-independent moral views about the social order.

In explaining the idea of self-enriching experiential learning, Jaeggi suggests – appealing to Hegel – that “enrichment” occurs when “ … [T]he experiential process is guided by an expanded understanding of the situation and the self, as well as by a correction of self-deceptions and biases. In a sense, the situation is redefined and overcome with reference to a more comprehensive situation in which it is embedded, or with reference to shortcomings in the previous description” (132). As I read Jaeggi, the idea is that we come to appreciate how a particular social problem fits into a wider range of norms, practices, and ideas. That expanded appreciation allows us to reframe an individual concern so that we can address the underlying problem. In the case of same-sex marriage, for example, the expansion of marital rights to same-sex couples is guided by an expansion of the marital ideal to encompass non-reproductive goods and, at the same time, an abandonment of rigid gender roles (46–7).

Again, however, the challenge is to secure a story of progress in purely processual terms. Jaeggi describes cases like same-sex marriage as ‘problems’ to which we respond through an “expanded understanding” and a “correction of self-deceptions and biases.” We search for “shortcomings in the previous description” (132). Conventionally, one would say that we correct our self-deceptions and biases when we come to a more accurate picture of things, one that better corresponds to reality. If we abandon the idea of an independent standard of reality, then it is hard to see how to differentiate deceptions from non-deceptions, biases from non-biases, descriptive shortcomings from descriptive adequacy. Likewise, a worldview can be expanded through either new falsehoods or new truths. An understanding is only ‘expanded’ in a desirable sense if it is both larger and more accurate. Here, again, the idea of a process-independent standard of reality creeps in.

What about ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’? Aligning herself with Deweyans like Philip Kitcher, Jaeggi suggests that progress involves finding ‘solutions’ which are responsive to ‘problems.’ But how are we to differentiate the problems of the oppressed from the problems of their oppressors? Certainly, for the MAGA movement, immigration is a problem and, from that point of view, strong immigration restrictions are a plausible solution. Jaeggi argues that right-wing movements are premised on a denial of ‘reality’ which results in “blockages to experience” (135). On her view, right-wing authoritarians deny reality by clinging to the idea of “natural” gender relations in the face of changing “gender norms and family structures” (161). Whereas “it is obvious that the ‘good old family’ and traditional order of the sexes cease to be the default position once they have been stripped of their aura of naturalness” (162).

Wading into the particulars of Jaeggi’s analysis on this would go beyond the scope of this commentary. But I do want to register the challenge for her approach. Her suggestion seems to be that solutions to problems are inadequate if they fail to come to terms with ‘reality’ – a suppression of facts or a denial (‘blockage’) of experience. If we accept that the ‘unnaturalness’ of gender is ‘reality,’ then Jaeggi’s diagnosis may go through in this sort of case.^[3] Yet I doubt that this is enough to differentiate progress from regression. And that is because, as Jaeggi herself is aware, even when we have come to terms with reality, there are many different ways of functionally adapting to it. The question then hinges, not just on what is real, but on what kind of reality we should want. One can accept that there is no natural set of gender norms while, at the same time, believing that it is better to live in a society defined by traditional gender roles. Likewise, to reject gender traditionalism is to think that, even if gender is natural in some sense, that it would be good to live according to some non-natural alternative conception. And the reason for this has something to do with the rights we ascribe to people and the wider set of social values we endorse. These beliefs about rights and values may not bring us all the way to a singular, fully specified ideal. But they do pull us, again, toward substantive normative claims that are process independent.

One can also accept Jaeggi’s premise that the nation-state is a social construct while, at the same time, believing that relatively narrow cultural and historical links are essential to preserving national stability and cohesion (Hazony 2018). To think that this ideal is regressive is not only to deny that history and ethnicity are essential in this respect, but also to note that their importance is a contingent function of people’s beliefs about their significance. Cultural cosmopolitans argue that a good society is organized around a more expansive global identity, one in which local attachments persist but in which, nonetheless, people also understand themselves as members of a large and diverse human community. Thus they actively enjoy and learn from encounters with cultural difference (Appiah 1997). They argue that if people saw themselves in this respect societies would be capable of stability even under conditions of multiculturalism and – crucially – they argue that people ought to see themselves in this way. Yet, once again, that claim recruits an aspiration to a particular set of process-independent normative convictions.

My concern, then, is that the processual criteria that Jaeggi offers cannot successfully distinguish progress from regression except by implicitly taking on a wider set of process-independent normative standards. And although those standards may not require a fully specified moral ideal, they are nonetheless substantive. Jaeggi can still rightly point out that the processual elements of her theory – the focus on learning and self-enrichment – may distinguish it from other stories of progress which, perhaps, merely involve moving to some or other pre-determined ideal. But if her account implicitly rests on some process-independent standard, then it will ultimately struggle to avoid invidious cultural comparisons. I develop this point through the remainder of the paper.

3 The Deweyan Alternative

I turn now to sketching a Deweyan conception of progress, one that I have defended in much more detail elsewhere (Fuerstein 2021, 2024). For present purposes, I describe only enough of the Deweyan account to draw out a few important comparisons. The view I sketch has much in common with Jaeggi’s and, as noted, Jaeggi nods sympathetically to Dewey throughout the book. Yet, unlike Jaeggi, Dewey’s approach frames progress, not in terms of process, but in terms of a particular kind of outcome: improvement in reflective satisfaction with the social order. I suggest that Dewey’s approach better supports the kinds of moral verdicts that Jaeggi and her audience take for granted. Yet it also pushes us closer to the kinds of uncomfortable cross-cultural judgments that Jaeggi seems keen to avoid. Thus, the contrast with Dewey brings out some important trade-offs that liberals confront in constructing a theory of progress.

The centerpiece of Deweyan philosophy is experience, which is both the epistemological basis for learning and, at the same time, the yardstick for how our lives are going. In social life, the Deweyan picture is as follows: societies are collections of individuals with diverse sets of ends or ‘values,’ which he understands as a particular species of reflective desire (Dewey 1988; 2002). To value something involves forming an ‘end-in-view,’ an aim that we endorse on the expectation that, if achieved, will remedy “some need, lack, or privation to be made good” (Dewey 1988, 221). The desire for such aims are embedded in habitual, and often unreflective, modes of behavior (Dewey 2002, 13–88). As technological, environmental, and cultural circumstances evolve, these habitual modes of behavior inevitably create significant frustration for some. Dewey uses different phrases to capture this idea but the key idea is that we experience “something the matter” with the status quo (Dewey 1938, 141), a condition of “need, deficit, conflict” (Dewey 1988, 231). When that happens, the conditions causing dissatisfaction rise to the level of conscious articulation and examination – “deliberation” (Dewey 2002, 189–96) – and there is now a “problem” which creates the need for change in our objectives (Dewey 1954).

Inquiry involves pursuing hypotheses about how to reorder our ends so as to improve experience: “The ‘value’ of different ends that suggest themselves is estimated or measured by the capacity they exhibit to guide action in making good, satisfying, in its literal sense, existing lacks.” (Dewey 1988, 232) Social progress thus involves practical interventions that significantly engender greater satisfaction with the social order given certain conditions that properly inform our experience: thoughtful deliberation (Dewey 2002), good information, and a sympathetic identification with others (Dewey 1954, 143–9; Dewey and Tufts 2008, 345–50). The result is what Dewey sometimes calls “growth” (Dewey 1997) or “meaning”: a reflective and informed contentment with new practices, a “fulfilment conditioned upon thought” (Dewey 2002, 210). I’ll call this deep satisfaction.

This brief sketch – and, again, it really is just a sketch – immediately displays a couple of features that are central to Jaeggi’s own approach: First, progress is a matter of addressing diverse impediments to deep satisfaction as they arise, not approaching some determinate ideal endpoint. So the Deweyan approach is not teleological in that sense. Second, different societies confront different sets of problems, or impediments to deep satisfaction, depending on their own particular, evolving social circumstances. Therefore, progress will take diverse forms across the spectrum of human societies. In addition, frustrations can be resolved in a variety of different ways. Thus, even within the confines of a particular society, there are typically a variety of potential paths available which might constitute a solution. So progress is socially contingent and pluralistic.

We can use one of Jaeggi’s core cases – women’s rights in the 20th century – to illustrate how the Deweyan model works.^[4] Broadly, the story goes like this: In many societies, urbanization, technological, and economic changes create more opportunity for women to enter the workplace and, at the same time, to form and pursue more individualistic professional and personal lives. These changes, in turn, generate a dissatisfaction with the status quo which, in turn, arouses expanding social deliberation about how women’s desires fit within a broader scheme of social ideals: equality, justice, fairness. Social movements provide a new conceptual repertoire for women’s understanding of what is needed for their own flourishing, and a set of moral justifications for their demands. A cycle builds in which women’s desire for greater autonomy and equality develops in tandem with a process of informed social reflection on the validity of those desires, and innovations in moral discourse. A deepening and widening sense of frustration gives rise to a movement that pushes for change, both in social institutions, and in the desires and behavior of men. These changes are reflectively endorsed on the basis of deliberation and experience (‘thought-conditioned fulfillment’), durably reducing some of women’s frustrations with the social order. Progress – partial and imperfect – is thereby achieved.

As new circumstances evolve, new frustrations arise and are subject to further deliberation and reflection in relation to wider moral ideals. This leads to the need for progress once again. In different societies, the particularities of gender relations will occasion the need for a plurality of approaches. And even within one society, competing paths to progress sometimes emerge. Thus there is no singular ideal of gender equality which defines an endpoint. We make progress, we confront new problems, and we keep going.

The Deweyan picture also resists the idea of a singular endpoint in a second sense. As a subjective state, deep satisfaction is not something that simply happens to us as a matter of psychological contingency. Rather, how we experience our own lives is dependent, in part, on what we judge to be worth doing and pursuing. Thus, satisfaction is sensitive to our own normative judgments, and not only the quirks of our biological and psychological nature. Consequently, progress and regression are themselves contingent on the variable judgments of people about what it is good to do and what it is worthwhile to be. And these judgments, in turn, are sensitive to people’s lived experience of acting on the norms that they judge to be worthwhile. Desires, experience, and normative judgments thus dynamically co-evolve through mutual interaction. Different communities, with different starting points in their desires, experience, and living conditions, are likely to make different judgments about what is most worthwhile.

From this point of view, the problem with the right-wing insistence on traditional gender norms is not simply that it causes deep frustration among people who identify with non-traditional gender categories, or that new gender categories are ‘here to stay.’ It is that these non-traditional categories reflect autonomous judgments of value that are integrated into a wider conception of the good life. The Deweyan conception of progress thus embraces the idea, not only that progress is contingent on our psychology, but that it is contingent on our moral agency.

Much of this converges with Jaeggi’s account. However, progress for Dewey is about the achievement of a particular kind of outcome, namely, one in which the subjectivity of deep satisfaction is improved. The process by which deep satisfaction improves is important, but primarily because it is instrumental to the durability of deep satisfaction across diverse social groups. Dewey therefore sees both science and democracy as essential instruments of progress. Democracy is essential because progress involves attending to the desires and frustrations of everyone considered as equals. Democracy, on Dewey’s view, is the only social technology that enables us to refine our desires and practices in a way that is fairly responsive to the concerns of all (Dewey 1954; Dewey and Tufts 2008, 347–50). And science, on Dewey’s view, is crucial because it enables rigorous learning from experience (Dewey 2008, 53–5). Thus, the process of change is extremely important in this picture, but only because it is instrumental to the outcomes which ultimately define progress rather than because it defines it.

This brief account reveals how the Deweyan thinks about the regressive character of far-right movements. Here are a few examples. For the Deweyan, the problem with the wholesale suppression of transgender identity can be put in straightforward terms: that suppression does not successfully address the frustration felt by people who feel alienated by traditional gender categories and who reflectively judge gender identity to be an important aspect of their lives. The problem with rejecting same-sex marriage is that it does not respond to the deep frustration felt by many homosexuals excluded from a practically and culturally important institution, a judgment that, again, emerges within a wider set of normative deliberations about what is fair, meaningful, and dignified. The problem with ethno-nationalist movements is that they reflect historical ignorance about nation-states, factual ignorance about the effects of immigration (Lutz and Bitschnau 2023), and a lack of sympathetic attunement to the reflective desires of a large portion of society.

But what about the frustrations of white nationalists who feel threatened by non-white immigrants, or religious conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage? Here, the Deweyan makes an open appeal to egalitarian ‘community.’ Deweyan communities are groups in which ‘genuine conversation’ and mutual sympathy enable diverse members to refine their own ends in light of what matters to others around them, and thereby to sustain joint action in pursuit of mutually beneficial goals (Dewey and Tufts 2008, 344–6; Dewey 1954, 147–52). The Deweyan analysis suggests that the extreme proposals of white nationalists cannot be sustained under this kind of reciprocal engagement. Nor, it suggests, can they be sustained without appealing to falsehoods about the effects of immigrants on crime and such. The Deweyan hypothesis is that under democratic conditions of community and a reasonably hygienic epistemology, strongly ethnocentric or gender-hierarchical social ideologies could not be sustained. Put more simply, the Deweyan argues that hard-right ideologies are regressive because they are not compatible with the flourishing of all. If leftist alternatives promote progress then it will be because they do tend to promote the flourishing – ‘deep satisfaction’ – of all.

Such ambitious talk of ‘community’ and ‘the flourishing of all’ easily invites the criticism that Dewey cannot accommodate the fundamental pluralism of modern societies (Talisse 2011, 2019). Given space constraints, I can only direct readers to work I have done elsewhere on this issue (Fuerstein 2024). However, skeptical readers can easily substitute in a less ambitious model of egalitarian concern (e.g., a Rawlsian model of reciprocity would do) if preferred. The important point, so far as the comparison with Jaeggi goes, is only that Dewey’s notion of progress depends on an appeal to a substantive value of equality, and a particular egalitarian conception of what an improved social outcome is going to look like. The particulars of his egalitarianism are not essential.

Though Jaeggi’s view is clearly distinct from the view sketched above, I find myself unsure about just how much of it she wants to reject. The Deweyan approach does suggest some plausible ways of interpreting the central ideas in Jaeggi’s processual model. Jaeggi speaks consistently of ‘problems’ and, for Dewey, a ‘problem’ arises when there is a significant and durable frustration that persists among some significant portion of society. Jaeggi’s core notion of ‘enrichment’ can be interpreted in terms of deep satisfaction: it involves improvements in people’s reflective satisfaction with their lives under conditions of egalitarian, sympathetic, and informed engagement with others. Jaeggi’s ‘blockage to experience’ constitutes a norm or behavior that systematically denies or undermines the expression of a socially significant frustration. Finally, as noted, the Deweyan approach encompasses the multiplicity and social contingency of progress.

And yet the Deweyan conception also recommends, as I have noted, a particular kind of goal or outcome that constitutes progress: improvements in deep satisfaction. The precise effect on experience will vary across societies, but that experiential standard will be the same. Improvements in experience, of a particular sort, thus provides a certain kind of universal yardstick. Is this a ‘substantive’ conception of an ‘endpoint,’ such that the Deweyan picture is teleological? Is it objectionably so?

If Jaeggi’s view is meant to capture the idea of progress in purely processual terms, then I think that she needs to reject the Deweyan standard. For, not only does it recommend a particular kind of social improvement in its definition of progress, it also openly appeals to substantive liberal values: equality, freedom, democracy, scientific epistemology. This package of values may have procedural elements, but I do not think that it can be rendered entirely in terms of process. The moral judgments that Jaeggi takes for granted – on gay rights, racial and gender equality, transgender rights, right-wing authoritarianism – suggest that she herself may adopt these values as baseline assumptions for her theory. If that’s the case, though, then her analysis of such cases goes beyond processual conditions alone.

This brings us back to Jaeggi’s motivations for the processual approach. Her core concern is to avoid hegemonic progress narratives, which cast ‘Western’ societies as superior, and others as morally backward or stuck. Is the Deweyan conception of progress hegemonic in that sense? Is any open appeal to outcomes or liberal values hegemonic? I turn now to consider Jaeggi’s worries about Western hegemony and the prospects of dodging them.

4 Liberalism and Weak Hegemony

Jaeggi’s examples of progress are set almost entirely within Western liberal societies: the expansion of women’s rights, innovations in gender identity, and same-sex marriage, for example. In passing, she does mention the recent women’s uprising in Iran (124), but does not offer any discussion of the case. And her core examples of regression likewise involve far-right movements in Western societies. It is therefore interesting to consider how she would handle cases from other societies with, broadly speaking, more illiberal values.

Consider gender equality in gender-traditionalist societies like Pakistan or Nigeria. Across a number of conventional measures – such as female mortality, education, political representation, and labor force participation – both of these societies lag significantly behind the countries typically thought of as paradigmatically ‘Western’ (United Nations Development Programme 2025). Jaeggi never offers a precise definition but, conventionally, I take it that ‘the West’ encompasses at least the European democracies, along with Canada, the United States, and Australia.^[5] Is gender hierarchy regressive in Nigeria and Pakistan in the same way that it is in the West? Given that these societies are, by conventional aggregate measures, doing worse with respect to gender equality, are we justified in saying that they are, therefore, more regressive? If we do judge that they are more regressive, does that judgment land in the box of ‘Western hegemony’?

On the subject of hegemony, it seems that Jaeggi’s principal concern is to avoid the implication that progress is unique to Western societies, who therefore stand on a unique moral high ground:

…[A] theory of crisis-driven social change as an experiential learning process breaks with a Eurocentric-paternalist narrative of development. To be sure, it still implies a normative direction: things will change not only within a given sequence of transformative processes, but also for the better (or the worse, if society regresses). This does not imply, however, that we are dealing with a single, all-encompassing world-historical process with pioneers and stragglers, vanguard parties and left-behinds. In short, the fact that we can diachronically diagnose progressive or regressive processes in terms of such a problem-solving dynamic (for example, modern Europe’s regression into fascism) does not automatically mean that these would be synchronically comparable. Progress is thereby pluralized. (16)

But what is it, exactly, that blocks synchronic comparisons? Let’s grant that colonialism, imperialism, and cultural arrogance are all significant moral wrongs. And let’s grant that, historically, the West has been prone to all of these things, and that this has often had catastrophic consequences. Let’s grant that judgments about progress, affirmative or negative, do not in themselves justify coercion. But now, having granted all these points, when confronted with conventional measures of gender inequality, what is it that blocks synchronic comparisons of Pakistan with, say, Sweden?

I would say that the Deweyan model gives pretty clear verdicts in response to a Sweden-Pakistan comparison. Societies with systematic gender hierarchies are morally regressive, because they are not responsive to deep frustrations of women that would forcefully emerge under conditions of free, reflective, and egalitarian engagement. The Deweyan theory does not imply that there is some singular moral destiny that gender-hierarchical societies are falling short of. It allows for pluralism, and it allows for a sensitivity to cultural particularities. Cultural norms that represent women as inherently servile, property of their husbands, or legitimate targets of violence will never be compatible with the Deweyan ideal. Yet different cultures will arrive at varying conceptions of the division of family labor, of norms of femininity, of professional ambition, and of economic autonomy, and that suggests that progress will always vary meaningfully across societies.

At the same time, the Deweyan model presents a standard which seems to support synchronic cross-cultural comparisons, and – if conventional international indices are any measure – those comparisons will tend to favor the West (United Nations Development Programme 2025; World Economic Forum 2025). I note that on the United Nations Gender Inequality Index (United Nations Development Programme 2025), for instance, only one of the top 10, and four of the top 20 ranked countries are outside the West as conventionally understood.⁷

Of course, so much of the history of the West is itself an unmitigated moral disaster by liberal standards. So any cross-cross cultural comparisons would require ample helpings of qualification, humility, and context. Nothing licenses the sort of “smugly congratulatory Whig history of Western imperialist societies” targeted by Jaeggi (xii). And nothing licenses colonialism. Still, once all the caveats and humble disclaimers have been laid down, the synchronic cultural comparisons remain, and they will favor some societies over others. And again the West will be disproportionately represented. It is in this respect that the liberal discourse of progress seems to involve a kind of Western hegemony. This is hegemony without the violence, delusions, and theft. But it seems to be a form of hegemony nonetheless. Might we call this ‘weak hegemony’?

What about Jaeggi’s theory? If we ask whether Nigerian society is suffering from blockages of experience that inhibit a self-enriching learning process, the Jaeggian answer could conceivably be ‘no.’ Let’s just concede this as a possibility for the sake of discussion. In that case, Jaeggi’s theory would steer well clear of Western hegemony, but would also cut strongly against basic liberal intuitions about gender equality. Alternatively, the answer might be ‘yes.’ Here I think the analysis would probably run in a roughly parallel way to Jaeggi’s commentary on right-wing gender traditionalism in the West. In that case, we preserve conventional liberal intuitions about gender hierarchy, but we also move towards weak hegemony. For if Nigerian gender-traditionalism is a form of regression, then it’s only one step further to the comparative judgment that Nigeria is more regressive on gender than most (all?) Western countries. And from there we can start doing synchronic cultural comparisons on any number of other issues.

I’m somewhat unclear about whether, and in what sense exactly, Jaeggi sees her theory as a way out of these kinds of invidious cultural comparisons. One thought could be that, though the processual approach still allows for such comparisons, they are anchored in process rather than the prescription of one particular outcome. But it’s not clear why that difference alone would allay worries about hegemony. Another possibility is that, though the theory allows for invidious comparisons with respect to individual issues – such as gender equality – it nonetheless blocks totalizing, across-the-board comparisons. And perhaps it is, indeed, more difficult to commensurate judgments of process across disparate areas of life into one unified ‘score.’ Perhaps, for Jaeggi, this is the key worry about hegemony: not that Westerners might make individual comparisons on individual issues, but instead that they might be tempted to see their societies as in some general way more advanced. And perhaps we should indeed resist that temptation. But if we can produce synchronic rankings on large collections of individual issues then, whether or not we can generate a unified ‘progress score,’ the invidious implications are clear enough.

But here’s the bigger picture. Earlier I raised the worry that a purely processual approach does not give us enough to offer clear verdicts on the kinds of core examples from the West that Jaeggi discusses. And if it does not give clear verdicts on those cases, then it is also not going to give clear verdicts on non-Western cases. I suggested, by contrast, that a Deweyan approach offers us greater resources to issue clear verdicts in these cases, but only by openly tethering itself to a package of liberal values. This does raise a further sort of dilemma for the theory, and perhaps for theories of progress in general. It suggests that, in order to render clear and plausible verdicts on core cases like gender equality, it needs to take on board some substantive liberal conception of morally good outcomes. But once a theory does that, it becomes weakly hegemonic. In other words, any theory strong enough to render clear and plausible verdicts on progress within a given society is also too strong to avoid invidious cross-cultural comparisons. Perhaps there is something about the very notion of progress itself which is, by natural, liberal? Is a certain measure of liberal hegemony inherent to the discourse of moral advancement? I conclude by considering these questions.

5 Is Progress by Nature a Liberal Ideal?

Perhaps even a highly tradition-bound, conservative social order can offer its own conception of progress. Here’s the idea: a certain set of traditions describes what is morally best, and failures of tradition are regressions. Improved conformity with tradition is progress. Such societies might allow for the importance of change, but only as a way of continually reducing deviations from an unchanging ideal of traditional practice.

From Jaeggi’s point of view, this sort of suggestion appears untenable. But why, exactly? Her answer seems to be in the same spirit as Dewey’s: the social world is dynamic and complicated, and continues to present new obstacles to us. These are ‘problems’ which require learning, thus generating improvements, i.e., progress. And so there can be no fixed, morally adequate fund of traditions for the same general reason that there can be no fixed moral ideal in general.

In response the conservative may try to resist the premise that the social world is inherently dynamic and complicated. Perhaps continual change is not inevitable and, indeed, perhaps a strong sense of shared tradition is a key factor that enables people to flourish given a more or less static set of social ideals. The conservative proposes here that, at least under the right conditions, change can be contained enough such that a fixed package of traditions remains morally best. But that suggestion struggles with the kinds of cases that Jaeggi focuses on in her book, namely, those in which the social order seems to be failing badly for some meaningful portion of the population. These are the usual kinds of cases involving the systemic mistreatment of some meaningful portion of the population – women, racial minorities, etc. – and where the source of the mistreatment is some set of practices codified in tradition itself.

Here, the conservative seems to be forced into at least one of two options: Option one is to reject moral egalitarianism and argue that the apparent failure of the social order for some groups does not entail the need for change because the concerns of those groups just do not matter. Historically, this was perhaps the preferred option, though relatively few are willing to openly assert it now. Option two is to insist, against the assertions of the aggrieved groups, that the solution to the problem is not radical change but, instead, a deepening of the very traditions perceived to be the source of the problem in the first place. This second approach does not reject moral equality directly. Instead, it rejects the authority of the aggrieved group’s judgments about what they need to flourish. In the face of deep and sincere misery, the idea is, in effect, that the aggrieved group must find a way to adapt itself to the authority of existing social norms, rather than the other way around.

There is more to the story, but this does bring us forward, I think, in understanding the relationship between liberalism and the moral importance of progress. Liberals assert the fundamental priority of moral equality and moral autonomy. They are egalitarians in the usual sense that they insist on the equal moral worth of everyone and, therefore, that everyone’s interest should be weighted equally in the justification of the social order. And they endorse moral autonomy in sense that they insist on the moral priority of individuals’ own considered judgments about how their lives are going. On this view, when people experience the social order as deeply hostile to their own flourishing then, barring reason to think that they are deluded, that is a prima facie reason to see the social order as unjustified. Whereas conservatives insist that aggrieved groups should adapt their experience to norms fixed by tradition (or some other, external source of authority), liberals generally insist that the social order should adapt itself to the (reasonable) judgments of aggrieved groups, based on their own experience.

The combination of egalitarianism and moral autonomy gets you pretty far in supporting conventional liberal judgments about oppression and, likewise, in defending the link between liberalism and democracy. Liberalism may not, on its own, provide a full justification for democracy. But if morality requires taking seriously people’s own sense of how the social order affects their ability to flourish, then that favors a social architecture that operationalizes voice in an egalitarian way. Likewise, strong protections for individual freedom effectively ensure that there is scope for people to live in accord with what they themselves can see as good. The combination of moral autonomy plus egalitarianism also makes it extremely difficult to sustain a tradition-based social order so long as, inevitably, the conflicting interests and desires of different groups will make some deeply miserable with the status quo. This tendency arises as a consequence of the inevitability of structural changes in social life that make such conflicts salient in new and shifting ways. Because norms are calibrated to a particular context of the normal, changes in the latter tend to introduce dissatisfaction with the former.

Again, the women’s movement provides a clear illustration of this point. And, again, for the details, I can only gesture towards work I have done elsewhere (Fuerstein 2024). But, at a general level, the important point is that women’s mounting frustration in the 20th century with status quo gender norms arose in part as a response to structural changes: urbanization, wartime economic constraints (particularly the dearth of men), and the rise of the white-collar economy, among many other factors. These factors enabled women to exercise new forms of social and professional autonomy and, in doing so, made possible new forms of frustration with the gendered division of labor. The need for women’s liberation was thus not only a function of a changing consciousness, but of changes in the world that made longstanding constraints oppressive in a new way.

As I’ve noted, I offer these arguments in a speculative spirit. But if I am right that dissatisfaction with the social order is a consequence of inevitable forms of structural social change, then that would suggest that the moral priority of progress follows closely from the view that people’s subjective experience of the social order is a crucial determinant of its moral adequacy. It is also in this respect that the ideal of progress seems to be linked to at least a modestly teleological liberal approach. If equality and autonomy are fundamental, then progress centers on the (pluralistic) advancement of those goals.

As I have noted, Jaeggi’s moral intuitions map broadly onto liberalism. But she hopes, at the same time, to avoid hegemonic judgments that entail the moral superiority of the West. Her solution to that is to focus on the process of progress rather than substantive values or outcomes. My most recent observations about liberalism suggest some reasons why this project is difficult to carry out. The value that Jaeggi places on progress is, I have suggested, implicitly linked to ideas about the priority of equality and autonomy that are fundamentally incompatible, not only with the social hierarchies that are prevalent in many non-liberal societies, but also with the sort of normative priority that so many non-liberal societies place on tradition itself. The result may not be ‘Western hegemony’ in its fullest sense, but uncomfortable comparisons seem impossible to avoid.