Beyond the Expanding Circle: Towards a Pluralist Account of Moral Progress
Wednesday 29 July 2026
LSE Philosophy PhD student Rafael Ruiz has published his new paper Beyond the Expanding Circle: Towards a Pluralist Account of Moral Progress in the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
In his article, Ruiz criticises the expanding circle theory of moral progress, the view, associated with Peter Singer and others, that moral progress consists primarily in the gradual extension of moral concern to a wider range of beings. While moral inclusion captures an important dimension of progressive moral change, he argues that the expanding circle framework cannot serve as the dominant theory of moral progress, since it is both internally too coarse and externally too narrow.