Singh’s model of super-attractors, grounded in “subjective selection” as the unifying principle of cultural convergence, is persuasive in explaining why practices and beliefs stabilize through their perceived psychological utility. Yet some of the most consequential cultural achievements in human history emerged not from stabilization, but from disruption. Cultural evolution is not only a story of attractors, but it is also a story of breakthroughs. These shifts appear difficult to reduce to subjective utility alone.
It remains unclear how Singh’s framework can account for instances of genuine moral progress: the transition from irrational to rational beliefs, from retributive to consequentialist models of justice, or from common-sense intuitions to counterintuitive scientific commitments. If culture is conceived primarily as a technology of subjective satisfaction, we risk overlooking the processes that enable not only the preservation but also the emancipatory transformation of norms and convictions.
Many salient instances of moral progress involve the expansion of moral status – namely, the inclusion and protection of subjects previously excluded from full membership in the moral and political community. Historical examples include formerly enslaved people, marginalized racial groups, women, sexual minorities, children, and individuals with disabilities, with recent debates extending to non-human animals and potentially future artificial agents. Broader commitments to equality, personal autonomy, and democratic rule likewise reflect this expansion (Bina, Reference Bina2024).
Moral progress is undeniably a specific and theoretically demanding concept and phenomenon, whose genealogical and descriptive articulation is not straightforward, insofar as it incorporates a significant normative component. Implicit in moral progress is, on one hand, a dimension of subjective selection: individuals or groups excluded from the benefits granted to those enjoying the most advantageous social conditions aim to obtain such benefits and pursue this aim with the means at their disposal. On the other hand, moral progress also contains a dimension of recognition, or “granting,” on the part of those already advantaged, extended toward those who are less advantaged.
This latter aspect of moral progress remains a challenge for many explanatory models. This dynamic underlies core modern institutions such as human rights (e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and is therefore crucial to explain, if we aim to sustain and extend it. On this basis, understanding how what we call moral progress (here, for simplicity, the motivated expansion of the moral circle; Singer, Reference Singer2011) could emerge is also instrumental to its further advancement and preservation.
Empirical work on cooperative cognition (Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2016), dual-process dynamics in moral judgment (Greene, Reference Greene2014), and institutional “ratchet effects” in norm stabilization (Boyd & Richerson, Reference Boyd and Richerson2005) suggests that moral expansion is supported not simply by subjective utility but also by capacities for reflective override, empathic projection beyond parochial boundaries, and the scaffolding effects of legal and cultural institutions. These mechanisms indicate a mixed architecture in which attraction dynamics coexist with counter-attractor forces enabling normative innovation.
One may concede that cognitive aspects play a relevant role, and that therefore, even within the framework of the super-attractors hypothesis, one can account for a shift – one not to be judged for now through the normative lens of values – toward solutions that are more “rational” in the sense of being more effective in achieving our aims. Cognitive factors may fit within Singh’s model: magical thinking can be displaced by empirically grounded reasoning when it yields superior results, although intuitive beliefs continually re-emerge at the individual level.
In this sense, one can plausibly trace a trajectory, compatible with the super-attractors and subjective selection framework, whereby primitive forms of punishment – now considered cruel and unacceptable – are gradually replaced by sanctions oriented toward the rehabilitation of the offender rather than their affliction, because these constitute more efficient solutions in economic and social terms. Yet the cognitive component of moral progress is only one aspect of it. Even in the case of punishment practices, there is a recognition that inflicting suffering on a convicted individual – for example, through torture – is not morally right or acceptable, even if vengeful feelings continue to simmer as an evolutionary remnant (cf. Lavazza et al., Reference Lavazza, Bonicalzi and De Caro2025).
If Singh’s proposal does not claim to be exhaustive, it nonetheless seems reasonable and significant to suggest modifying it so as not to leave moral progress unexplained or forced into categories that deny or diminish a phenomenon so central to human life, even while acknowledging scholarly disagreement concerning how to describe moral progress or even whether it exists.
Morality can be analyzed as a biological-cultural element independently of judgments of praise or blame. However, accounts in terms of functionalist reasoning or secondary adaptation appear insufficient to explain how certain ideas come to be established – ideas that subsequently acquire the status of normative guides, often considered ex post to be self-evident – for our action and for the regulation of societies. In naturalistic terms, a plausible proposal might appeal to environmental conditions that make it less costly and more feasible – also cognitively more accessible – for the empathic and altruistic tendencies we have incorporated through evolution to unfold.
If moral progress hinges on environments that reduce the cost of altruistic commitments and increase opportunities for reflective cognition, then we should observe broader moral circle expansion under conditions of reduced ecological stress, inclusive institutions, and increased exposure to cross-group perspective-taking. In this sense, moral progress may not be an anomaly to be folded into subjective selection, but a systematic counter-dynamic, a “moral innovation engine” triggered when cognition, institutions, and social ecology align in specific ways.
This goes in a direction opposite to that suggested by super-attractors, as if, under certain conditions, the centripetal force of subjective selection were overcome by the centrifugal force of intrinsic individual motivations (Lavazza & Leone, Reference Lavazza and Leone2025) that counter evolutionary pressures understood as the selection of the best available solutions given the environment. In other words, if super-attractors explain cultural stabilization under structural constraints, moral progress marks the operation of counter-attractor dynamics through which emotions and reflective reasoning generate trajectories that break away from purely utility-based equilibria. Future work should model moral progress as systematic normative divergence enabled by cognitive, social, and institutional conditions.
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Singh’s model of super-attractors, grounded in “subjective selection” as the unifying principle of cultural convergence, is persuasive in explaining why practices and beliefs stabilize through their perceived psychological utility. Yet some of the most consequential cultural achievements in human history emerged not from stabilization, but from disruption. Cultural evolution is not only a story of attractors, but it is also a story of breakthroughs. These shifts appear difficult to reduce to subjective utility alone.
It remains unclear how Singh’s framework can account for instances of genuine moral progress: the transition from irrational to rational beliefs, from retributive to consequentialist models of justice, or from common-sense intuitions to counterintuitive scientific commitments. If culture is conceived primarily as a technology of subjective satisfaction, we risk overlooking the processes that enable not only the preservation but also the emancipatory transformation of norms and convictions.
Many salient instances of moral progress involve the expansion of moral status – namely, the inclusion and protection of subjects previously excluded from full membership in the moral and political community. Historical examples include formerly enslaved people, marginalized racial groups, women, sexual minorities, children, and individuals with disabilities, with recent debates extending to non-human animals and potentially future artificial agents. Broader commitments to equality, personal autonomy, and democratic rule likewise reflect this expansion (Bina, Reference Bina2024).
Moral progress is undeniably a specific and theoretically demanding concept and phenomenon, whose genealogical and descriptive articulation is not straightforward, insofar as it incorporates a significant normative component. Implicit in moral progress is, on one hand, a dimension of subjective selection: individuals or groups excluded from the benefits granted to those enjoying the most advantageous social conditions aim to obtain such benefits and pursue this aim with the means at their disposal. On the other hand, moral progress also contains a dimension of recognition, or “granting,” on the part of those already advantaged, extended toward those who are less advantaged.
This latter aspect of moral progress remains a challenge for many explanatory models. This dynamic underlies core modern institutions such as human rights (e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and is therefore crucial to explain, if we aim to sustain and extend it. On this basis, understanding how what we call moral progress (here, for simplicity, the motivated expansion of the moral circle; Singer, Reference Singer2011) could emerge is also instrumental to its further advancement and preservation.
Empirical work on cooperative cognition (Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2016), dual-process dynamics in moral judgment (Greene, Reference Greene2014), and institutional “ratchet effects” in norm stabilization (Boyd & Richerson, Reference Boyd and Richerson2005) suggests that moral expansion is supported not simply by subjective utility but also by capacities for reflective override, empathic projection beyond parochial boundaries, and the scaffolding effects of legal and cultural institutions. These mechanisms indicate a mixed architecture in which attraction dynamics coexist with counter-attractor forces enabling normative innovation.
One may concede that cognitive aspects play a relevant role, and that therefore, even within the framework of the super-attractors hypothesis, one can account for a shift – one not to be judged for now through the normative lens of values – toward solutions that are more “rational” in the sense of being more effective in achieving our aims. Cognitive factors may fit within Singh’s model: magical thinking can be displaced by empirically grounded reasoning when it yields superior results, although intuitive beliefs continually re-emerge at the individual level.
In this sense, one can plausibly trace a trajectory, compatible with the super-attractors and subjective selection framework, whereby primitive forms of punishment – now considered cruel and unacceptable – are gradually replaced by sanctions oriented toward the rehabilitation of the offender rather than their affliction, because these constitute more efficient solutions in economic and social terms. Yet the cognitive component of moral progress is only one aspect of it. Even in the case of punishment practices, there is a recognition that inflicting suffering on a convicted individual – for example, through torture – is not morally right or acceptable, even if vengeful feelings continue to simmer as an evolutionary remnant (cf. Lavazza et al., Reference Lavazza, Bonicalzi and De Caro2025).
If Singh’s proposal does not claim to be exhaustive, it nonetheless seems reasonable and significant to suggest modifying it so as not to leave moral progress unexplained or forced into categories that deny or diminish a phenomenon so central to human life, even while acknowledging scholarly disagreement concerning how to describe moral progress or even whether it exists.
Morality can be analyzed as a biological-cultural element independently of judgments of praise or blame. However, accounts in terms of functionalist reasoning or secondary adaptation appear insufficient to explain how certain ideas come to be established – ideas that subsequently acquire the status of normative guides, often considered ex post to be self-evident – for our action and for the regulation of societies. In naturalistic terms, a plausible proposal might appeal to environmental conditions that make it less costly and more feasible – also cognitively more accessible – for the empathic and altruistic tendencies we have incorporated through evolution to unfold.
If moral progress hinges on environments that reduce the cost of altruistic commitments and increase opportunities for reflective cognition, then we should observe broader moral circle expansion under conditions of reduced ecological stress, inclusive institutions, and increased exposure to cross-group perspective-taking. In this sense, moral progress may not be an anomaly to be folded into subjective selection, but a systematic counter-dynamic, a “moral innovation engine” triggered when cognition, institutions, and social ecology align in specific ways.
This goes in a direction opposite to that suggested by super-attractors, as if, under certain conditions, the centripetal force of subjective selection were overcome by the centrifugal force of intrinsic individual motivations (Lavazza & Leone, Reference Lavazza and Leone2025) that counter evolutionary pressures understood as the selection of the best available solutions given the environment. In other words, if super-attractors explain cultural stabilization under structural constraints, moral progress marks the operation of counter-attractor dynamics through which emotions and reflective reasoning generate trajectories that break away from purely utility-based equilibria. Future work should model moral progress as systematic normative divergence enabled by cognitive, social, and institutional conditions.
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The author declares no competing interests.