Abstract

Moral beliefs, values, and attitudes differ across cultures and change over time. This contingency can invite anxiety about endorsing particular values and about the possibility of non-circular claims of moral progress. One way of addressing this anxiety is through vindicatory genealogies of value. This paper develops such a genealogy for the value of ‘Choice’, a value associated with support for gay rights, legal abortion, and the right to divorce, which has been robustly measured by the World Values Survey (WVS) since 1995. I argue that existing vindicatory genealogies, such as Nicholas Smyth’s vindication of emancipative values, suffer from methodological flaws due to problems of measurement invariance in the WVS, the dataset that ostensibly supports them. By contrast, ‘Choice’, as a specific value within the WVS framework, withstands rigorous statistical tests and is a more defensible target for vindication. With ‘Choice’ defended as an apt target for genealogy, I propose a vindicatory mechanism based on Bernard Williams’ genealogy of liberty, which I label the withering of justification. I apply this mechanism to the value of ‘Choice’, offering an empirically precise and normatively compelling vindicatory genealogy, and positioning ‘Choice’ as a key topic for future research in the philosophy of moral progress.