On the post-Enlightenment evolution of moral universalism

Michael Jetter, On the post-Enlightenment evolution of moral universalism, The Economic Journal, 2025;, ueaf049, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaf049

Abstract: Is humanity’s circle of moral concern expanding? I explore frequencies of morally universal language in 15m book publications in American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian from 1800-2000. In each language, morally universal terminology diminished markedly. This pattern also emerges in Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew books. I test two prominent hypotheses predicting moral universalism, pertaining to reason and religiosity. Reason-based terminology indeed correlates positively with purely morally universal terminology – but also (and more strongly so) with morally communal terminology. These empirical patterns cast doubt on claims of (i) moral universalism expanding and (ii) reason being its driver.

I wonder. Back in 2012 Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac issued an interesting report through Stanford's Literary Lab: A Quantitative Literary History Of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method. They studied a corpus of roughly 3000 novels and found that word usage shifted from abstract terms to concrete. I suspect that that shift would also appear as a loss of moral universalism but, depending on what actually happened in those novels, that might not actually be the case. (My post on this study.)

Could this sort of thing be going on in Jetter's study as well? I don't know, but note that his study does not seem confined to novels (I've not read the article, only the abstract.)