There is a plurality of work dealing with the concept of moral progress, but from among these texts we can isolate two main camps. On the one hand, you have teleological conceptions of progress. Moral progress, these thinkers, involves transformations in social practices that move us closer to some defined end. On the other hand, you have pragmatic conceptions of progress, which see moral progress as movement away from problems into an open-ended future, not constrained by definite ends.
My paper seeks to bring Confucius into the scholarly debate, in order to complicate the narrative of progress. Specifically, this paper posits that Confucius’ relationship to the Zhou dynasty provides a model for thinking about progress that is not cleanly captured by either the teleological or the pragmatic models of moral progress.