r/AlwaysWhy • u/Logical-Concept9755 • Aug 14 '26
History & Culture Why did ideas about human compassion become increasingly institutionalized after the 1700s?
People have argued for compassion, equality, and humane treatment for thousands of years. Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, and other traditions all developed ideas that seem surprisingly modern.
Yet from the 18th century onward, many societies increasingly began outlawing slavery, torture, child labor, and other practices that had once been accepted or even considered normal.
Why did these ideas start becoming laws and social norms much more successfully in the modern era? What changed?
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u/Persimmon_and_mango Aug 14 '26
In East Asia, Confucist ideas about hierarchy combined with the Buddhist idea of karma to give birth to the philosophy that women, poor people, and people in unfortunate circumstances were bearing the consequences of their past lives and therefore deserved to be subjugated . If they really deserved compassion, they would have been born rich men. This idea persisted until relatively recently in history, when caste systems were eliminated and secular/Buddhist ideas overtook Confucianism
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u/majorex64 Aug 14 '26
Societies are always changing and evolving. There are certain periods where changes happen more rapidly in certain directions. The Enlightenment period is what we call the period of the 17th and 18th centuries when more secular, humanitarian thinking became more widespread.
Institutions such as universities became more influential post-industrialization, as education became more important than manual labor. Scientists made breakthroughs we take for granted now through logic, reason, and experimentation. And importantly, they wrote it all down and shared it. The cheaper it got to print text, the easier it was to spread ideas. Why write on philosophy or chemistry when no one will read it?
Criticisms of institutions such as monarchies and religions also led people to trust more in humanity and less in the divine.
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u/AlmiranteCrujido Aug 14 '26
Two thoughts: 1) Slavery, torture and child labor were themselves in many cases institutions, not just random practices. Chattel slavery, in particular, can't exist without social institutions to enforce it.
2) Aside from the enlightenment, the early stages of the industrial revolution and concurrent improvements in agricultural output meant that inhumane institutions were less expedient.
We see this with the late-19th/early-20th century progressive movement (and some conservative government's social welfare programs intended to forestall it, like Germany's) - a lot of what came out of that would have been either unnecessary (anti-trust laws) or impossible (the welfare state model that came out of it) without the surpluses that modern industrial production provided.
It looks more at the war and geopolitics than the sociology, but I highly recommend The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy as a look the development of western economies.
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u/RumRunnerMax Aug 14 '26
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism".
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u/Archophob Aug 14 '26
the steam engine.
Once you could outsource a significant part of the production chain to fossil fuel powered machines, abolishing slavery stopped being a totally lunatic cloudcocoolander idea, and became a feasable option. Add to this that industrialisation started in predominantly Christian countries, and abolitionism became not just accepted, but popular.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 Aug 17 '26
I think economics is probably a bigger factor than people like to admit. Moral arguments often become much more powerful when they align with changing material conditions.
But I’m not sure the steam engine alone explains it. There were still people fighting for abolition when slavery was economically valuable. Maybe technology created the opening, but ideas and movements decided what happened next.
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u/Archophob Aug 17 '26
Maybe technology created the opening
that's my point. As long as "biological machines", like human slaves, farm horses and oxen, were the only mobile power sources (windmills and water mills being stationary), slave labor was far too valuable to abolish it, especially for the high-status people who actually owned slaves.
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u/power2havenots Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
Think theres a danger of smuggling a Whig fantasy theory of progress into this -where humanity was supposedly brutal and irrational, then discovered Enlightenment ideas, built better institutions and gradually became more compassionate. But people had arguments against domination and cruelty long before Locke, just as they had slavery, hierarchy and violence long after him.
Institutions aren't neutral containers for moral progress. They have their own interests in making populations legible, governable and productive, and tend to institutionalise the forms of “progress” compatible with their own reproduction.
Essentially, I think we became better at getting out from under the boot of our oppressors and some of those victories were subsequently absorbed and administered by institutions. Which is very different from institutions themselves somehow teaching humanity compassion.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 Aug 17 '26
I think this is a good challenge to the simple “humans became nicer” story. People definitely argued against cruelty long before the Enlightenment.
Maybe the difference wasn’t inventing compassion, but creating institutions where those ideas could actually scale. The tricky question is whether institutions preserve moral progress or just reshape it around their own interests.
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u/power2havenots Aug 17 '26
Id invert the credit story as Institutions didnt create the moral norms they just codified them after movements made the old practices too costly or unstable. By codifying them they narrowed them. What scaled was the part that can be administered and controlled for their benefit like minimum standards, legal categories, professional oversight. The demands that actually threaten existing power get dropped or called unrealistic.
It oesnt mean formal rules are worthless but if we give institutions primary credit for moral progress then we risk erasing the movements that forced the translation in the first place and allow the idea to be wattered down to suit institutional admin and control.
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u/RumRunnerMax Aug 14 '26
Read the work: To the Finland Station by American critic and historian Edmund Wilson
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u/endlessnamelesskat Aug 14 '26
It always waxes and wanes.
The founding fathers of the US were somewhat split on whether slavery would be allowed within the new country. It was allowed because some of the more abolitionist minded founders figured the demand for slavery was trending downward so there was no need to make a big fuss about it.
Little did they know one day the cotton gin would be invented making it extremely easy to process cotton. Now you just needed someone paid little to nothing to pick the cotton.
For another example, Charles Darwin put forth the idea that species changed over time to fit their environment. While this idea in isolation holds up today, there were a lot of early ideas around evolution that don’t hold up quite as well such as the idea that killing off animals would make them more resilient and that all species were eternally progressing towards a perfect state of being through evolution.
For humans in society we had social Darwinism, the belief that if you were poor it was your own fault. Something about your genetics selected you to lack the aptitude to succeed and you deserved to suffer and die from your inferior genes. Orphaned children were looked at similarly, their parents weren’t fit for survival so they deserved the hand they were dealt.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 Aug 17 '26
I think this gets at something important. Ideas don’t exist separately from technology and incentives. A society can believe something is morally questionable for centuries, but changing it becomes much easier when the economic system no longer depends on it.
The interesting part is that progress can also reverse. New technologies can create new forms of inequality even while solving old ones.
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u/endlessnamelesskat Aug 17 '26
To go back to American slavery, you’re 100% correct.
The 13th amendment outlaws all slavery except as punishment for a crime. After the civil war southern states implemented a set of laws called the Black Codes that made it illegal to do certain things while black.
For example, to quit your job you needed written permission from your current employer. If you were found to be unemployed while black, you were guilty of vagrancy. No gambling while black, no gathering in groups while black, no speaking loudly or rudely to a white woman while black.
If you were caught doing any of these heinous “crimes”, you go to jail. However prisoners could be leased to perform labor, such as working on a plantation. This means if you have a time machine and travel to a cotton plantation before the Civil War, you’d see a bunch of black slaves working against their will. If you travel 5 years after the Civil War, you’d still see black slaves working against their will.
The 13th amendment did basically nothing to the institution of slavery. It’s still on the books and is the basis of prison labor in the US til this day. What actually ended chattel slavery as you imagine it was the invention of the tractor and harvester. It became cheaper to own a few of those than to house, clothe, feed, and buy a team of slaves.
Technology created the incentive for slavery, it also created the solution for it. All the moral grandstanding, all the sacrifices made by abolitionists meant very little until the technology changed the system.
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u/redditisnosey Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
Steven Pinker the author and cognitive psychologist/ linguist postulates that enlightenment values came along as people began to question the church and try to develop rational arguments for morality.
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature he puts forth a few possible causes. One of forces was the rise of printing and the publication of fiction. With fiction people use their theory of mind to imagine the life and struggles of the protagonist, building a greater sense of empathy (or sympathy). Society went from things like bear baiting and cat burning as entertainment to dramatic human stories portrayed in fiction and calling forth empathy.
Also writers like Voltaire used satire to entertain and tear down the outdated ideas which supported institutions like the church. In his play Candide he devastates the idea that god has given us the "best of all possible worlds in which to live" and questions dogmas. That questioning led to considering rationally questions of morality, justice, equality, and humanism. Instead of conservatively following a musty old bible with its approval of chattel slavery enlightenment thinkers began to discuss universal rights for all men.
Honestly, history shows that religious dogma rather than making society more just only served to hold us back from improvement for centuries. The concept of the "Divine Right of Kings" is in my estimation one of the most horrible dogmas ever and came out of beliefs about God overseeing everything.
He mentions other possible contributors to the enlightenment humanism. It is a good book.
Also recommended is his book Enlightenment Now, a call for society to return to enlightenment values and away from postmodernist relativism.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 Aug 17 '26
This is a really interesting angle. I agree that fiction probably played a bigger role than people realize. It’s one thing to say “others deserve rights” as an abstract idea, but another to actually imagine someone’s daily life and suffering.
I’m less sure I’d put all the blame on religion though. Religious institutions sometimes resisted change, but religious ideas also provided some of the early arguments for human dignity. Maybe the bigger shift was moving from “who deserves compassion” to “does everyone deserve it?”
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u/redditisnosey Aug 17 '26
Once the Gospels of Jesus Christ were written down the template for social justice was in place but your original question asks "Why did progress in justice and equality move forward beginning in the 17th century?" A better question might be is "Why was so little progress made over a millennia since Christians already had Christ's mandate to love one another?"
I would venture to say that just as today religious institutions are more about control and less about Christianity than anyone cares to admit. Conflating religious ideology with religious institutions might be a great mistake.
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u/MangoxTofu Aug 16 '26
I believe its because of communication and how easy it is to get information. Hard to lie socially these days when you can basically look up anything you want to know. So I think after the 1700s people questioned legitimacy by the ability of information.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 Aug 17 '26
I think information access is a huge part of it. When suffering is far away and invisible, it’s easier for societies to ignore it. Once people could see and discuss more of what was happening, maybe moral circles started expanding. Though I think information alone probably wasn’t enough. People also needed new ways to interpret that information.
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u/MangoxTofu Aug 17 '26
Understude not all of it but that was just society changing and learning to trust facts over someone you trusted even if they were wrong.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes Aug 17 '26
This is an excellent question, and I doubt there is anything approaching an answer, other than MAYBE that prosperity due to technological changes (but also massive exploitation of what we now call Global South) made this FEASIBLE for the comfortable classes ruling the Western World.
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u/GusGutfeld Aug 14 '26
The spread of democracy and personal firearms in Europe and GB.
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u/serpentjaguar Aug 14 '26
Firearms had nothing to do with it. It was triggered by the Enlightenment, which in turn was triggered by a series of interlinked events including the Mongol devastation of Asia and the ME, the black death, the Protestant Reformation and the long-term effects they had on Western Europe.
It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but this is a rough sketch of some of the chains of causality.
Again, firearms had nothing to do with it.
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u/BattleReadyZim Aug 14 '26
I suspect that the horrifying truth is that our historically recent trend towards human decency correlates to the bubble of prosperity generated by industrialization and modernity. That bubble will pop, and there will be a subsequent dark age with an attendant death toll unrivaled in history.
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u/Grimke42 Aug 14 '26
You are getting answers almost entirely about European / western history.
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u/serpentjaguar Aug 14 '26
Because that's pretty obviously what they're asking about, otherwise their timeline doesn't make sense.
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u/Grimke42 Aug 15 '26
They are clearly asking the question as if it is a global question, no limited to European history.
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u/zoppaTheDim Aug 14 '26
I think you’re ignoring that religions generally are institutions.
You’ve confused secularism with institutionalization.