The Evolution of Morality

When I was young, homosexuality was a criminal offense almost everywhere in the world. It is now legal in most countries, and same-sex marriage is recognized in dozens. Medical assistance in dying was, and in many places remains, a criminal act; it is now legal and regulated in the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and several other countries. These changes happened faster than most people imagined possible, and in ways that no-one predicted. Understanding how moral consensus has shifted in the past is essential for understanding how the norms around AI, privacy, and algorithmic decision-making might change.

The criminalization of homosexuality is often treated as an ancient prejudice that modernity finally overcame, but its legal form is specific and recent. The British Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885—under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted—established the statutory framework that then spread through British colonial law to India, Kenya, Singapore, and dozens of other territories. This was a Victorian legal export, not a timeless human universal. The United States had similar state-level sodomy laws, most of which dated to the nineteenth century. The Supreme Court upheld their constitutionality in 1986 and did not overturn that ruling until 2003. A law framed as enforcing ancient moral consensus was, in legal terms, barely a century old, and was still being extended into new jurisdictions within living memory.

The Stonewall uprising in June 1969 has entered history as a founding event of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, but its significance lies less in the event itself than in what it catalyzed. Gay liberation organizations formed within weeks. The annual Christopher Street Liberation Day march began the following year and became the model for Pride events globally. What followed was not spontaneous. It was organized political work: building community institutions, litigating against discriminatory laws, lobbying legislatures, training activists, and making the case for rights in terms that demanded equal treatment rather than tolerance.

The AIDS crisis beginning in the early 1980s devastated these communities. In the United States alone, hundreds of thousands of people died over the following two decades, and the federal government’s response under the Reagan administration was negligible for years after the epidemic was identified. ACT UP, founded in 1987, developed direct action tactics that accelerated drug approval timeline, such as targeting the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, and media coverages. In doing so, they changed what was considered acceptable activist pressure on public health institutions. The crisis also produced an enormous wave of political organizing, legal advocacy, and coalition building driven by the urgency of survival. The LGBTQ+ movement that emerged from the AIDS years was more sophisticated, better organized, and more willing to engage in explicit political conflict than it had been.

Legal change on LGBTQ+ rights did not arrive at once. Each step was criticized as premature by conservatives and inadequate by the communities affected, but each made the next one thinkable. Decriminalization came first, in most countries, through either legislative action or court decisions. Anti-discrimination protections in employment and housing followed in some jurisdictions. Civil partnership or domestic partnership recognition preceded marriage equality, typically by years or decades. Marriage equality, which seemed to most observers politically unreachable in 2000, was recognized by the US Supreme Court in 2015. The speed of that final sequence reflects both the sustained organizing of prior decades and specific features of the American constitutional system that allowed judicial strategy to outpace legislative consensus.

Medical assistance in dying presents a parallel case with different actors and different institutional friction. The Netherlands was the first country to legalize it, through a regulatory framework that evolved from prosecutorial tolerance into explicit legislation passed in 2002. Belgium followed the same year. The medical profession was a critical and initially resistant actor in both countries: the ethical tradition of medicine had treated the prohibition on actively hastening death as foundational, and the shift required sustained internal debate within professional associations alongside external legal pressure. What finally emerged was a framework in which physicians retained gatekeeping authority under specified conditions, which proved more acceptable to the profession than a framework in which the decision was taken out of medical hands entirely.

What these two cases together reveal about how moral consensus changes is that the process has identifiable components. Changed facts matter: the AIDS epidemic made invisible communities visible in ways that shifted public sympathy and political calculation. Changed visibility matters: LGBTQ+ people in prominent public roles before and after coming out reduced the distance between the abstract policy debate and human recognition. Organized political pressure matters: neither marriage equality nor medical assistance in dying arrived without sustained campaigns that built coalitions, litigated strategically, and maintained pressure across decades of partial progress and setback. Finally, legal strategy matters: advocates have to choose which cases to bring, in which courts, at which moment.

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Dowbiggin2007

Ian Dowbiggin: A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine. Bloomsbury, 2007, 978-0742531116.

Faderman2015

Lillian Faderman: The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. Simon & Schuster, 2015, 978-1451694123.

Hannig2023

Anita Hannig: The Day I Die The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America. Sourcebooks, 2023, 978-1728259420.

Hirshman2012

Linda Hirshman: Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. Harper, 2012, 978-0061965500.

Lewy2011

Guenter Lewy: Assisted Death in Europe and America Four Regimes and Their Lessons. Oxford University Press, 2011, 978-0199746415.