The Expanding Circle

In 1965, a married woman in France could not open a bank account, get a passport, or sign a work contract without her husband’s permission. The French parliament changed the law the following year. Hundreds of thousands of women got bank accounts, and while bobody declared a revolution, it was one. (And before anyone makes any jokes, Canada didn’t pass the Married Women’s Property Act until 1964.)

The circle of people we recognize as fully human has expanded over the last two and a half centuries—slowly, and with catastrophic reversals, but steadily. Enslaved people were property in most of the world in 1800. Women moved from legal nonentities to property owners and voters. People under colonial rule won formal independence, LGBTQ+ people went from being criminals to being legally recognized in many countries, and people with disabilities moved from institutional confinement towards recognition of their rights and needs.

Telling this as a story of inevitable progress is tempting and wrong. A better way to understand it is to look at what mechanisms drive progress, and what forces produce reversals.

The standard account of the modern era of human rights is that the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust shocked the world into action, leading to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, which in turn established a framework within human rights gradually and imperfectly spread.

Samuel Moyn sees it differently. He argued that the UDHR was a sideshow at the time. It was a declaration of aspirations, not a legal instrument; no enforcement mechanism existed, no NGOs mobilized around it, and the people who drafted it still administered colonial empires in which the people being colonized had no such rights.

The human rights movement as we know it—international, legally institutionalized, centered on the individual rather than the state—actually emerged in the 1970s, not the 1940s. Amnesty International was founded in 1961 and became a mass organization only later. Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978. The Helsinki Accords of 1975 gave dissidents in Soviet bloc countries a framework they could actually use. This was the moment, Moyn argues, when human rights became a political project rather than a rhetorical gesture.

And it happened for a specific reason: every other political utopia had failed. Communism had produced gulags and show trials, social democracy had stalled, and national liberation movements had often produced authoritarian governments. Human rights filled the vacuum: it became the last utopia standing precisely because it was modest enough to survive. Where socialism promised a transformation of the whole social order, human rights promised something narrower: that individuals would not be tortured, imprisoned without trial, or killed for their beliefs.

This reframing replaces the story of inevitable moral progress with a story about political contingency. Rights do not expand because humanity matures on its own schedule. They expand when specific people, working in specific political conditions, institutionalize them against resistance from people who benefit from the current arrangement.

Several mechanisms drive expansion when it does occur. The historian Lynn Hunt points to something unexpected: novels. The eighteenth century saw an explosion of epistolary fiction (novels written as letters), like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie (1761). These books were wildly popular across Europe. They also did something new: they asked readers to inhabit the inner life of someone unlike themselves, to feel the world from inside another person’s consciousness. Hunt argues that this trained readers to recognize the humanity of strangers, i.e., to understand that other people have interior lives as real as their own.

Whether novels were a cause or a symptom of changing attitudes is debatable, but slave narratives in the nineteenth century worked on the same principle. The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative* (1845) put readers inside an enslaved person’s experience in a way that statistics never could. The abolitionist movement distributed these books deliberately and widely. Making suffering something a reader from a comfortable life could imaginatively enter was a political strategy.

A second mechanism is organized political pressure. The Somerset case in Britain in 1772 illustrates how this works. James Somerset was an enslaved man brought to England who escaped and was recaptured by his enslaver. His case was taken up by abolitionists, who argued that English common law did not support slavery. Lord Mansfield’s ruling was narrow—it said only that Somerset could not be forcibly transported out of England—but abolitionists used it as a wedge.

They had already built a network of committees, pamphlets, and petitions. The boycott of West Indian sugar in the 1790s was the first mass consumer boycott in British history, drawing in tens of thousands of households across a country that was consuming enormous quantities of sugar produced by enslaved people. These campaigns eventually produced the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. The expansion of the moral circle, here, was not a spontaneous change of heart by elites. It was the result of sustained, organized work by people who built coalitions, applied pressure across decades, and framed their arguments in terms their opponents could not easily dismiss.

A third mechanism is contact. The psychologist Gordon Allport found that intergroup contact reduces prejudice, but only under specific conditions: equal status between the groups, common goals, institutional support, and cooperation rather than competition. These conditions do not arise naturally. They have to be created, which is one reason why legal desegregation matters even when the people enforcing it have no particular enthusiasm for the goal. When the law mandates shared spaces, it creates the conditions under which contact can work. Attitudes change slowly afterward.

The expansion of the moral circle has never been linear. Reconstruction in the United States after the Civil War extended legal rights to formerly enslaved people, but was then systematically dismantled through paramilitary violence, electoral manipulation, and judicial capitulation. Most of the gains of the 1860s and 1870s were reversed by 1900. It took another sixty years, and another sustained organizing campaign, to recover them in formal law. Similarly, India’s constitution of 1950 abolished untouchability. Seventy-five years later, caste-based discrimination persists in employment, housing, and violence. Japan’s Buraku community—people historically associated with occupations considered ritually impure—continues to face discrimination despite official policy.

The current rollback of rights for trans people in several countries is not an anomaly. Every extension of the moral circle has produced a counter-movement arguing that the extension is too far, too fast, or aimed at the wrong people. Sometimes those counter-movements win, at least for a while. Moyn’s point is that human rights exist not because history bends toward justice on its own but because people made them exist, and other people can unmake them.

The relevance to technology is direct, even if the industry has largely avoided the conversation. Every system that makes decisions about people embeds assumptions about whose interests count and whose harm is legible. Facial recognition systems that perform poorly on darker skin tones are not neutral tools that happen to malfunction for some users—they encode a prior judgment about whose face needs to be recognized accurately. Content moderation systems that work better in English than in Amharic or Tagalog reflect a prior judgment about whose speech deserves moderation resources, and algorithmic credit scoring that penalizes postal codes correlated with race is redlining with a different interface.

Peter Singer argued that reason itself pushes in this direction: once you accept that suffering matters, it becomes harder to explain why only the suffering of people like you matters. That logical pressure is real, but Moyn’s corrective is equally real: reason does not do this work on its own. Someone has to organize the campaign, draft the legislation, build the coalition, and be prepared to keep going when the counter-movement wins the next election.

Allport1954

Gordon W. Allport: The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley, 1954.

Hochschild2006

Adam Hochschild: Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. Mariner Books, 2006, 9780618619078.

Hunt2007

Lynn Hunt: Inventing Human Rights: A History. W. W. Norton, 2007, 9780393060959.

Moyn2010

Samuel Moyn: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Harvard University Press, 2010, 9780674048720.

Singer1981

Peter Singer: The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.