ABSTRACT
The previous chapters argued that there are interesting empirical reasons to suppose that certain features of the environments of social and intelligent species group themselves into natural kinds that seem like they could be moral kinds. A key question of the book is whether we should think that these natural kinds are in fact moral kinds. This chapter furthers the argument that the natural kinds in question are moral kinds by looking for possible causal roles that natural moral kinds and hence natural moral values may have played in the history of human moral thought. We focus on one particularly important and well-discussed historical incident of progressive moral change, the British and American abolition movements to end slavery in the nineteenth century. The general argument of the chapter is that if a naturally good kind of thing functions in a moral kind of way, it probably is a moral good.
