poke, I agree that michael vassar misread you, but I think his last paragraph is concrete engagement. If you're worried that moral philosophers are too abstract, I would stress the moral deliberation of political philosophers. The Enlightenment, eg, the abolition of slavery, seems to me a pretty clear-cut case.

Here are the possible objections I can see: 1. I have the timeline wrong and the philosophers jumped on a bandwagon 1b philosophers reflect the elites, but it takes time for elite morality to affect the world 2. we only remember the philosophers on the winning side 3. moral deliberation is a good guess about which way society is going to go, but philosophers have no impact (but this suggests that the masses are doing moral deliberation!)