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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
In the last twenty years there has been a dramatic revival of interest in the idea that there can be genuine moral knowledge. The noncognitivist assumptions that dominated so much twentieth-century ethical theory no longer seem the obvious truths they once did to so many thinkers. It is now common to hear the claim that moral values are genuine constituents of the furniture of the world - or at least of its upholstery- and that moral deliberation and judgment legitimately aspire to truth. Morality, it is frequently argued, is a realm of discovery rather than invention, and moral reasoning, and the play of moral imagination, must be constrained by how the moral facts stand.
Such “realist” or “cognitivist” views in ethics take many forms. This essay considers whether a pragmatist account of moral knowledge might fruitfully be developed. My project will recommend itself only to those who believe that pragmatist insights serve to support relatively robust conceptions of truth and justification.
I am grateful to Christine Sypnowich for her comments on an earlier draft.
1 Little, Margaret elegantly describes varieties of moral realism on the contemporary scene in her two-part review of the literature in Philosophical Books 35 (1994): 145-53 and 225-33Google Scholar. Little organizes her discussion around the “deep and fascinating divide” between the blend of realism and naturalism advanced by American philosophers such as Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Peter Rail ton, with its roots in naturalistic epistemology and the philosophy of science, and the moral cognitivism that originated in Britain in the work of John McDowell, David Wiggins, Jonathan Dancy, Sabina Lovibond, and others, which Little describes as a form of non-naturalism. Representative readings from both camps, and their common non-cognitivist opponents, are collected in McCord, Geoffrey Sayre ed., Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. McNaughton's, DavidMoral Vision (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar, is an excellent introduction to the British variety.
It is important to be wary of the labels often attached to positions in this debate. Some of the British group, for example, are in fact reluctant to describe themselves as “moral realists,” preferring the term “cognitivism” (though in my view this also has unfortunate associations) (see, e.g., Wiggins's, Needs, Values, Truth [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987], 330-31, 335 n. 19Google Scholar, and his “Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1990-91): Section 3). In addition, their position can be seen as a form of non-naturalism only if the term “naturalism” is reserved for positions committed to deploying exclusively natural-scientific forms of explanation. The British writers, inspired as they are by Aristotle and Wittgenstein, are best seen as pressing for a broader conception of the natural, which would encompass our moral sensibilities (and indeed our other conceptual capacities) as aspects of our nature, even though these cannot be rendered transparent by the explanatory resources of natural science. This is an explicit theme in the recent writings of McDowell, John who urges that we extend our concept of nature to encompass the “second nature” human beings acquire through enculturation (see his Mind and World [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994]Google Scholar and “Two Sorts of Naturalism” in Virtues and Reasons. Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, eds. Hursthouse, RosalindLawrence, Gavin and Quinn, Warren [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], 149-79).Google Scholar
Note also that Little does not discuss communitarians like Alasdair Macintyre and Charles Taylor, whose historicist accounts of moral knowledge have affinities with the British school. There are also figures, such as Smith, Michael (see, e.g., The Moral Problem [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994])Google Scholar, who do not fit neatly into either camp.
2 Precedents are to be found in Misak's, Cheryl “Pragmatism, Empiricism and Morality,” in Lovibond, Sabina and Williams, S.G. eds., Essays for David Wiggins. Identity, Truth and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 201-18Google Scholar, and in recent writings of Hilary Putnam's (see, e.g., the essays in Part 2 of Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Wiggins, David cautiously deploys Peircian insights in developing his moral cognitivism; see “Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments” and “Postscript” (Part 3) in Needs, Values, Truth, 139-84 and 329-50Google Scholar. Pragmatist themes also inform the view of moral knowledge developed in Larmore's, CharlesThe Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (see, e.g., 59). Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey was most preoccupied with ethical issues, and his voluminous (and sadly neglected) writings, though hard to square with much that passes for moral realism, contain many insights that might inform contemporary debates about the scope and limits of moral cognitivism, and its relation to naturalism.
3 Misak, develops this idea in “Pragmatism, Empiricism and Morality” and in her forthcoming Moral Deliberation: Truth, Conflict, and Modesty (London: Routledge)Google Scholar. I am indebted to her for allowing me to read the latter work in manuscript.
4 Peirce, C.S.Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 1.135.Google Scholar
5 Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Kloesal, C. ed., Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition, vol.3 (1872-78) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 273.Google Scholar
6 Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Peirce, op. cit., 254.Google Scholar
7 Ibid.
8 Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell), 6.Google Scholar
9 This has been a constant lament of communitarian political philosophy. See, e.g., Taylor, CharlesThe Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991)Google Scholar, republished as The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
10 See her “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” in her Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 157-73.
11 A more subtle example is Marx's analysis of our perception of economic forces and relations, though its complexity precludes its discussion here.
12 Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth, 185–214; see esp. Sections 8-10.Google Scholar
13 Note that we should expect the pragmatist, with her stress on the practical character of belief, to be drawn to internalism in the theory of motivation — to the idea that an agent's cognitive states can themselves be sufficient to provide reasons for action.
14 See, for example, Taylor's, Charles “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 152-84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 James, WilliamThe Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1897)Google Scholar, 23. 16 See Dancy, “Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties,” Mind 92 (1983): 530-47;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
17 Larmore, Charles(Morals of Modernity, 108-11)Google Scholar criticizes the perceptual model of moral knowledge, which he finds in McDowell's moral writings of the 1980s, on the grounds that it cannot account for the normative dimension of moral knowledge. Although Larmore grants that we can see that an action is bad, he holds that we cannot be said to see that some action ought to be done. Values are perceptible, reasons not. The argument rests on the principle that only what is the case is a possible object of perception; we cannot perceive what was, what will be, what might have been, or what ought to be. However, those who invoke the perceptual model typically hold (1) that the properties of an action (e.g., its cruelty) from which an agent's reasons for action result are genuinely perceived, and (2) that the agent's recognition that the presence of these properties constitutes reason for some action is not the result of inference, but is immediately apprehended. The agent apprehends that the action should not be done, because he sees that it is cruel. Thus, to speak of perceiving reasons does not imply a curious perceptual access to some (better) possible world. It is just a matter of apprehending what ought to be done in virtue of the perception of morally relevant features of the situation. (I also see no reason to hold, as Larmore does, that McDowell has now dropped a perceptual model of moral knowledge. In his recent writings, McDowell argues that perception involves the exercise of conceptual capacities [rather than the reception of a preconceptualized “given“) and, when veridical, issues in an awareness of how things are. Perception can put us in contact with the facts, and the deliverances of perception are essentially objects of critical reflection. This account seems tailor-made for a perceptual model of moral knowledge.)
18 Dewey, JohnThe Quest for Certainty, in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 4, ed. Boydston, Jo Ann (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 209.Google Scholar
19 The trick is to find a way for the principle “Cruel acts are wrong” to be true while accommodating the particularist's insights that (1) some cruel acts are right, and (2) cruelty is not always morally relevant in the same way (the moral relevance of cruelty so depends on its relation to other properties in particular cases that there may be times when the cruelty of an action is morally irrelevant, or even where the action is the better for being cruel). Perhaps the answer is to exploit an analogy with propositions like “Dogs are four-legged animals” (or “The cat is a carnivore“) which are neither defeated by counterexample nor function as prima facie judgments. Such judgments express what might be called conceptual norms and play a crucial role in organizing the epistemic landscape. To see moral principles as vehicles of commitment is to recognize that they play a similar role to these conceptual norms.
20 See Wiggins, “Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments,” 139-84.Google Scholar
21 This is an important theme in Larmore's The Morals of Modernity.
22 Wiggins, David “Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1990-91), 79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
