Making Morality: Pragmatist Reconstruction in Ethical Theory

Introduction

1 Introduction: Pragmatic Metaethics as Revisionism This book defends a pragmatist account of morality. By “pragmatist” I mean an account of morality that builds on the work of the classical pragmatist tradition of American philosophy and in particular, Dewey’s contribution to that tradition.1 What I find most important in the pragmatist philosophical tradition is the claim that practice is primary. This focus on practice is radical—more radical than perhaps has been realized. It is not just the idea that philosophy should be applied to practical questions like how to build better schools, how to make our economy more just, or how to treat dying patients. Without a doubt, pragmatists maintain that philosophers have a vocational obligation to be involved in the problems of their community, forging conceptual tools that will help shed light on its problems. But the pragmatist proposes something more fundamental than the application of theoretical concerns to practical problems. Pragmatism challenges our very conception of theorizing, since it views theorizing as an intrinsic feature of practical activity.2 The choice, for pragmatism, is not between theory and practice but between intelligent and unintelligent practice. To say that philosophers should be concerned with intelligent practice is to reject the very assumptions that make a radical break between “theory” and “practice.” Pragmatism is committed to the idea that philosophical views of rationality, human nature, morality, knowledge, and metaphysics need to be interpreted as theoretical tools that arise out of our need to make practices more intelligent. Pragmatism 2 Making Morality is a revisionist philosophy. Pragmatism criticizes both philosophy and common sense insofar as these tend to mask the transient and contingent sources of our conceptual interpretations of reality. Our anxieties about human finitude and contingency lead us to project higher unchanging realities, be these God, the forms, the moral law, or the world as it is “in itself.” Instead of using our conceptual creations to manage the precarious realities around us, we hide from the precarious by projecting realms of perfect being that exist far from where we are now. Why do we project these ideal realms? We humans are rational and imaginative animals. Rational speculation frees us from the immediate and enables us to project plans, concepts, and ideals that help us to understand and control our world. However, human reason often distorts its own activities. Our power of imagination idealizes our contingent lives in ways that lead us to suppress awareness of our contingent origins. We construct stories about otherworldly salvation or ultimate immutable truth that tend to distort the fact that we are intelligent animals living in a perilous world.3 With respect to morality in particular, we might offer similar compensatory explanations of the idea that moral principles or rules reflect a changeless reality of moral truth. One explanation might appeal to social ideology. Political and religious authorities and members of dominant groups maintain their power by appealing to unchangeable, transhistorical truths to which they are privy. Some of our everyday commonsense morality appeals to transhistorical moral truth in order to legitimate the role of such dominant powers. For example, religious conservatives in the contemporary United States appeal to unchanging biblical truth to maintain the legitimacy of heterosexual marital unions and the moral wrongness of homosexual marital unions. The common understanding of marital morality is based on unchanging sexual mores that favor heterosexuals. The idea that moral principles are unchanging and fixed helps maintain the privilege of those who benefit from adherence to those principles. There are also psychological “benefits” in believing that moral principles reflect an unchanging order of moral truth (although ultimately, Introduction: Pragmatic Metaethics as Revisionism 3 these prove inadequate for long-term resolution of problems). The painful tragedies that mark human life provide incentive to hide behind the veil of timeless moral truth, where all goods are realized and no sacrifices need be made. Within modern moral philosophy—especially modern metaethics —we find some tendency to abstract from actual commitments and practices. Philosophers use the human power of theoretical and imaginative speculation to abstract from our experience as participants in moral practice. For example, philosophers ask, “Are moral properties genuine properties in the world?” The answer can only come from the very perspective external to the contingent practices from which the question arises in the first place. Once you conceive of a moral property as an attribute of an object “out there” that is observable from...