Pragmatic ethics

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Pragmatic ethics was discussed by John Dewey (pictured at the University of Chicago in 1902, about 20 years before his major works on pragmatic ethics were published)

Pragmatic ethics is a theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics. Ethical pragmatists such as John Dewey believe that some societies have progressed morally in much the way they have attained progress in science. Scientists can pursue inquiry into the truth of a hypothesis and accept the hypothesis, in the sense that they act as though the hypothesis were true; nonetheless, they think that future generations can advance science, and thus future generations can refine or replace (at least some of) their accepted hypotheses. Similarly, ethical pragmatists think that norms, principles, and moral criteria are likely to be improved as a result of inquiry.

Martin Benjamin used Neurath's boat as an analogy for pragmatic ethics, likening the gradual change of ethical norms to the reconstruction of a ship at sea by its sailors.[1]

Contrast with other normative theories[]

Much as it is appropriate for scientists to act as though a hypothesis were true despite expecting future inquiry to supplant it, ethical pragmatists acknowledge that it can be appropriate to practice a variety of other normative approaches (e.g. consequentialism, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics), yet acknowledge the need for mechanisms which allow people to advance beyond such approaches, a freedom for discourse which does not take any such theory as assumed.[2] Thus, aimed at social innovation, the practice of pragmatic ethics supplements the practice of other normative approaches with what John Stuart Mill called "experiments in living".[3][4][5]

Pragmatic ethics also differs from other normative approaches theoretically, according to Hugh LaFollette:[5]

  1. It focuses on society, rather than on lone individuals, as the entity which achieves morality.[5] In Dewey's words, "all conduct is ... social".[6]
  2. It does not hold any known moral criteria as beyond potential for revision.[5] Pragmatic ethics may be misunderstood as relativist, as failing to be objective,[5] but pragmatists object to this critique on grounds that the same could be said of science, yet inductive and hypothetico-deductive science is our epistemological standard.[7] Ethical pragmatists can maintain that their endeavor, like inquiry in science, is objective on the grounds that it converges towards something objective (a thesis called Peircean realism named after C. S. Peirce).[8]
  3. It allows that a moral judgment may be accepted in one age of a given society, even though it will cease to be accepted after that society progresses (or may already be rejected in another society).[5] The change in moral judgments about slavery that led to the abolition of slavery is an example of the improvement of moral judgments through moral inquiry and advocacy.[9]

LaFollette based his account of pragmatic ethics in the writings of John Dewey, but he also found aspects of pragmatic ethics in the texts of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Martha Nussbaum.[5]

Barry Kroll, commenting on the pragmatic ethics of Anthony Weston, noted that pragmatic ethics emphasizes the complexity of problems and the many different values that may be involved in an ethical issue or situation, without suppressing the conflicts between such values.[10]

Criticisms[]

Pragmatic ethics has been criticized[by whom?] as conflating descriptive ethics with normative ethics, as describing the way people do make moral judgments rather than the way they should make them.[citation needed] While some ethical pragmatists may have avoided the distinction between normative and descriptive truth, the theory of pragmatic ethics itself does not conflate them any more than science conflates truth about its subject matter with current opinion about it; in pragmatic ethics as in science, "truth emerges from the self-correction of error through a sufficiently long process of inquiry".[2]

Moral ecology[]

Moral ecology is a variation of pragmatic ethics which additionally supposes that morality evolves like an ecosystem, and ethical practice should therefore include strategies analogous to those of ecosystem management, such as protecting a degree of moral diversity.[11] The term "moral ecology" has been used since at least 1985 to imply a symbiosis whereby the viability of any existing moral approach would be diminished by the destruction of all alternative approaches.[12][13] According to Tim Dean, current scientific evidence confirms that humans do take diverse approaches to morality, and such polymorphism gives humanity resilience against a wider range of situations and environments, which makes moral diversity a natural consequence of frequency-dependent selection.[14][15]

See also[]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Benjamin 2005.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b Liszka 2005.
  3. ^ Mill 1863.
  4. ^ Anderson 1991.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g LaFollette 2000.
  6. ^ Dewey 1922.
  7. ^ On inductive and hypothetico-deductive methods and their relation to pragmatist metamethodology, see: Nola & Sankey 2007, pp. 80–183, 312–336
  8. ^ Almeder 1983.
  9. ^ Anderson 2015, pp. 27–41.
  10. ^ Kroll 1997, p. 108.
  11. ^ Dean 2014, p. 9.
  12. ^ Bellah et al. 2008, p. 284.
  13. ^ Hertzke & McRorie 1998.
  14. ^ Dean 2014, pp. 219–220.
  15. ^ Dean 2012.

References[]

  • Almeder, Robert F. (1983). "Scientific progress and Peircean utopian realism". Erkenntnis. 20 (3): 253–280. doi:10.1007/BF00166389. JSTOR 20010883. S2CID 120899446.
  • Anderson, Elizabeth S. (October 1991). "John Stuart Mill and experiments in living". Ethics. 102 (1): 4–26. doi:10.1086/293367. JSTOR 2381719. S2CID 170339697.
  • Anderson, Elizabeth S. (November 2015). "Moral bias and corrective practices: a pragmatist perspective". Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 89: 21–47. JSTOR 43661501.
  • Bellah, Robert N.; Madsen, Richard; Sullivan, William M.; Swidler, Ann; Tipton, Steven M. (2008) [1985]. Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520254190. OCLC 154697787.
  • Benjamin, Martin (2005). "Moral reasoning, moral pluralism, and the classroom" (PDF). Philosophy of Education Archive: 23–36. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-07-16.
  • Dean, Tim (2012). "Evolution and moral diversity" (PDF). The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication. 7. doi:10.4148/biyclc.v7i0.1775.
  • Dean, Tim (September 2014). Evolution and moral ecology (Ph.D. thesis). Sydney: University of New South Wales. OCLC 1031063481.
  • Dewey, John (1922). Human nature and conduct: an introduction to social psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Company. OCLC 14779049.
  • Hertzke, Allen D.; McRorie, Chris (1998). "The concept of moral ecology". In Lawler, Peter Augustine; McConkey, Dale (eds.). Community and political thought today. Westort, CT: Praeger. pp. 1–26. ISBN 9780275960964. OCLC 38732164.
  • Kroll, Barry M. (Autumn 1997). "Arguing about public issues: what can we learn from practical ethics?". Rhetoric Review. 16 (1): 105–119. doi:10.1080/07350199709389083. JSTOR 465966.
  • LaFollette, Hugh (2000). "Pragmatic ethics". In LaFollette, Hugh (ed.). The Blackwell guide to ethical theory. Blackwell philosophy guides. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 400–419. ISBN 9780631201182. OCLC 41645965.
  • Liszka, James (2005). "What is pragmatic ethics?". american-philosophy.org. Archived from the original on 2008-11-20. Retrieved 2011-07-01.
  • Mill, John Stuart (1863) [1859]. On liberty. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. OCLC 4458249.
  • Nola, Robert; Sankey, Howard (2007). Theories of scientific method: an introduction. Philosophy and science. 2. Montréal: McGill–Queen's University Press. doi:10.4324/9781315711959. ISBN 9780773533448. OCLC 144602109.

Further reading[]

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