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PRAGMATIC REASONS A Defense of Morality and Epistemology |
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as well as our practice of making judgments regarding free will and moral responsibility. Here is what this book offers on this topic that is new: · It offers a novel account of rationality, and shows how this notion of rationality underpins our ethical and epistemic norms. This theory of rationality is in an important sense the lynchpin of the project, because it demonstrates why many of the perennial problems facing consequentialism are a direct result of mistaken accounts of rationality. Thus, this account of rationality allows the consequentialist to refute such traditional arguments as the argument that rule and act consequentialism are extensionally equivalent, the ‘demandingness objection’ against consequentialism, the ‘rule worship’ objection, and others. · It offers a unified account of the normativity of both morality and epistemology. Though the normativity of morality is hotly-contested, the normativity of epistemology is a greatly-neglected topic. · It offers a novel pragmatist justification of our practice of making ascriptions of free-will and moral responsibility. · Although the above practices (morality, epistemology, free will ascriptions) are pragmatically justified, it offers a way for these practices to be truth-apt and objective, and not instances of doing or believing something false merely because it is useful to do so. This, in particular, distinguishes this account from some recent consequentialist accounts of free will. · It offers an account of human flourishing and interests, and a compelling account of how interests, though themselves morally loaded, can justify our moral practice without circularity.
Click here to read chapter 3, “Pragmatism and Rationality”. In a way, this is the central chapter of the book as it defends the conception of rationality on which the theory rests. The strategy developed up to chapter 3 is that pragmatic considerations justify a set of rules, and individual actions are justified by appeal to these rules, and not by appeal to pragmatic considerations. This strategy allows us to give a genuinely pragmatist account of morality and epistemology, while denying that truth is mere usefulness and maintaining the connection between truth and objectivity. However, this version of pragmatism is itself vulnerable to several familiar objections (such as J.J.C. Smart’s “rule-worship” objection) that rule-consequentialism must collapse into act-consequentialism. In chapter 3, I argue that these objections rest on a dogma that rationality must be understood atomistically, in terms of isolated agents and individual, discrete actions. Against this dogma, I defend the claim that rationality must often be understood cooperatively and in terms of strategies (where strategies are understood to be rules or sets of actions). In developing this answer, this chapter makes clear how acting morally is rational, and refutes those who claim that when morality and self-interest conflict, it is always rational to choose according to self-interest. The chapter has been abridged somewhat to satisfy copyright requirements.
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Pragmatic Reasons: A Defense of Morality and Epistemology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) defends sophisticated version of pragmatism, resting on a novel account of strategy-based (as opposed to act-based) cooperative rationality. It shows that we can give a genuinely pragmatist account of morality and epistemology, while denying that truth is mere usefulness and maintaining the connection between truth and objectivity. The sophisticated pragmatist approach is particularly fruitful in that we can justify a range of important practices, including our practices of moral and epistemic evaluation, |
