Is Ethical Normativity Similar to Logical Normativity (original) (raw)

Ethics, Knowledge, and Rule-Following: A Pragmatist View

Starting from a pragmatist point of view the paper dismisses the argument that ethical conduct is always based on knowledge of justifying and applying rules. In a first section I show that Plato and Kant already claimed that the originality of the ethical can’t be represented as either propositional knowledge or a norm, but is instead given to us in a way that is never fully available for our rational grasp. In a second section, I will address the ethical conclusions James and Dewey draw from the fact that ethical demands can’t be translated into forms of knowledge. In a third section, I conclude with an argument for the originality of the ethical based on the thoughts of Stanley Cavell, stating that it is always something more than a mere competence in the sense of a knowledge of rules.

Assessing Moral Rules: Utilitarian and Kantian Perspectives

Philosophical Issues

There has always been some disagreement about the importance of principles and rules in morality, but in recent years the disagreement has sharpened radically among philosophers. Traditional thinkers of many kinds, natural law theorists, intuitionists, Kantians, and even utilitarians, emphasized the need for moral principles and rules that are publicly acknowledged, deliberately taught, and socially enforced. Despite significant differences, there seems to be broad agreement on the main content of many of these principles. Respected philosophers associated with virtue ethics and particularism, however, have challenged these common assumptions, arguing on various grounds that the role of principles and rules in a moral life has been grossly exaggerated. Some of the objections stem from abstract metaphysical and epistemological considerations. Others express the more practical moral concern that traditional ethical theories have neglected the significance of judgment, character, and particular context in determining what is best to do. Wittgenstein's followers emphasize the limits of guidance by explicit rules as opposed to values inherent in ongoing social practices. Elizabeth Anscombe led many to suspect that modern ethical theories employed legalistic ideas of ''obligation'' that make no sense apart from theological beliefs of an earlier age. These are all important challenges, but not my concern in this essay. Here I take up another major source of doubt about moral rules and principles: the common perception that ruleutilitarianism, the most prominent contemporary type of rule-oriented ethics, is subject to devastating objections. My plan is to revisit some of these objections, for I suspect that the objections to rule-utilitarianism are also seen as reasons to doubt any normative ethical theory that is similar in giving a prominent role to publicly affirmed, deliberately taught, and socially enforced rules and principles.

Logical normativity and individual accountability: remarks on Peirce's perspective

Cognitio Revista De Filosofia, 2010

Peirce's philosophy seems quite uninterested in tracing a "theory of the subject" understood as a possible foundation for both theoretical and ethical truths. Rather, Peirce stresses the importance of comprehending the event of signs as an original possibility to get in touch with truth. Of course this implies also a metaphysical position but Peirce-taking any possible distance from the Cartesian philosophical style-does not want to allow for any metaphysics of subject.

Introduction to Ethical Theory

What makes right actions right and wrong actions wrong? This draft text surveys some of the more influential attempts to answer this question in the history of Western philosophy.

What Makes a Reasoning Sound? C. S. Peirce's Normative Foundation of Logic

Transactions of The Charles S Peirce Society, 2012

The immediate purpose of this paper is to expound C. S. Peirce's conception of reasoning as he refined it in his mature reflection on the normative sciences and their hierarchical relations (the dependence of logic on ethics and, in turn, that of ethics on esthetics). In order to clarify adequately Peirce's position, however, it is helpful to consider his rejection of Christoph Sigwart's attempt to ground logical soundness in subjective feeling. What is at stake in this debate is nothing less than Peirce's endeavor to articulate a thoroughly pragmatic understanding of truth, not simply his commitment to argue against subjective approaches to logical questions. Accordingly, the ultimate purpose of this paper is to shed light on the problem of objectivity. From a pragmatist perspective, there is an essential relation between an affectively involved agent and a deliberately conducted, successful inquiry. This alone secures the possibility of objectivity in the only form in which finite, fallible agents can hope to attain or, at least, approximate this ideal.

Presentation. The affinity between logic and ethics

The presentation of this issue aims to reflect on the professional, research and publishing schemes in which we are immersed in the guidelines and imperatives of the time, centered on a neoliberal form of thought that has sometimes led people and institutions acting without the necessary discernments so that their actions would not be based on the principle of the common good. The first part contains the object of such reflection, and the articles in the second part of this issue have, inadvertently, the resonance of a logical-ethical blend.

The Origin and Growth of Peirce’s Ethics

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

's first account of ethics was enunciated in the second half of the 1890s, when he was almost sixty years old; and it was quite dismissive (CP 1.50, 1896). 1 His second, positive view of ethics came shortly after (CP 8.158, 1901). The fact that it took Peirce many years to write about ethics and that he changed his mind in a relatively short period of time perhaps explains why his moral writings have not been taken seriously. 2 This picture, however, has been recently challenged by a group of scholars who developed a growing interest in Peirce's normative thinking. 3 The purpose of this paper is to offer a distinct contribution to recent attempts to understand Peirce's normative thinking. I want to trace the growth of Peirce's thinking about ethics from dismissing it as a "useless" and "dubious" kind of knowledge to reviewing it as a major philosophical concern; and to illustrate my argument I will show how his conflicting positions appear to correlate with his theory of the categories. While a diachronic approach will be necessary to correct some efforts to resolve the The Origin and Growth of Peirce's Ethics

The Origin and Growth of Peirce’s Ethics: A Categorical Analysis

The purpose of this paper is to offer a distinct contribution to recent attempts to understand Peirce’s normative thinking. Scholars have interpreted the real tensions in Perice's normative thought by conflating passages from different moments in the development of his philosophy. Extracts from Peirce’s famous 1898 lectures (when he dismissed ethics as useless) are frequently combined with later passages from 1902 onwards, when he changed his mind. This paper proceeds by tracing the growth of Peirce’s thinking about ethics and correlating his conflicting positions with his theory of the categories. The approach offered here is diachronic. A diachronic approach is necessary to correct some efforts to resolve the inconsistencies in Peirce’s moral theory. Also, a categorical account is understood as essential to perceive the inner coherence of his moral philosophy and to support the view that Peirce moved from a nominalist to a realist position in ethics. By connecting Peirce’s conceptions of ethics to his theory of the categories I hope to have provided a better understanding of the structure of his normative realism.

NORMATIVITY WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF PLURAL REASONS. THE APPLIED ETHICS REVOLUTION

Aahrus: NSU Press, 2007

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Preface Chapter I From the death of ethics to the normative turn Twentieth century ethics after the death of ethics Three Diagnoses of Death for Ethics And one Prognosis of Resurrection with Transfiguration The anti-normative turn: the Anglo-Saxon version And the Continental version Chapter 2 From the Normative Turn to the Controversy between Utilitarianism and ‘Deontology’ 1949-1958: freeing moral discourse from the “third person” 1958: From Moore’s anti-naturalism to Anscombe’s, Geach’s and Foot’s anti-anti-naturalism 1958: Baier’s way from metaethics to normative ethics: 1958: Lewis’s discovery of Apel’s performative contradiction 1966: Searle’s infringement of Hume’s Law 1960-1983: The Continental Normative Turn and the rehabilitation of practical philosophy 1960-1983: The Continental Normative Turn and discourse ethics 1936-1981: Utilitarianism redivivus 1971-1998: a resurrection of several kinds of ‘deontological’ ethics The new controversy between Utilitarians and Kantians and the emergence of a third way Theoretical and Practical reasons for the revival of practical philosophy A few intermediate considerations Chapter 3 The applied ethics revolution Conscientious Objectors and Ethical Committees The methods of Applied Ethics The New Political Philosophy qua Applied Ethics A slightly odd example: development ethics Applied ethics is not ethics applied Applied ethics is a ‘Kantian’ approach for non-Kantians Applied Ethics is Deliberation Applied Ethics is Reverse Subversion Applied Ethics is a Gift from Zeitgeist A provisional moral The first chapter tries to reconstruct a plot, or a hidden agenda, in the twentieth-century ethical discussion. It singles out two starting points for the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental discussion, to be identified with the philosophies of Sidgwick and Nietzsche, both supporting some kind of ethical scepticism. It discusses how far the diagnosis formulated by Karl-Otto Apel of a ‘parallel convergence’ between Existentialism and Analytic philosophy in separating facts and values and thus justifying ‘decisionism’ is useful in making sense of the agenda of the discussion. The second chapter discusses the reasons for two parallel U-turns at about 1958 which brought back to the forefront two traditional schools of normative ethics, Kantian and Utilitarian, and the reasons for criticism from the heterogeneous alignment of virtue ethicists. The third chapter discusses the phenomenon of emergence of ‘applied’ ethics from the Seventies, the reasons, both theoretical and political, for the revival, the point to which applied ethics may look like a grand return of casuistic and natural-law ways of thinking, and the difficult coexistence between general normative ethics and procedures to settle issues reasonably while ethical dissent is as alive as ever.