Normative Ethics After Pragmatic Naturalism (original) (raw)

Philip Kitcher presents an ambitious account of pragmatic naturalism that incorporates an explanatory story of the emergence and development of ethics, a metaethical perspective on progress, and a normative stance for moral theorizing. This article contends that Kitcher's normative stance is incompatible with the explanatory and metaethical components of his project. Instead, pragmatic naturalists should endorse a normative ethics that is experimental, grounded in practice, and acutely aware of cognitive and informational limitations. In particular, the ethical project would benefit from endorsing empirical work on participatory democracy for the identification of mechanisms to guide us on deep moral conflicts. In The Ethical Project (2011), Philip Kitcher seeks to show how humans have invented and continued to refine ethics over time in response to human problems. The task of moral philosophy is not to identify an ethical reality or to articulate a valid procedure for identifying basic moral principles. Instead, Kitcher reframes ethics using an analogy to technology. This analogy supports a functional account of moral progress: ethics is a process of inventing mechanisms, institutions, and techniques for more effectively overcoming altruism failures. Kitcher articulates an important research project, but his normative theory clashes with his metaethical and explanatory accounts of ethics. My purpose in this article is to show that his normative ethics is incompatible with pragmatic natu-ralism and to suggest that a better path forward draws on empirical work on participatory democracy that provides a promising research framework for the identification of mechanisms to guide us when confronted with moral conflicts. In the first section, I outline the structure of Kitcher's analytic history. Second, I turn to his metaethical account of progress and raise the concern that apparent moral progress is "mere change." The third section presents Kitcher's normative ethics, and the fourth section criticizes it on the grounds that it is inconsistent with his analytic and metaethical theories. bs_bs_banner