Normative Ethics After Pragmatic Naturalism (original) (raw)
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Philip Kitcher: Moral Progress (ed. Heilinger)
Moral Progress, 2021
Philip Kitcher develops the pragmatist approach to moral philosophy he began in his book The Ethical Project. He uses three historical examples of moral progress—the abolition of chattel slavery, the expansion of opportunities for women, and the increasing acceptance of same-sex love—to propose methods for moral inquiry. In his recommended methodology, Kitcher sees moral progress, for individuals and for societies, through collective discussions that become more inclusive, better informed, and involve participants more inclined to engage with the perspectives of others and aim at actions tolerable by all. The volume is introduced by Jan-Christoph Heilinger and contains commentaries from distinguished scholars Amia Srinivasan, Susan Neiman, and Rahel Jaeggi, and Kitcher’s response to their commentaries.
Democratic contractualism. Philip Kitcher’s pragmatic account of moral progress
Philip Kitcher: Moral Progress, 2021
The present small volume contains a large project: Based on the assumption that a better understanding of past instances of progressive moral change is crucial for making urgently needed current and future advances in morality "more systematic and more sure-footed" (p. 11/internal reference/) 1 , Philip Kitcher develops a novel understanding of moral progress as change in belief and conduct, change that solves problems and overcomes limitations in living together. He analyses the dynamics of progressive change, including its main impediments, and proposes a complex methodology of moral inquiry, guiding how individuals and communities should go about realising more such progress. Challenged by constructive criticism from Amia Srinivasan, Rahel Jaeggi and Susan Neiman, also included in the present volume, Kitcher concludes with a spirited defense of his vision of a society shaped by institutions that invite and promote progressive change. The discussions on moral progress are part of Kitcher's ambitious project of a "reconstruction of philosophy" in a pragmatist spirit that he has initiated in a number of articles, several of which can be found in the collection Preludes to Pragmatism. 2 Furthermore, his important book, The Ethical Project, has further set the scene with a first 1 Page numbers in paranthesis refer to the current book.
PHILIP KITCHER'S PRAGMATIC NATURALISM: HUMAN CONVERSATION AS THE ONLY ETHICAL AUTHORITY
Philip Kitcher, by considering ethics to be a human invention, situate the objectivity and universality of ethical norms on humans (as subject), not on some extraneous factors to man (a divine being or some moral authorities).In his book,The Ethical Project, Kitcher systematical present 'ethics' as a social technology that liberates us from the difficulties of human predicaments.He gave a naturalistic account of how we came to have ethical project.In this article, we shall give a critical exposition of his discourse in ethics, and examine various suggestions made by scholars like Connor, towards the possibility of situating the origin, truth and progress of ethical claims on human activities over the ages.
Can Kitcher Resist the Mere Change View in Metaethics
In The Ethical Project, Kitcher argues for a pragmatist picture of ethics. That is, our ethical standards developed through evolutionary processes, which respond to external constraints; and, furthermore, there are moral progressions leading towards an upward trend. The development of behavioral and psychological traits in hominids, Kitcher claims, contribute to ethical progress. He demonstrates this by providing descriptive examples from history. We think Kitcher’s project is ambitious, and that there is much to appreciate in the detailed descriptions and normative arguments. However, one challenge to Kitcher’s approach is the mere change view, that is ethical laws disseminate through processes having no connection to truth, progress, or knowledge. We argue that Kitcher’s argument does not adequately meet this challenge.
Analyse & Kritik, 2012
There have been many genealogies of ethics. Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project stands apart in its ability to incorporate the insights of earlier genealogies while avoiding their oversights and mistakes. In this essay, I compare and contrast Kitcher’s genealogy of ethics with two contemporary alternatives, those offered by Frans do Waal and Richard Joyce. Comparing Kitcher’s genealogy with these alternatives makes it easy to highlight his most useful contribution to our understanding of the origin of ethics: the idea of ethics as a social technology. I conclude by identifying an oversight of Kitcher’s own genealogy, a significant way in which the function of ethics-as-a- technology has been transformed from its origin to today.
Kitcher’s Revolutionary Reasoning Inversion in Ethics
This paper examines three specific issues raised by The Ethical Project. First, I discuss the varieties of altruism and spell out the differences between the definitions proposed by Kitcher and the ways altruism is usually conceived in biology, philosophy, psychology, and economics literature. Second, with the example of Kitcher’s account, I take a critical look at evolutionary stories of the emergence of human ethical practices. Third, I point to the revolutionary implications of the Darwinian methodology when it is thoughtfully applied to ethics.
Self-Conceptions and Evolution: A Critical Comment on Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project
Conceptus, 2009
This paper provides a critical comment on Philip Kitcher?s as yet unpublished book The Ethical Project. In the first part it explains why Kitcher?s position is naturalist as well as pragmatist. In the second part it is argued that the role ethics plays in human history is richer than Kitcher conceives it: Building on his view, this paper suggests that ethics not only provides a mechanism to diminish the risk of social conflict and social instability, but it also enables the emergence of self-conceptions. This reveals according to what processes certain particular changes occurred in the evolution of ethics.
Analyse & Kritik, 2012
Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project trios to vindicates ethics through an analysis of its evolutionary and cultural history, a history which in turn, he thinks, supports a particular conception of the role of moral thinking and normative practices in human social life. As Kitcher sees it, that role could hardly be more central: most of what makes human life human, and preferable to the fraught and impoverished societies of the great apes, depends on moral cognition. Prom this view of the role of the ethical project as a social technology, Kitcher derives an account of moral progress and even moral truth: a normative analogue of the idea that truth is the convergence of rational enquiry. To Kitcher’s history, I present an anti-history. Most of what is good about human social life depends on the expansion of our social emotions, not on our capacities to articulate and internalise explicit norms. Indeed, since the Holocene and the origins of complex society, normative thought and norm...
Beyond the Hall of Mirrors: Naturalistic Ethics Out of Doors
Steady engagement, over the last decade or so, with the classical pragmatists has led Philip Kitcher to develop a position he calls “ethical pragmatic naturalism.” Ethical pragmatic naturalism has three legs: an anlytic history, and metaethical stance, and a normative position. The first two of these extend and expand pragmatist, especially Deweyan, insights in novel and illuminating, if not entirely unproblematic, ways. In particular, we are offered a plausible, naturalistic account of how our species moved from its pre-ethical state to where it is today, as well as a metaethical account that takes progress, rather than truth, to be primary. The normative position, developed on the basis of the analytic history and metaethical stance, attempts to combine a refined version of Adam Smith’s theory of “social mirroring” with Deweyan moral experimentalism. I contend that Kitcher’s focus here falls too heavily on the cognitive dimensions of the ethical project, overemphasizing efforts of rule-formation, the alleged construction of an internalized “impartial spectator,” and an experimentalism construed primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of thought experiments. Consequently, Kitcher’s position hews far more closely to the traditional picture he is ciritcal of than it does to the revolutionary Dewey he claims as inspiration. I suggest that Kitcher’s position would be strengthened by a more robust construal of experimentalism, grounded in Deweyan habit, that puts greater emphasis on reconstruction of environing conditions as a crucial part of our toolkit for progressive change.
Moral Progress in the History of Moral Norms
In his recent book The Moral Arc (2015), Michael Shermer makes an admirable case for the occurrence of moral progress at the social level. Society-level moral progress occurs when a change in the norms, practices, and institutions of a society constitutes a moral improvement, relative to the way that the norms, practices, and institutions were before. Shermer argues compellingly that society-level moral progress has taken place with the decline of witch executions, the pacification of international affairs, the rise of democracy, the abolition of slavery, the extension of equal rights to women and homosexuals, and increasing support for animal rights. However, the huge body of historical and sociological information that Shermer draws on will likely fail to convince a proponent of what Philip Kitcher calls the mere-change view (Kitcher 2011: 138 – 140, 210). This is the view that changes in norms, practices, and institutions can never be moral progress, because there is no objective standard by which such changes may be evaluated as resulting in a state of affairs that is morally better than a previous state (Kitcher 2011: 210). As Kitcher aptly quips, the mere change view amounts to the thought that social changes are “simply one damned thing after another” (Kitcher 2011: 7). Against the mere-change view, I shall argue that moral progress does indeed occur, and moreover that it can be understood as increased success in achieving the end of a moral enterprise. The end of a moral enterprise is a state of affairs favored by selection pressures which govern the historical evolution of moral norms. Such an end can be identified through sociological inquiry of the kind that Shermer and others pursue.