Rationalist Pragmatism
Philosophy of Language: Connections and Perspectives
Series Editors: Margaret Cameron, Lenny Clapp, and Robert Stainton
Advisory Board: Axel Barceló (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas), Chen Bo (Peking University), Robyn Carston (University College London), Leo Cheung (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Eduardo García (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas), Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern University), Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California), Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University), Catrina Dutilh Novaes (Vrije University Amsterdam), Eleonora Orlando (University of Buenos Aires), Claude Panaccio (University of Quebec at Montreal), Bernhard Weiss (University of Cape Town), and Jack Zupko (University of Alberta)
Philosophy of Language: Connections and Perspectives comprises monographs and edited collections that explore connections between the philosophy of language and other academic disciplines, or that approach the core topics of philosophy of language in the Anglo-American analytic tradition from alternative perspectives. The philosophy of language, particularly as practiced in the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy, has established itself as a thriving academic discipline. Because of the centrality of language to the human experience, there are myriad connections between the core topics addressed by philosophers of language and other academic disciplines. The number of researchers who are exploring these connections is growing, but there has not been a corresponding increase in the venues for publication of this research. The central purpose and motivation for this series is to address this shortcoming.
Titles in the Series
Rationalist Pragmatism: A Framework for Moral Objectivism, by Mitchell Silver
Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God?, by D. E. Buckner
Rationalist Pragmatism
A Framework for Moral
Objectivism
Mitchell Silver
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ISBN 978-1-7936-0539-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-7936-0540-5 (electronic)
To
Joel M. and Joel G.
for nigh half a century of dialectic marbled with ironic laughter.
Contents
Introduction: Ideal and Nonideal Moral Theory
3 Others
4 Meaning, Morality, and Social Agreement
5 Morality’s Motivational Powers
6 No Double Standards
7 Our Morality
8 Political Implications
Appendix: On Weighing Goals
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
I start with the urge to preach, to say what is right and what is wrong. The impulse is less didactic than self-justificatory. I want to think of myself as good. For me, this desire shares psychological and philosophical space with the desire to think of myself as rational. Goodness and rationality, although hardly the whole of my character ideal, comprise its central and essential substance, and so I seek reasons for commitment to my idea of goodness, in the hope that the idea will endorse the goodness of Reason, thereby laying a virtuous circle as the foundation of my ideals.
This book of self-justification aspires to make clear the compatibility of my character ideals by demonstrating that a good person can be a rational person. Indeed, its loftiest ambitions aim higher; I want to show that a rational person must be a good one. However, this view has long, and recently with renewed vigor, been challenged. Some challengers say Reason is as comfortable with amorality as it is with morality. Others go further, denying that morality can have any place in a fully rational outlook. In what follows I want to take on these challenges. I want to preach goodness using Reason as scripture so that I may be justified in my eyes.
The self-justificatory impulse of this book, if its argument has merit, can only be satisfied by an objectivist morality. Justification, responsibility, mutually recognizing selves, truth, and rationality are the central concepts that enable self-justification by enabling standards for judging conduct that we correctly apply to all selves—an objective morality. Objective morality makes self-justification possible. Whether my argument for objective morality is motivated by a noble or neurotic desire for self-justification is an issue beyond the manifest topic of the book. But readers can infer what they will.
Some things are right and some things are wrong. In this book, I will mostly be concerned with how that is possible. Only if it is possible that some things are right and some are wrong can we sensibly attempt to sort out which is which. The sorting of right from wrong is named “normative ethics,” and inquiry into the nature of normative ethics is termed “metaethics.” The division is not quite that neat, for a metaethics always has normative implications. A significant motive for writing this book is my belief that faulty metaethics may empower defective normative ethics. I will defend four major claims in what follows: (1) We recognize the truth of a set of beliefs by its utility. (2) The recognition of truth is fundamentally social. (3) Moral beliefs are potentially true. (4) The best articulation of the most general moral truth is “Actions should be judged by a single set of standards.”1
The first claim is in the pragmatist tradition, and while pragmatism has seen a resurgence of interest and advocacy among professional philosophers, it remains a minority view. Common understanding distinguishes even more sharply between what we should accept as true and what is useful to believe.
The second claim has been maintained and variously developed by philosophers and social theorists for