Rationalist Pragmatism. Mitchell Silver

sincerely held moral standards. She can of course claim to have no moral standards (although that is not the typical relativist position—it is more the amoralist one) and so no view on the matter.²⁶ But a standard-less life is not an easy one, for without standards, there are no means of evaluating actions, and yet to live one must act. Indeed, a standard-less being would hardly qualify as an ongoing agent; she would enact an endless stream of rationally unconnected whims, as if she has no good, only impulses. Without standards, she acts not because she judges anything worthy of achievement, but only because she (with or without reflection) finds herself nonrationally driven toward some ends and not others. As a purely theoretical stance, the abjuring of any practical standards puts a relativist in the position of holding that her relativism has no moral implications whatsoever.

      The relativist might object that her life isn’t without standards, only without moral standards. But if her standards do not evaluate and recommend action, they are practically vacuous, and if they do, they are moral standards despite her demurral. However, even if one granted (which I do not) a conceptual distinction between morality and practical rationality,²⁷ any metaphysical grounds for rejecting moral standards would apply with equal force to any standards of practice. If there is nothing you ought to do, there is nothing you ought to do.

      Alternatively the relativist might (indeed usually does) admit having moral standards, and perhaps say her standards take torture to be wrong, but her relativism requires her to acknowledge that your standards, which are tolerant of torture, are no less true than her own. This may not prevent her from being seriously committed to her standards and the wrongness of torture,²⁸ but it is then a commitment without any rational foundation, and her condemnation of torture reflects standards which she takes seriously but which she thinks you have no reason to take seriously. Although not as difficult as being without standards, having to act with utmost seriousness on standards you believe no more correct than those which support contrary actions also saps the will. But if the relativist does not really take her standards seriously, she doesn’t really hold those standards. To truly hold moral standards as a relativist one has to experience one’s judgments as both righteous and ultimately arbitrary. Not an easy psychological trick.

      Still, in spite of the difficulty of living a relativist life, indeed even were it impossible to live as an ever-mindful relativist, we would have to acknowledge its (or amoralism’s) truth if we could not provide a credible alternative account of how there can be moral principles revealing of moral truth.

      4. A Pragmatic Approach to Recognizing the Truth

      A pragmatic theory of recognizing true beliefs—which is independent of a pragmatic theory of truth’s meaning or essence—claims that truth is known by its fruit.²⁹ We recognize a belief as true because holding it is, all things considered, helpful to achieving our goals. ³⁰ You are ultimately justified in believing that the cat is on the mat, not because you have certain visual evidence (it looks like the cat is on the mat), and testimony (your companion reports that the cat is on the mat), but because, when you believe the cat is on the mat, you successfully locate the cat. If in spite of appearances and all reports, upon wanting to pet the cat, you did better by going to the chair than to the mat, you would be more justified in believing that the cat was on the chair than on the mat. Many of one’s firm beliefs discount certain experiences as illusory and certain testimony as mistaken. The most justified belief is the one that proves more serviceable than its competitors.³¹

      This unrefined initial sketch of a pragmatic theory of justification is prey to obvious counterexamples. An old story about Jake, the winner of millions of dollars in the lottery, exemplifies the simplest. When asked how he came to play the winning number of 14300, Jake replied that he had dreamt of 120 diamonds dancing with 120 pearls. He multiplied the pearls and diamonds and chose to bet on the product—14300. When told he was in error, that 120 × 120 = 14400, not 14300, he replied, “So, you go be a mathematician!”

      It would appear that Jake’s belief that 120 × 120 = 14300 better helped him achieve his goal of wealth than the alternative belief that 120 × 120=14400. But it would be rash to conclude that a pragmatic theory of justification must thereby designate the first belief to be more justified than the second. Consider the larger story: Jake’s belief, if consistent with his approach to arithmetic, would result in a steady stream of beliefs that ill served him. Others who had any quantitative dealing with him would think of him as an idiot. He would quickly be cheated out of his new wealth. His faulty tax returns could land him in jail. We could hardly expect him to be a successful investor. Every purchase he made would pose a danger. And if we try to imagine him an otherwise competent arithmetician, with this singular idiosyncratic belief, his prospects are no better. We make him into a man with no cognitive commitment to consistency, no belief in the basic principles of inference, no need to see how things fit together. It is difficult to think of him as successful in achieving his goals. Indeed, the belief that we take to be true is the one that would best serve him, namely that although 120 × 120 = 14400, he was fortunate to have had a different belief when choosing his lottery number, but that he could not expect to succeed in the future by maintaining the belief that 120 × 120 = 14300. If objectors reply that, nonetheless at the moment that Jake was choosing a lottery number, 120 × 120 = 143000 was the optimally successful belief, then again they are wrong. The most successful belief would have been “dreams do not foretell winning lottery numbers, 120 × 120 = 14400, and although I have no ground for choosing one 5 digit number over another, I expect 14300 to win and will act accordingly.” Such a belief would best help Jake achieve his goals. It would certainly leave him with the same lottery winnings.

      Jake’s story points us toward the refinements that are part of an adequate pragmatic theory of recognizing truth. First, goal achievement isn’t a one time, at one instant, matter.³² More significantly, people have many goals and many beliefs, and therefore, although beliefs are the core carriers of truth, they carry it as a collective. Sets of beliefs are the things in which truth is fundamentally found or found wanting. More accurately, sets of beliefs are the things which are more or less justified, and a single belief’s claim to truth derives from its contribution to the justifiability of the set of beliefs of which it is a member.³³ The set is defined as all of the beliefs currently attributable to a believer. The beliefs that the cat is on the mat and 120 × 120 = 14400 tend toward truth insofar as they increase the justifiability of the set to which they belong. A belief is justified because it makes the set of beliefs it is part of more justified. And it makes the set of beliefs more justified not merely because of its inherent properties, but rather because of its contribution to the set’s effectiveness, which will depend, in the first instance (but not solely) on the other beliefs in the set. It might be useful to believe the cat is on the mat while believing the mat is in the bedroom, but less useful to believe the cat is on the mat while believing the mat is on a cloud.

      Your belief set’s usefulness also depends on factors external to the set, including other believers belief sets. The effectiveness of believing that you will meet Jake at 2 p.m. at the diner depends in large part on what Jake believes. Ultimately, the justifiability of a belief depends on all of reality, for a set of beliefs justifiability is determined by its effectiveness at achieving goals, and that effectiveness is affected by which goals are pursued and the context in which they are pursued. Considered in isolation, no belief is justified, because it has neither coworkers with which it might work well or poorly, nor a mission that defines the quality of its work. And workability, according to pragmatism, is the measure (which is different than the essence) of a belief’s truth.

      The denigrator of morality in the relativist mode might argue that this pragmatic theory of justification makes his case. Justification depends on effectiveness, and the measure of effectiveness is success at achieving given goals. Therefore, the measure of a belief’s truth will vary with the goals of the believer. If sets of belief are justified not because they match reality, but because reality empowers those belief sets relative to a set of goals, then there is no single set of beliefs that are absolutely justified, no description of the world that is justifiable independently of any set of goals. This appears to be a rejection of the notion of objective justification, because goals always are someone’s. Insofar as beliefs’ justification depends on goals, they are only subjectively justifiable, justifiable relative