Academics label belief in unqualified right and wrong, my third major thesis, “moral objectivism,” and in one version or another it represent the majority view of professional philosophers.2 So too in common understanding; although when pressed to do moral theory many might give lip service to a nonobjectivist position, most people, most of the time, act and speak as though some acts really are wrong, some really right.3 I am with the majority of both philosophers and others in holding that there are true and false moral judgments, but believe the only credible philosophical framework for moral objectivism includes a pragmatic conception of justification. The position I develop I call “Rationalist Pragmatism,” and I hope to justify the name in due course.4
Lastly, while there are many different formulations of a moral “golden rule,” from the Golden Rule, through Hutcheson’s “Greatest Good for Greatest Number,” to Kant’s “act only in accord with universalizable law,”5 I will argue that the principle of “No Double Standards” best comports with the metaethical structure that houses moral truth.
The skeleton of that structure is briefly described: morality is rationality between persons; rationality is the effective pursuit of goals guided by justified beliefs; beliefs are justified when they are known, beliefs can only be known if they are objective, and objectivity is achieved when all persons’ goals are taken equally seriously. The attempt to flesh out this skeleton is made in chapters 1 through 5. The subsequent chapters explore the moral implications of this theoretical framework.
I remain ambivalent about the ordering of the chapters. I’ve a taste for wanting to do first things first, and am inclined to think of definitions, presuppositions, and their immediate implications as first things. Hence metaethics before ethics. “As a philosopher, true to form, I begin a discussion of content by looking at form.”6 However, those with limited patience for the abstractions of metaethics may choose to start with the normative discussions of chapters 6–8, and, should they find the moral principles delineated there appealing, might find themselves more inclined to examine the supporting metaethics of the first five chapters.
At the end of his preface to the first volume of The Origins of Political Order Francis Fukuyama defends his engagement as a nonspecialist with areas of specialist inquiry in which he, unfamiliar with the primary sources, is inexpert and therefore vulnerable to error.7 Fukuyama, however, thinks the value of synoptic and comparative history is worth the potential loss of precision and nuance. The present book is premised on an analogous judgment regarding philosophy. I can hardly claim deep knowledge of the specialist philosophical literature in epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, action, or even some niches of ethical theory—all areas I nonetheless touch upon because they are relevant to this book’s ambition. Prudence might recommend scaling the ambition back rather than plunging into waters whose shoals and tides I have not mastered. Yet philosophy, perhaps more than any other intellectual endeavor, calls for such recklessness. No region of philosophical inquiry is self-contained. It is not merely that different philosophical specialties rub up against each other at the boundaries, but rather that core questions in every area involve taking, often unacknowledged, positions in other areas. What makes this especially troublesome is that those unacknowledged positions are usually highly contested. A biologist can make her case on the role of a particular gene secure in the knowledge that all of her intended audience accepts that natural selection can create adaptations, but no theoretician of beauty can safely assume her readers come with a common view of truth and goodness. Hence, philosophy stands in particular need of both attempts to tie things together and efforts by its practitioners to lay out their metaphysical and epistemological cards, even if the game is putatively restricted to moral theory. This I try to do, knowing that treating of a large topic and laying out those cards has me playing in fields whose recesses I haven’t thoroughly explored. I write in the hope that the intricacies of specialist arguments and distinctions that I am ignorant of, or positions I take with a minimal defense, although surely making the project needful of some elaborations and modifications, will not prove fatal to it.
A further justification for risking naïve mistakes by attempting breadth has to do with the mission of philosophy. There is a special imperative in philosophy to seek broad understanding, which, after all, is philosophy’s central aspiration.8 Uncontextualized philosophical findings are worse than useless; they are pure scholasticism. While it is not every philosopher’s job (at least not all the time) to fit their inquiries into a larger context, setting the highly detailed, exquisitely narrow, professional philosophical investigations into larger contexts is the only way to realize their value—the only way to explain why minutely focused philosophical work matters.
Finally, presenting a broad view is worth doing in a small book that has a chance of being read by those who, although interested in the subject and willing to endure the abstraction, density, and obsessive analyses of serious philosophy, are unwilling to devote months to the massive tome which would be required to dot every specialist i and cross every technical t implicit in a large thesis (not that complete thoroughness could ever actually be achieved). This small book that stakes out many philosophical positions in service of a large thesis is the result of these considerations.
A philosophical view of some complexity is most perspicuously presented in provisional pieces that are revised in the course of assembly. Objections will occur to even the most sympathetic reader as the unrefined cogs and springs of the view make their first few appearances. Serious objections for some readers will doubtlessly survive full assembly, but I hope that as the ideas are developed, polished, and integrated, many naturally arising objections will be addressed. In the end you may have sufficient reason to reject my view, but I plead for some patience before you reach that judgment.
After an introductory apologia for my method, I will begin my sermon proper with the subject of the hoped for justification, the self. I write in the firm conviction, as fundamental as any I have, that there are other selves, and in the somewhat less firm, but still strong, conviction, that many of those other selves share my interest in self-justification. Morality, like sanity, begins in the rejection of solipsism. Moral philosophy begins in the belief that some of those other selves want, as I do, to do the “right” thing, if there is such a thing.
Belief that there are other selves that share an interest in self-justification is more than an initial assumption; it is, in Kantian terms, a transcendental condition of the entire endeavor. The justification of myself to myself must travel through others, for the justification is not a Popeye-an “I am what I am”; rather it is the Spike Lee-an “I do the right things,” and, to be real, this rightness requires others. More of this to come, but the upshot is a quest for “moral objectivism,” a morality that is the same for me and you, all of you.
I do not doubt that a careful reader, and certainly one with specialist knowledge, will have little difficulty finding mistakes. But the book would be considerably more error prone had it not been for helpful friends and colleagues. Rationalist Pragmatism was largely written during the tenures of Mickaella Perina and Christopher Zurn as Chairs of the University of Massachusetts/Boston Philosophy Department, and they did their utmost to make it a place conducive to philosophical reflection. Nelson Lande’s persistent urgings stimulated much of the department’s philosophical life from which I benefited. Many members of the department attended lunch talks where early versions of chapter 2, sections 5 and 6 were discussed. Those meetings generated a number of useful suggestions, as did a presentation of chapter 2, section 3 to a group of UMB philosophy alumnae. Steven Levine and Jeremy Wanderer were generous with their knowledge and time when I needed guidance on an issue in pragmatism or semantics. I am grateful to all my UMB colleagues and students for their contribution to this work.
Joel Greifinger read an early partial draft, and his always sharp observations were of general help, but most particularly his comments caused me to engage more seriously with Habermas, and to realize I needed to explain how my idealized epistemology would function in nonideal contexts (chapter 4, section 7). Hadass Silver also read an early draft and persuaded me that the issue of measuring the value of competing goals required the substantial