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Truth, Pragmatism and Morality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2013

David Wiggins
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Abstract

1. Hilary Putnam's conception of ethics is not best understood as a form of ‘moral realism’, but as a position consequent upon the pragmatist understanding of the relation between truth and rational acceptability – ideas that Putnam argues are not confined to laboratory science. Just as our conception of the visible world is founded in reason as informed by sense perception, why cannot our moral notions appear to reason itself as that is shaped or informed by our situation and our nature, our vital needs and our capacity to respond to those needs through the invention and refinement of ethical notions? In following out this proposal, I try to show how well Putnam's conception of rational acceptability can consist and cohere with the constraint upon enquiry that C. S. Peirce calls ‘secondness’. 2. Putnam writes ‘we invent moral words for morally relevant features of situations, which lead to further refinements of our moral notions’. Enlarging on this claim, the paper reconstructs some of the ways in which human beings can arrive through a practical reason of the unforsakeable at an ethos – a shared way of living – and at what Putnam calls ‘a moral image of the world’. 3. The paper then sets out some of Putnam's conclusions concerning agreement and disagreement, the supposed dichotomy of fact and value, the supposed problem of the perception of value, and the implausibility of Lionel Robbins's claim that economics and ethics can have no closer relation than mere juxtaposition. 4. In conclusion, the paper touches upon the merits or demerits of the very idea of a ‘moral reality’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 351 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2013 

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References

1 See Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (London & Cambridge Mass: Penguin and Harvard 2008)Google Scholar, Chapter Eleven.

2 See Peirce's essay ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’, Pt 4. (This essay is the second of a series of which the first is ‘On the fixation of belief’, referenced at note 8 below.)

3 And attend even to Frege's doubt that the rainbow ranks as an object of public reference. See his essay ‘Negation’ at page 376 in Gottlob Frege: Collected Paper in Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy, (ed.) McGuiness, Brian (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1984)Google Scholar. I must add that it will not matter decisively if the rainbow fails to qualify as a good instantiation of Putnam's more general contention.

4 In Our Knowledge of the External World (London, Allen & Unwin 1914)Google Scholar Bertrand Russell pointed to the validity of the following argument. I note that Putnam's pragmatist, rather than temporize (as others have) with Russell's conclusion, will deny the physicists their title to issue the comprehensive ruling that makes up their second premise.

5 Tendencies that reason is ill-placed, I remark, to disapprove – and without which there would, I suggest, be no Homo sapiens.

6 Before it is afforced or enriched in all these ways, this is reason more or less (see my Ethics: Twelve Lectures on The Philosophy of Morality, 37 fn 4, and section 2.11) as Hume conceived it in his quarrel with Reason as his predecessors Clarke, Cudworth and others conceived it. For the addition of solidarity to the other tendencies mentioned above, see my ‘Solidarity and the Root of the Ethical’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 71/2009, 239–269.

The affinity will not escape notice between the way we attempt here to link morality with truth or fact, and the way in which John Mackie sought in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977) to keep them apart. For a friendly comment on this situation, see my op. cit. Ethics: Twelve Lectures, 330. Indeed like many other philosophers I am much indebted to Mackie's work.

7 On the indispensability to practical thinking of the idea of non-hypothetical need, see my ‘Claims of Need’ in Morality and Objectivity, (ed.) Honderich, London: RKP 1985Google Scholar, reprinted in Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford, OUP), 1987, 2002. See also Ruth Anna Putnam ‘Creating Facts and Values’ in Philosophy, vol 60, April 1985. For the idea of a vital need, one which we simply cannot forsake, see Ethics, Twelve Lectures, op. cit., 329.

8 Peirce also demands that this external permanency be something ‘on which our thinking has no effect’. (See vol 3, 253–5, in The Writings of C. S. Peirce: a Chronological Edition, (ed.) Fisch, M., Cloesel, C., Hauser, N., (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1982Google Scholar)). But we can satisfy this demand, I suggest, by insisting not that we cannot refine or reshape our idea of our need (for we do so constantly) but that our thinking can never take away from the reality of our unforsakeable need itself or remove the originary source of our striving.

On secondness more generally, see further Misak, Cheryl, Truth and the End of Enquiry: a Peircean Account of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991)Google Scholar, 83.

9 For ‘reasonable,’ see Hume Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals IX.1 (Selby-Bigge, 276).

10 See Enquiry into the Principles of Morals v. 1 (Selby-Bigge, 186):

‘Every man's interest is peculiar to himself and the aversions and desires that result from it cannot be supposed to affect others in like degree. General language, therefore, being formed for general use must be moulded on some more general views and must affix the epithets of praise and blame in conformity to sentiments which arise from the general interest of the community.’

11 Let me try to indicate how there is indeed that prospect: It is one thing to maintain, as did John Stuart Mill in chapter 16 of Considerations on Representative Government (1861), that: ‘a portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist among them and any others – which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government and desire that it should be government by themselves, or a portion of themselves, exclusively’. It is another thing to hold, as Carl Schmitt held, that politics is prior to and transcends all order, transcending the state as well as law, and that ‘the basis for all political activity and impulses is the distinction between friend and enemy’. (See The Concept of the Political [1932] trans G. Schwab, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press 1976, 20, 26–27, 35. Here I am much indebted to Cheryl Misak.) It is yet another thing, a third thing, having reached such a point in Nazist thinking to seek to implement such ideas not from scratch and on a virgin continent but in despite of the most fundamental prohibitions that the rational development of morality can provide. For these last, see my ‘Solidarity and the Root of the Ethical’, op. cit. at note 6 above.

12 It will widen the appeal of this form of words, I hope, if I remark that it forced itself upon me before Cheryl Misak and Hilary Putnam made me appreciate more fully the merits of pragmatism as a philosophy of enquiry. See my Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: OUP 1987, 2002), Essay V, Section 10.

13 Putnam rightly credits this insight to John McDowell and to Iris Murdoch, reporting McDowell as saying that in order to apply an ethical term it is necessary, regardless of what else one is attempting, to feel or know the appeal of the relevant ethical point of view and to know how to identify with it. See Putnam's Philosophy in an Age of Science (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard 2012), 295.

14 See Twelve Lectures op. cit., 76 note 6, and 175–76, citing Hume's words ‘Natural may be opposed either to what is unusual, miraculous or artificial’ and deriving from these words three possible meanings for ‘non-natural’ in order then to focus upon the third. See also section 11 below.

15 Compare the position that W.D. Ross really occupied. On this see my Ethics: Twelve Lectures, 334 note 14.

16 See further Ethics: Twelve Lectures, 332.

17 Those who insist on the priority of needs among human interests are not compelled to insist that human needs enjoy absolute priority over every other kind of concern. See my ‘Nature, Respect for Nature and the Human Scale of Values’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol 100, 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. (The correct text is given only in the bound Proceedings.)

18 For the locutionary and the illocutionary see Austin, J. L.How to do Things with Words (ed.) Urmson, J.O. (Oxford, OUP 1962 and 1975)Google Scholar.

19 See Lovibond, Sabina ‘Reply to McNaughton and Rawling’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104 (2003–4) 185–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also my Ethics: Twelve Lecture, 378–80. Nor is Putnam obliged by his position to enter the disobliging parenthesis about the non-natural. The non-natural is integral to the answer to Williams which was offered at Section 8 above.

20 Indeed, in other connections, Putnam insists that ‘all evaluation presupposes description’. See page 70 in his Philosophy in an Age of Science, (eds) De Caro, M. and Macarthur, D. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University 2012)Google Scholar.

21 Nor is that how Sabina Lovibond arrives at the conclusion Putnam reports Conant and Blackburn as criticizing from page 36 of her book, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Oxford, Blackwell 1983)Google Scholar.

22 So there is no proposal here to revive a correspondence theory of truth. Such particular ‘realities’ can never play the role that fact/facts have to play in the correspondence theory. For it is the particular truth that imports the relevant reality, not the other way about. Rather than say that the statement is answerable to that particular reality or fact, it might be better to say that the reality or fact in question is singled out only through the mediation of a true sentence that points to it.

23 See Ethics: Twelve Lectures, 76, also 327.

24 This text derives from a lecture given at the Fifth International Lauener Symposium on Analytical Philosophy in Bern in June 2012 dedicated to the work of Hilary Putnam and marking the award to him of the Lauener Prize for lifelong achievement in Analytical Philosophy. A longer version of the article with a reply by Putnam will be forthcoming in 2013/14 in M. Frauchiger (ed.) Themes from Putnam (Lauener Library of Analytical Philosophy, (eds) W. K. Essler and M. Frauchiger, volume 5) (Berlin, Boston, Peking: Walter de Gruyter).