Pragmatism and Moral Knowledge

Abstract

In the last twenty years there has been a dramatic revival of interest in the idea that there can be genuine moral knowledge. The noncognitivist assumptions that dominated so much twentieth-century ethical theory no longer seem the obvious truths they once did to so many thinkers. It is now common to hear the claim that moral values are genuine constituents of the furniture of the world - or at least of its upholstery- and that moral deliberation and judgment legitimately aspire to truth. Morality, it is frequently argued, is a realm of discovery rather than invention, and moral reasoning, and the play of moral imagination, must be constrained by how the moral facts stand.Such “realist” or “cognitivist” views in ethics take many forms. This essay considers whether a pragmatist account of moral knowledge might fruitfully be developed. My project will recommend itself only to those who believe that pragmatist insights serve to support relatively robust conceptions of truth and justification.