Morality and Ethics in the Work of Charles Peirce

Abstract

Abstract Peirce began the study of ethics once he realized that logic was a normative science and needed the guidance of ethics for a comprehensive account of reasoning. Given the state of ethics, Peirce sided with the eighteenth-century moral sentimentalists that moral sentiments and instincts were a more reliable guide to practical life. Nonetheless, Peirce pursued a science of ethics with the hope that its proper study would prove useful to logic and the conduct of life. Although Peirce never completed a systematic account of ethics, the argument here is that a good picture of his thought emerges from his writings. Based on the divisions of his logic or semiotic, the outlines of an ethics grammar, critic, and rhetoric can be formulated, one that provides interesting insights about morality, relevant to current debates in metaethics.