Ahmed engages the constructive metaethical part of TPM through one of the elements developed in the historical portion: the role of regulative assumptions in our inquiries, including our moral inquiries. This is a welcome engagement; one of the reasons that Peirce plays such a large role in TPM is that his pragmatic repurposing of Kantian regulative assumptions is a core element of the naturalist model of inquiry for which the classical pragmatists are arguably best known. As Ahmed rightly observes, “These assumptions are neither utilitarian nor deontic in nature, concerned with neither moral actions nor consequences, but rather frame-setting.” While regulative assumptions set the frame, within our shared frames, we find that certain reasons stand as invariant, allowing us to generate principles to live by.

This is where the critical question arises: “If Heney’s theory is meant to answer to human practices, we might justifiably ask how it is to apply when these practices are actually carried out. Indeed, it is for the adherence of action to invariant reasons that we embark on moral inquiry at all.” Ahmed notes that while invariant reasons against a type of action seem readily enough to be action-guiding, there is an “asymmetry” with invariant reasons in favour of a type of action. While vice operates one way, it may seem that virtue operates in another: “The question emerges as to how the ‘correctness’ of moral action is to be measured, if it is to be measured at all.” This is welcome pressure: metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics make contact at the point of principles, but we may well wonder whether we really can come to agreement about not just what to avoid, but what to pursue—and how.

It is interesting to see this point about practical efficacy couched in the language of virtue and vice, which Ahmed develops from the work of Stangl—while the limited examples that I offer (abusiveness; depravity; justice) do lend themselves to this interpretation, I did not intend to tip my hand toward some normative ethical theory rather than another. At the level of reasons, an invariant reason to act in a certain way could be neutral as between underwriting a duty, as an input into a consequentialist calculus, or as exhorting the agent toward virtue.

On the exhortation-toward-virtue interpretation, we run into a problem of assessment.1 Ahmed interprets Stangl’s work on deontically variant virtues as revealing that “there are multiple manners by which we can act in certain contexts that are conducive of virtuous ends”—or, as Rosalind Hursthouse has put the point, virtue can be modeled as a “multi-track disposition.”2 When we are called to action rather than prohibited from action by the presence of an invariant reason, we may want to know how to assess the resulting performance. But how are we called to action by adopting a principle like act justly? As Ahmed says, it is “difficult to measure the degrees to which different actions adhere to those invariant reasons, if they adhere at all.”

The solution that Ahmed sketches is one that I have, perhaps predictably, considered: we could leave it to the community to decide. Truth is group work; we have no reason to expect any one of us to see clearly whether justice demands one action more decisively than another. I have long thought of pragmatism as furnishing us with epistemic grounds for cosmopolitanism: to do better, we need to know better; to know better requires knowing together.

A quandary swiftly arises: we have to sort out “the community”—no easy feat! The idea of letting “the” community decide may quickly become the idea of pursuing an overlapping consensus of the sort Rawls favoured in part, it has always seemed to me, to avoid making truth claims.3 There is some question as to whether that satisfies the quest for truth—and while that quest is not to be conflated with the quest for certainty, I have argued that our moral inquiries are marked by cognitive aspiration. Peirce frames the need to move past fads toward inquiry proper as a need that we feel when we come to realize that our earlier methods could not secure the stability we seek in our beliefs. It is for the sake of improving our own beliefs that he would have us inscribe “every wall of the city of philosophy” with his famous slogan: “Do not block the way of inquiry” (CP 1.135).

Yet we do not live in the city of philosophy. When considering real, rather than ideal communities, we must confront the fact that not all communities are epistemically reliable, and that conversation across epistemic communities that have accidentally or deliberately become insular is fraught.4 This is not by any means to say that there are no steps to made forward in sorting out “the community,” and here I can say at least a little in the direction of picking up the gauntlet that Ahmed has (very politely) tossed down. I take the prospects of what I would term regulative realism in metaethics seriously: at least part of what should inform our moral judgments is minds-independent.5

As to satisfying the melioristic aspect of inquiry, I find compelling resources in both classical and contemporary pragmatism for how we might improve our communities both epistemically and morally speaking. Jane Addams’s brilliant writings on daily life at Hull House offer a persuasive demonstration of what we might learn when we let go of the idealization of epistemic peerhood as a marker of the most philosophically illuminating cases of disagreement, and take seriously the friction of disagreement rooted in difference.6 Elizabeth Anderson’s arguments for integration of “groups that mark significant lines of social inequality” and concrete recommendations for experiments in living speak directly to efforts to enrich and improve our understanding of our communities and ourselves.7

Ultimately, I would take Peirce’s injunction as a good working slogan: “It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community” (CP 2.654).

References

Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics. 1902. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

———. Second Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: Macmillan, 1930.

———. Twenty Years at Hull House. 1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Anderson, Elizabeth. The Imperative of Integration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Dostie Proulx, Pierre-Luc. “Early Forms of Metaethical Constructivism in John Dewey’s Pragmatism.” Journal of the History of Analytical Philosophy 4.9 (2016).

Hursthouse, Rosalind. “Virtue Ethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/.

Mayorga, Rosa Maria Perez-Teran. “Peirce’s Moral ‘Realicism.’” In The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce, edited by de Waal and Skowronski. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–6, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Vols. 7–8, edited by A. Burks. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1931–58. Cited as CP, plus volume and paragraph number.

Rawls, John. “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7.1 (1987) 1–25.

———.  “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14/3 (1985) 223–51.

Stangl, Rebecca. “Asymmetrical Virtue Particularism.” Ethics 121.1 (2010) 37–57.

TPM aims to develop a core phase of the history of American pragmatism, which offers a set of underrated resources for engaging contemporary questions in metaethics. As I noted in the preface, “The balance that I strike between historical inquiry and contemporary interventions may continue to seem too historical to some metaethicists and insufficiently historical to some scholars of American pragmatism” (xix).

Koopman is pressing me on the historical angle, for the frame I set in delineating what I talk about when I talk about pragmatism looks exclusionary from his perspective. In his words: “There is at least one philosophical controversy about which the book is rather quiet but which one might otherwise have expected it to take up explicitly: the debate concerning the status of neopragmatism within the history of pragmatism.” As Koopman rightly notes, this was a “design decision” on my part, and thus fair game for critical engagement. The pressure point, on his reading, is the frame that I construct around the label “classical pragmatism.” But it bears noting that Koopman and I share a willingness to try to strike a balance between historical inquiry and contemporary engagement—for his concern is that declining to integrate neopragmatism into the historical arc cuts my contemporary work off from “the full range of critical resources” available. Thus, I interpret Koopman as suggesting the following: for the interventions I seek to make in contemporary metaethics, neopragmatism may actually be a better fit.

Let me first simply agree that the historical frame with which I work in TPM has consequences for harnessing (or refusing) certain amendments to pragmatism from the era of the linguistic turn. The arc from Peirce to Lewis is of crucial importance for my metaethical moves in part 2, and that is why I chose to work with that arc—which is admittedly a phrase in a much longer symphony. I tried to acknowledge this in the preface, noting that the “timeframe is intentionally inexact,” and that “any attempt to assign an endpoint to the classical phase of pragmatism is also arbitrary” (xii). The inclusion of Lewis—disputed by some scholars of American pragmatism—already shifts the goalposts back into the 1960s. Though I would reject the claim that I present pragmatism as having run “its complete course in the first half of the twentieth century,” I do omit close consideration with neopragmatism in the historical portion of the book. I believe that Koopman and I would agree that the rumours of pragmatism’s death have been greatly exaggerated, but perhaps our agreement runs out when we turn to consideration of which live (neo)pragmatist options are the most fruitful. I take Koopman’s position seriously: my “design decision” was a tactical error if the best resources for my own positive projects are actually elsewhere in the pragmatist tradition—namely, in neopragmatism.

In short: I think that they are not. And here’s why: the effect of the linguistic turn as a modifying influence on pragmatism cuts against the strain of pragmatism that I have found most effective, one which insists, as Peirce himself said, on developing ways of engaging with a concept “symmetrically” (CP 8.218). For example, when we consider a concept like “truth,” we can engage with it along three dimensions: we can seek mastery in our grasp of the concept, we can seek clarity in our definition of the concept, and we can seek pragmatic understanding of the concept by our investigation of its use in practice.

The linguistic turn which Koopman nicely articulates as “ushered into a pragmatist key” by Sellars, Quine, and Rorty takes the third mode of engagement most seriously. For the linguistically-oriented neopragmatist, the other modes of engagement may be abandoned entirely as objectionably representationalist; such a thinker would say that there is nothing beyond linguistic practice implicated in the investigations internal to our language games.

While it is true that I devote relatively little space to Rorty and very little to Sellars and Quine, I regard Huw Price—the subject of chapter 5.6—as the most prominent current voice in the pragmatist key working on metaethics from the language-first angle. In principle, a symmetrical inquiry can start anywhere, and there is nothing wrong with going language-first if questions arise for us as urgent at that level. Our linguistic practices can certainly be weight-bearing, and thus give rise to the need for justification in order to be sustained.1 Nonetheless, language-only would seem to cut us off from that for which we have linguistic practices in the first place. When we sacrifice symmetry for an exclusive focus on linguistic practice, we run the risk of throwing reality out with the representationalism. I have made this argument elsewhere,2 and continue to hold that the regulative roles Peirce ascribed to the most widely shared ideas help to make inquiry what it is: a truth-directed and melioristic process.

This brings me, albeit briefly, to the two philosophical amendments that Koopman suggests I might have made on the basis of a deep engagement with neopragmatism in the second half of the twentieth century. First, given the thoroughly pragmatist aim of making “it possible for criteria of normativity to be publicly observable and socially shareable,” I should consider whether “language better than experience satisfies such desiderata.” And second, given my shift toward practice in the second part of the book, I should consider whether what does the work in my own account is neither experience nor language, but conduct instead.

I have said already as to why I do not favour an account that starts and ends with linguistic practice. Neither, ultimately, does Koopman—and so we may be in greater sympathy than my response thus far suggests. For he closes by offering up his own “conduct-pragmatism,”3 which—in perfectly pragmatist fashion—offers a third way between focusing on language or focusing on experience, focusing on practice and action.

One sticking point may be in what to make of the phenomenology of moral deliberation, which I take it pulls in our experiential relation to the practice of such deliberation, and not merely in an experience-as-evidence way. It is true that such deliberation is a practice, but it is also true that it is what it is in part because of how it feels to us—or so I have tried to argue. I would also repeat, from a different angle, what I said of representationalism and reality above in response to the language-first suggestion: at present, I am inclined to think that we must focus both on practice and what practice is for—dealing with the world in which we find ourselves, trying to go along and get along in a reality that is not always as we would like it to be.

That said, I do note the primacy of pragmatism both in the preface (xii) and in the closing chapter (144), and so to a great extent Koopman’s suggestion that my arguments rely on a pragmatist concept of practice is a point well-taken. Moral judgment is a practice that we engage in regularly, and perhaps I took the importance of its being a practice too much for granted. In fact, I do think of my approach—in TPM and beyond—as practice-first. The animating spirit of this approach in contemporary metaethics is nicely articulated by Peter Railton in his work on normative guidance, where he suggests that “we should probably try more often to work from the inside of agents, from their centers of mass as agents and moral beings.”4 While Koopman and I may continue to disagree about the relative importance of experience and reality, I suspect that this disagreement is against a background of deep agreement about working “from the inside.”

References

Heney, Diana B. “Reality as Necessary Friction.” Journal of Philosophy 112.9 (2015) 504–14.

Koopman, Colin. “Conduct Pragmatism: Pressing Beyond Experientalism and Lingualism.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6.2 (2014) 154–74.

Manne, Kate. “On Being Social in Metaethics.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, 8:50–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–6, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Vols. 7–8, edited by A. Burks. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1931–58. Cited as CP, plus volume and paragraph number.

Railton, Peter. “Normative Guidance.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, 1:3–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Talisse, Robert B. “Sustaining Democracy: Folk Epistemology and Social Conflict.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 16.4 (2013) 500–519.

Thanks for these thoughtful replies, Diana. I find your thoughts illuminating with respect to the various philosophical options on the table. Let me pose a follow-up question in light of these lines in your reply: "One sticking point may be in what to make of the phenomenology of moral deliberation, which I take it pulls in our experiential relation to the practice of such deliberation, and not merely in an experience-as-evidence way. It is true that such deliberation is a practice, but it is also true that it is what it is in part because of how it feels to us—or so I have tried to argue."

I agree that this is a sticking point, and perhaps one that suggests that there may be different questions central to your metaethical contribution to pragmatism than those I would myself foreground for a pragmatist ethics.

In short, my puzzlement is over your claim that it matters much how deliberation (and presumably other features of the moral life) *feels* to us. I can see how an account of such feelings in the moral life would be relevant to a descriptive phenomenology of ethics. But I had not taken that to be your project (or at least the center of it), nor would I take it to be the center of gravity of a Peircean pragmatist approach to ethics, nor (most importantly) would I take it to be the appropriate center of gravity for a project in ethics. I take the more appropriate center of gravity to be with concerns about the normative statuses of the contents of moral deliberation. Those concerns are where we find the difference between philosophical reflection on the moral life and just so happening to be a moral agent whose various actions can be described upon reflection to be possessed of various normative statuses.

If the normative status of moral acts are the appropriate center of concern for philosophical ethics, then it seems to me that how the moral life *feels* definitely has to take a backseat. Because it seems to land us squarely in subjectivism (unless feelings are by default social and shared, which I don't take you to have claimed with your argument that they are capable of a more social dimension than we sometimes assume). That would be a strange place to land for a Peircean, since most pragmatists who are attracted to Peirce's moral theory want a robustly objective account of vital matters, and see Peirce as an attractive alternative to a subjectivism they locate (wrongly, in my view, but that's a separate matter) in James (and even in Dewey).

The fuller argument for why feelings are not sufficient to account for the normative status of our moral practices is, on my view, all wrapped up in what I discussed above under the heading of the linguistic turn. In your reply, you offer many fine reasons as to why a language-only or even a language-first methodology would be insufficient. I think you and I agree on these. However, I take from linguistic pragmatism (and the linguistic turn more broadly) a crucial negative lesson about experience (and such things as experiential feels), namely that experience by itself is insufficient to account for the normative status of any content of any practice. So while language-only cannot get the philosophical job done, it does establish an important requirement that I am convinced we ought not transgress (at least until someone can show that it is not a requirement and that awareness by itself can confer normative status).

Thanks for your further reply, Colin! Two thoughts in response:

1) It seems that we agree on this much: language alone cannot adequately explain the normative status of our practices. You caution that experience alone also cannot – I agree. But I am concerned with a different lesson about experience than the negative one you refer to.

While I agree with you that we should be fallibilists about whether our own experiences play the justificatory role they may seem to assume in their immediacy (at least, that is what I take to be the negative lesson you refer to), it is experience itself that best supports such a stance. As James said in “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth”, “Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas”. Peirce expressed a similar idea in his articulation of the brute force of experience (using the painful example of being punched in the face while walking down the street contemplating idealism), and in his criticism of Hegel – who Peirce said “has usually overlooked external Secondness, altogether. In other words, he has committed the trifiling oversight of forgetting that there is a real world with real actions and reactions” (CP 1.136).

Experience, when recalcitrant and immune to our redescription, reminds us that we are embedded in a reality larger than – as David Foster Wallace put it – our own skull-sized kingdoms. Or, as Scott Aikin more recently put it, the given ain’t a myth, and pragmatists can live with that. We can live with it, I think, in part by taking seriously Peirce’s careful investigation of the ways in which experience involves interpretation. Just as he insists on a symmetrical development of grades of clarity in conceptual analysis (e.g. as applied to ‘truth’), he maintains the inseparability of the elements of experience – the ‘thisness’ of what is experienced, the brute impact it has on us in experience, and the interpretative structures we bring to bear.

Experience is a source of justification for beliefs – otherwise, we would have no reason embark on inquiry. Nonetheless, beliefs underwritten by experience may turn out to be false, and so enshrining the force of individual experience as a normative standard on grounds of something like that such experience is self-evidently representationally accurate would be a mistake.

So: if neither language nor experience alone is sufficient to explain the normative status of moral acts or the truth-aptness of moral judgements, yet each is necessary, together they may be on the way to jointly sufficient. This is where I also find myself intrigued by your conduct pragmatism. Conduct in the widest sense of ‘doings’ includes linguistic doings, but more besides – and how to understand the ‘more besides’ as providing legitimacy for our shared practices of moral praising and blaming is, I think, what you and I are both interested in.

2) That brings me to the interesting point about the place of descriptive phenomenology in ethics. Andrew Howat had posted a quite detailed comment here which has now vanished, so I’ll refrain from adding to it until it (hopefully!) pops back up. In any case, what I had primarily been concerned to show is that ethics as an enterprise can appropriately modeled as an area of inquiry at all. This is why I used throughout the lens of the truth-aptness of moral judgments, rather than the normative status of acts – the former is the coinage for cognitivism, while the latter skirts closer to debates in realism/anti-realism/quasi-realism.

When we consider the question “is ‘doing ethics’ in the sense of first order normative ethics really inquiry?”, the focus on phenomenology is consistently Peircean. The impetus to inquiry is in how we feel, in real doubt and not the paper variety. In “Fixation”, the initial story of how we come to the method of inquiry is naturalistic and descriptive. So my concern about how deliberation feels to us is to argue that we put ourselves in the position of inquirers in the moral domain, and in doing so, we take on the regulative assumptions that guide all inquiry. Far from leading us into subjectivism, the phenomenology of moral deliberation includes experiences of real and disruptive doubt, which leads us out of tenacity and into inquiry with its objectivist aims.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed to this thus far - I'm really enjoying the exchanges, as I did Diana's excellent book. I have two things to add. First, a point about applying historical scholarship to contemporary debates, and second, a point about moral phenomenology.

I think Prof. Koopman does an excellent job in his opening reply of describing a predicament very familiar to me, and no doubt to Prof. Heney and many other scholars like her - that of being caught between two philosophical worlds. I wonder if we can also add that this feeling is not an accident, but a product of concerted collective (though perhaps unconscious) effort. That is, in my experience, philosophers tend to be particularly tribal and territorial creatures (and this is perhaps most acutely true in relation to distinctions like analytic vs. continental vs. pragmatist). This entails that being taken seriously by a philosophical community or audience, typically necessitates narrowing one's focus and methodology to the point where a project like Heney's - the application of historical scholarship to contemporary debates – risks seeming inherently transgressive, because it crosses borders that scholarly communities prefer to see rather rigidly enforced as a gate-keeping mechanism. As a result, a project like this typically upsets one or both nations - either it upsets the history scholars because it's perceived to distort classical pragmatism by applying it to contemporary issues (or by connecting it with analytic philosophy, which many still seem to consider its mortal enemy), or it upsets the contemporary philosophers by forcing them to contend with history at all.

To the extent that Heney's project is disruptive and transgressive in this way, I applaud it - I like to think it is supplying the very 'irritation' of doubt that spurs healthy inquiry, on Peirce's view. Though I think Koopman is right that it often means having to do twice the work, Heney's work inspires me to keep plugging away at this task, because she proves it can be so fruitful and productive.

------

Re: phenomenology and its relevance to meta-ethics. I don't think it's un-Peircean to give phenomenology an important role here - just look at where phenomenology sits in Peirce's classification of the sciences to see how important he thinks it is.

Moreover, I anticipate Heney might want to point out to the role that phenomenology plays in her compelling commentary on Price's 'Truth as Convenient Friction'. Why can't pragmatists just do away with metaphysics and with reality entirely, as Price and other neo-pragmatists have often encouraged us to do? Heney's response is roughly this - because the phenomenology of error involves an 'outward clash', a bumping up against an 'external permanency', something that is unaffected by what we think about it. This is how Peirce defines and motivates the need for our concept of reality (see Robert Lane's excellent new book for more on this), i.e. it's grounded (at least as I read  Peirce) in his phenomenology (specifically, the category of secondness).

Thus, if we see the phenomenology of secondness also cropping up in our *moral* experience, that seems extremely telling - that looks like the surest sign that there is the same kind of robust objectivity available in the moral domain as in any other domain of inquiry. As Heney acknowledges, this might seem like a question-begging first move, so much more clearly needs to be said. But it's still a pretty vital one for getting the metaethical project off the ground (and it's something the non-cognitivist has to explain *away* if their position is to be compelling, per Heney p. 92).

Diana and Andrew, you both raise excellent points in your replies. Thanks for carrying the conversation forward.

My sense, at this point, is that we are at something of an impasse, and surely a most interesting one. Whenever I hit this particular impasse, I don't know what to do with it, or how to move things forward, so let me just try to state how I see the clash, and then perhaps one or both of you can offer thoughts on the next step(s) one might take here.

The impasse can be put vis-a-vis this thought from Andrew's post: "the phenomenology of error involves an ‘outward clash’, a bumping up against an ‘external permanency’, something that is unaffected by what we think about it."

To my mind, that is an interpretation of an experience, but not something that experience itself requires us to endorse. For the interpretive assumption guiding the idea here is that there is an "error" involved rather than a "disagreement" (even a disagreement between myself at two different times). Now, I'm not denying that there are errors, but I do deny that error is something that we can just read off of a phenomenology (my account would see errors as always embedded in epistemico-practical contexts).

Thus, I would disagree with James when he says, as quoted by Diana in her erply, that experience has a way of "making us correct our present formulas.” If James means by this that experience by itself makes us do anything epistemic, then that is precisely what I deny. (Can experience be a part of a broader epistemico-practical ensemble that makes us correct ourselves? Yes, of course, but then experience matters locally according to the ensemeble, and not universally and by default in the way that classical empiricists and even most pragmatist empiricists want.) So on my view, experience does not possess of itself any "brute force," as Diana puts it.

To sum up, I find that I can't make much sense of the idea of a 'brute force' or 'making'-power or 'clash' that you two seem to want to attribute to experience and experience taken by itself. Why not? Because even in the kind of case that would seem to many of us extreme, it seems to me that experience does not 'compel' in the demanded sense. Consider: sometimes experience would seem to force us to revise our beliefs on pain of death. And yet, sometimes in some of these very situations people do choose to die (be it because they believe in something greater or perhaps they just do not want to go on). What are you going to say to them (or their followers or kin) then? Are you going to say, "See, experience proved him wrong, because he died." That seems to miss the point.

So the impasse I am at seems to be this. I do not see experience doing the kind of work that others attribute to it. Yet they presumably see experience doing this work (or else there wouldn't be the attribution). What, then, are we to make of that? What do we do when two people draw radically different lessons from and about experience? (That's, of course, my problem all over again.)

In any event, thanks in advance for any thoughts on moving forward from there.

I found this particular exchange very interesting to read through.
On the one hand, I found Prof. Koopman's question to Prof. Heney about how exactly experience might 'deliver' truth about normativity very challenging. On the other hand, as a Peircean myself I thoroughly endorse Prof. Heney's Peircean response (also echoed by Prof. Howat, I believe) that epistemic adjustments made subsequent to the shock of Secondness are how all inquiry happens, so why should this model not explain moral inquiry also? So how to reconcile these two positions?
It seems to me that Prof. Koopman's worries center around the (deontic) *modal* dimension to moral claims and thus at least in part echo Hume's old worry about how an 'ought' may be derived from an 'is'. This is an intriguing question to consider from with the pragmatist tent. If I may be permitted a Peircean excursus into the formal sciences, my understanding of Peircean modal epistemology is that only structural or diagrammatic reasoning can deliver any kind of necessary truth. (In the ethical case such reasoning would likely turn around consistency / inconsistency between behaviours a la Kant's categorical imperative.) BUT this does not take us away from experience (and so Prof Heney is ultimately correct) because Peirce held that we genuinely 'experiment' on diagrams.
James and Dewey would not doubt have a rather different approach to these matters!
In closing I would like (if time permits) to invite Prof. Koopman to say some more about what exactly he means by 'conduct pragmatism'. I find the term itself very attractive, but to invoke the Pragmatic Maxim, what would be an example of the view being put to use in a particular context?

Reference
Legg, Catherine. "The Hardness of the Iconic Must: Can Peirce's Existential Graphs Assist Modal Epistemology?." Philosophia Mathematica 20.1 (2012): 1-24.

Thanks, Cathy, for chiming in over here. I've found all the threads on this Syndicate symposium very engaging. I'll reply very briefly (short on time here).

With your claim that "only structural reasoning" can deliver the kind of truth at stake in normative claims (at least to the extent that those claims involve some kind of necessity -- which I think is sometimes the case though not always the case [complicating my own view much, I realize!]), I think you've pointed to everything I am hoping to secure in my argument. When you follow-up and say that "this does not take us away from experience," I think I can agree with that but still defend my position by suggesting that there are two different kinds of experience at stake here.

1. If experience is such a broad term (which you argue for in your book, Diana, so the question becomes "just how broad?") that even mental cogitations count as "experience" then I believe we are using the term in a way that makes it trivially true that experience plays a role in the normative exercise of reasoning. Even an arch-rationalist like Descartes in his winter cabin would count as arguing for experience in this sense.

2. One option then is to narrow "experience" to something more classical such that it involves sense-experience--in doing so we can even use a very broad concept of that (just not so broad to extend to all possible human consciousness). With this breadth of experience in view we can then ask the question I think of as the crucial one: when we are engaged in "structural reasoning" about the normative status of some belief, what role does experience play *as a possible content* in that reasoning? The important debate, I take it (though maybe part of the disagreement is over my placing possibly too much importance on this point?), is whether first-hand personal experience by itself can claim any status within such reasoning? My (Sellarsian/Rortyan/Brandomian) argument is that it cannot play any important role *by itself* but only in concern with a host of other practical material. So experience matters, but it matters less than an overall practical ensemble, which I try to capture with my perspective of a conduct-centered pragmatism.

Toward the latter, since you ask, I think the quickest answer is this: following the triad familiar to James and Peirce of thought, feeling, and willing/acting, we can ask, "which takes priority?" I follow the early James who says: willing/action! (But not the Peirce who disagreed with him, nor the later James who backpedaled.) An longer sketch of this is argument (including reference to James and Peirce) is available at this free online article of mine at EJPAP: /img/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Koopman.pdf (see pp.158-166; the first half is just ground-clearing).

In Kramer’s “Ethics and the Profession (A)Moral Philosopher,” he frames much of his engagement as a “metaphilosophical discussion.” I am responding in kind—meaning that what I say here gives context to TPM, rather than rehashing its arguments. I discern two lines of commentary in Kramer’s remarks: the first is an interrogation of the place of the ideal in ethical theory; the second is a consideration of what being truly melioristic in ethical inquiry requires. Together, they lead to Kramer’s appropriately pointed question: “Just what are [moral philosophers] supposed to be doing?”

Good question.

In short, I agree entirely with Kramer’s answer—“better”: moral philosophers are supposed to be doing better. I don’t mean better than other people morally speaking. Some rather notorious, though likely far from conclusive, studies suggest that ethicists are no better morally speaking than anyone else.1 At any rate, what I mean is better than we have done qua moral philosophers. I see this aim as best served by a two-fold approach: being better at moral philosophy requires understanding its history more thoroughly, including taking seriously a wider range of voices than has usually been represented in the canon of moral philosophy, and it requires bringing philosophy into contact with the urgent moral problems encountered in ordinary human lives. I suspect that Kramer will agree with me on both points, but let me say more so as to avoid taking that agreement for granted.

My insistence on a transformative role for an inclusive history of philosophy may seem self-serving, given my choice to spend half of a book about metaethics doing history of philosophy that predates the usual “starting point” of contemporary metaethics—or it may seem disingenuous, given that it was only half, and only four pretty well-known figures (and all men) at that. This is perhaps the moment to reiterate that I was, and am, perfectly serious about moving only toward a pragmatist metaethics in TPM.

The work of unpacking pragmatism’s resources for ethics more completely requires wider engagement in at least three senses of “wider.” First, it requires engaging more thinkers, especially those who have historically been relegated to the fringe of American pragmatism for one reason or another.2 Second, it requires more attention to what would nowadays be classified as normative and applied ethics. Setting aside the fact that the distinction between branches of ethics belies their intertwined nature, pragmatists have worked and do work in all of the nooks, crannies, and vistas of moral philosophy. Third, it requires more openness to what counts as relevant texts.3 The sheer volume of work implicated in an even halfway comprehensive accounting of the history of pragmatist moral philosophy presents a need for a book of precisely that kind4—and that is not the need TPM was designed to meet. Rather, I sought to demonstrate two things: that pragmatism has been underrated in contemporary metaethics, and that there are new ways forward in live metaethical debates when we enter into those debates equipped with pragmatist methods.

The insistence on contact between philosophy and the urgent moral problems encountered in ordinary human lives may be an easier sell. But the question then is “why metaethics?” As Kramer notes, “moral life will continue without our articulating it.” I have described metaethics as targeting the preconditions and presuppositions of first-order moral engagement—and one way to interpret that would be as targeting an articulation of the grounds or foundations of our shared moral life.

I can see two possible responses here. One would be simply to deny that metaethical inquiry has to be a search for foundations as apart from, or distinct from, practice. To an extent, this simple response is the view I put forward in TPM, where I regard the subject matter of metaethics—those preconditions and presuppositions—as “ineluctably bound up with . . . first-order engagement” (148).

The other would be to explore what could be meant by a purported grounding requirement. One way of understanding such a requirement is as a search not for foundations, but for explanatory relationships. On this way of thinking, grounding is not about entities, but rather about explanations. And on this frame—or so I submit—the type of articulation involved in second-order theory is not antithetical to pragmatism.

One last point that Kramer raises merits a direct response; this is his question about whether “a healthy ethics [can] be built out of separate domains with their own positive projects.” I do not see work across and between branches of ethics as investigations of separate domains, though they may be treated separately as one part of the terrain is under intense scrutiny while the surrounding landscape is in the periphery.  Here, I suggest we take inspiration from Susan Haack’s articulation of her practice of philosophy, which she describes as cultivating “peripheral vision – to be on the lookout, while […] working on one problem, for the way it bears on other issues.”5

Haack calls this a route “towards reconstruction in philosophy”, an invitation out of narrow sub-sub-specializations and into wider intellectual community.  It also strikes me an eminently reasonable way of being simultaneously a pragmatist and a professional philosopher, focused on both practices and problems.  What can we do but start where we find ourselves, and see how far we can get?  As George Santayana said, “If [the philosopher] begins in the middle he will still begin at the beginning of something, and perhaps as much at the beginning of things as he could possibly begin.”6

Here’s to meeting in the middle.

References

Dea, Shannon. “Deep Pluralism and Intentional Course Design: Diversity from the Ground Up.” Rivista di Estetica 64 (2017) 66–82.

Haack, Suan and Chen Bo (2016). “Towards Reconstruction in Philosophy: Chen Bo Talks With Susan Haack”.  Forthcoming, in Chinese translation, in Henan Journal of Social Science.

Kaag, John J. Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism: The Philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot. Lexington Books, 2011.

Santayana, George. Scepticism and Animal Faith. Dover, 1955 (1923).

Schwitzgebel, Eric. “Do Ethicists Steal More Books?” Philosophical Psychology 22 (2009) 711–25.

Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. “Socializing Democracy: Jane Addams and John Dewey.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences: 29/2 (1999) 207–30.

I realize I may have come off as a Diogenes (of Sinope) who used to call “Eukleides’ School (Scholēn) ‘bile’ (Cholēn) and Plato’s instruction (diatribēn) ‘a waste of time’ (katatribēn).”1 I do not mean to dismiss the situation we as professional philosophers find ourselves in today, nor demand of us that we immediately forsake our current situation for some kind of homeless cultural politics out in the wider world. As I have written elsewhere, I think the professionalization of philosophy was a necessary measure, and helped philosophy survive within the university.2 That said, I am concerned that professional philosophy (including but not limited to moral philosophy) has a dangerously scholastic structure of education, professional development, promotion, and tenure. Whether we like it or not, we all find ourselves talking to a rarified audience and it is sometimes quite difficult to see just what in our philosophical discussions has made a “difference that makes a difference.” If pragmatism is to be more than another dogmatic school of philosophy, it has to be affective for our lives, communities, cultures, and arguably civilizations.

You wrote that “…moral philosophers are supposed to be doing better…I mean better than we have done qua moral philosophers.” You then clarify that doing better moral philosophy than we have previously done as moral philosophers requires a more diverse and historical deep inquiry into moral philosophy’s history. We should also come into “contact with the urgent moral problems encountered in ordinary human lives.”

While, as you rightly suggest, I endorse such activities for moral philosophers, I am still left wondering how you would frame “the difference that makes a difference” about expanding the canon for our urgent moral situation.  I also am unclear what sort of “contact with our moral problems” you propose.

To put it bluntly: What meaningful place can and should professional pragmatist, moral philosophers have in helping to ameliorate our most urgent moral problems? As I suggested, a close study of the history of moral philosophy, such as Hadot’s broader studies of the Hellenic period, might give us suggestions of how philosophy has and can be a positive force in the shaping of our personal and cultural life.

To make matters more complicated, our urgent moral problems are ever more urgent. Yet, the ability of current civilization to develop ideally situated communit(ies) of moral inquiry, is increasingly strained. While I endorse us meeting in the middle, recognizing our limits within the current conception of professional philosophy, I grow increasing concerned about our ability to support progressive amelioration. Are their times where we cannot reasonably ameliorate ourselves out of crises? If so, and in such a situation, does the professional, pragmatist moral philosopher have to reconsider their place within cultural life? Does our vocation need to adjust? As you astutely note in your reply to Sabeen Ahmed, “[y]et we do not live in the city of philosophy. When considering real, rather than ideal communities, we must confront the fact that not all communities are epistemically reliable, and that conversation across epistemic communities that have accidentally or deliberately become insular is fraught.” In this age of authoritarianism, filled with fraught, ruptured, and insular communities, and in a time where hyper saturated symbols take predominance over reflection, the situation looks glooming for incremental moral progress.

You do give us some suggestions of where we might turn for models. For example, in your response to Ahmed, you note: “Jane Addams’s brilliant writings on daily life at Hull House offer a persuasive demonstration of what we might learn when we let go of the idealization of epistemic peerhood as a marker of the most philosophically illuminating cases of disagreement, and take seriously the friction of disagreement rooted in difference.” Yet it is not just Addams’ writings, metaethical, normative, and applied that are important here, but her very philosophical work itself, from which those conclusions were drawn. She was not in a university, did not have a tenure-track position, and she was not developing peer-reviewed research in philosophy, to be methodically organized in research journals and books. Her contact with urgent moral problems was through her service as part of a community of inquiry, “a school as social center,”3 as Dewey put it. Hull House was a site of ethical reflection, inquiry, and action. Her metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, were drawn from, and then informed, her work as part of a community of inquiry situated to advance moral intelligence.

Should the professional, pragmatist moral philosopher then be looking to make their own “Hull Houses,” (albeit often in more modest ways) or is a “wider intellectual community” in the academy all we can hope for? If the latter is the case, is that the kind of philosophy that can make a significant difference in our urgent moral situation?

References

Dewey, John. "The School as Social Center," in The Collected Works of John Dewey: The

Middle Works of John Dewey: 1899-1924: Journal Articles, Book Reviews, and    Miscellany in the 1902-1903 Period, and Studies in Logical Theory and The Child and    the Curriculum. Volume 2. Editor Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL:    Southern Illinois University Press, 1976.

Kramer, Eli. “Introduction: Richard Rorty as a Transitional Genre,” in Rorty and Beyond. Editors Randall Auxier and Chris Skowronski. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Forthcoming.

Laertius, Diogenes. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Translator Pamela Mensch. Editor James Miller. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Lynch, John. Aristotle’s School: A Study of a Greek Educational Institution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

Prof. Kramer offers a very sobering, yet, I believe clear-eyed critique of current institutional templates for 'knowledge-generation' as they find expression in many so-called "ethics experts" today. He presents a pragmatist call to re-envisage the work of moral philosophy as much more of a Socratic exercise: teaching ethics by leading people to *act better* in real concrete situations. Such a pedagogy must involve not just presenting those people with propositions about ethics that are true, but 'working on' them and their personalities.
This critique resonated with me. In my view, a deep irony perpetuates itself wherever pragmatist philosophers do not turn a critical eye on their current institutional arrangements (which in a recent book, also inspired by the ancients, 'Socrates Tenured', Frodeman and Briggle describe as "the great unthought of contemporary philosophy".)
Interestingly, Peirce also at one point (around 1902) stated of ethics that its progress must be not analytic but lived. He said, "...it is true that ethics has been, and always must be, a theatre of discussion for the reason that its study consists in the gradual development of a distinct recognition of a satisfactory aim. It is a science of subtleties, no doubt; but it is not logic, but the development of the ideal, which really creates and resolves the problems". (I discuss this quote in the recent book "Charles Peirce in His Own Words", referenced below)
Yet how to begin, and resource, this work of reconstruction in Philosophy is one of the most difficult practical problems in which I currently feel my life implicated.

REFERENCES
Frodeman, R., & Briggle, A. (2016). Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st-century Philosophy. Rowman and Littlefield.

Legg, C. in Thellefsen, T., & Sorensen, B. (Eds.). (2014). Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words: 100 Years of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition (Vol. 14). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, pp. 271-78.

Legg’s remarks takes as their focal point my choice of terrain in Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics, and her questions see clear to the heart of the project. They are questions I have asked myself, and Legg has framed them with an admirable clarity. My answers here are consistent with my views in TPM, but are rooted in my more basic commitments to pragmatism as a method.

First, Legg asks: “Does the very idea of a ‘pragmatist metaethics’ contain some essential tensions?” And second, “Is merely reflecting on our own moral debates sufficient to fully address ‘the preconditions (and presuppositions) of moral thought and discourse’?”

Second things first. In TPM, especially in chapter 5, “A Pragmatist View of Truth in Ethics,” I was much occupied by questions of explanatory adequacy. Pragmatists are unified, to the extent that we are, by tossing out the idea of certainty as our epistemic goal. If not certainty, then what? I say “truth.”1 This makes the question of what counts as an adequate explanation for accepting some proposition as true in the moral domain a question of critical importance to the plausibility of moral cognitivism. But as I suggested in TPM, a view of truth that can license continued endorsement of moral cognitivism should be, recognizably, a view of truth as we use that concept—not a theoretical construct gerrymandered for the purposes of working around standard metaethical puzzles.

Reflecting on our own moral debates can show us not only what our current positions are, but also what is acceptable as a defense of adhering to some position. One reason for being engaged at the level of the metaethical is that our first order judgments about conduct characteristically come packaged with other commitments—what I have elsewhere developed under the idea of “moral architecture.” So while I agree with Legg’s characterization that “ethical inquiry grows naturally from, is continuous with, and consists in nothing more than, the kinds of discussions about ethical questions that humans have always felt drawn to engage in,” for ethics to count as a domain amenable to inquiry means taking on board certain guiding principles and being as fallibilist about our moral judgments as any other assertions we might make. That we should take certain assumptions and attitudes into our normative business is an argument one makes from a metaethical stance.

The regulative assumptions that I develop in TPM concern truth and reality.2 To set aside those guiding principles for ethics would undermine the way that we do, as agents and inquirers, participate in discussions about the ethical questions we’re drawn to. As Peirce somewhat mysteriously remarks, “It so happens that I myself believe in the eternal life of the ideas Truth and Right . . . every idea has in some measure, in the same sense that those are supposed to have it in unlimited measure, the power to work out physical and psychical results. They have life, generative life” (CP 1.219). Made less mysterious: the ideas of truth and right—ideas which provide a backbone to moral cognitivism and generalism—are not mere abstractions, but inform our decision-making, our policy-making, and “work out” their results by constraining and informing much of what we do together. In the incomplete Minute Logic—a text for which Legg is a leading interpreter3—Peirce’s organization of the normative sciences suggests that what it is logical for us to do and what it is ethical for us to do are questions that can only be artificially separated.

Now, first things second. Does the very idea of a pragmatist metaethics contain essential—by which I take Legg to mean, unavoidable—tensions? If we thought that metaethics is a domain of philosophy where our commitments make no difference in practice, the answer would have to be “yes.” But I have rejected that supposition by arguing that our moral practices reveal that we have weight-bearing metaethical commitments. I continue to believe that the apparent tensions can be resolved in a philosophically—and practically—fruitful way; in a way, that has been my hypothesis in TPM and beyond.

Consider Brad Hooker’s thought experiment, urging us to compare a society of particularists (who think that there is no need, nor foundation, for any action-guiding moral principles) with a society of Rossian generalists (who think that there are exception-laden, but nonetheless action-guiding, moral principles).4 Those societies would operate differently, and a traveler’s guide on how to deal with the locals would provide different practical advice. Our conduct would be steered, were we wise, by what we knew about a community’s preconceptions and presuppositions about the moral domain.

Perhaps we don’t even need the thought experiment—ten years into teaching philosophy, I see sustained disagreement more commonly in my normative ethics classes than in any other class that I teach. What explains this? My students are bright and engaged, and generally want to make the world a better place. I hypothesize that the root of their disagreement is this: their views about what it takes to improve our moral judgments and our shared practices diverge along metaethical fault lines. Those who implicitly endorse something like emotivism think that improving our moral practices means the suspension of all censorious judgment; those who have allowed epistemic fallibilism to push them into wide-ranging skepticism wish that we could improve our practices but doubt whether we really can; and those who implicitly endorse generalism think improving our moral practices means clarifying and justifying the principles we rely on in our shared institutions.

I made a methodological gesture in the conclusion to TPM, which I think speaks to Legg’s call to think about how, as practicing, on-the-job pragmatists, we should approach an area where theory and practice may seem to stand very far apart: “When metaethics prizes its ascendency to the abstract and away from the problems of applied ethics or the calculus and casuistry of much of normative ethics, there is a real danger of losing sight of the interconnectedness of the branches of ethics,” and “pragmatism affirms that interconnectedness” (147). A pragmatist approach to metaethics matters, then, because it shows how deeply our implicit metaethical commitments structure and permeate our everyday moral lives. Legg’s closing remarks suggest that the difference between having defensible or objectionable metaethical commitments may come down to self-control in moral-epistemic matters, and I close here by simply agreeing with her: there is more work to be done in unpacking how we can live up to our pragmatist ideals.

References

Auxier, Randall, and Lewis Hahn, eds. The Philosophy of Richard Rorty. Library of Living Philosophers 32. Chicago: Open Court, 2009.

Dewey, John. “Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth.” Journal of Philosophy xxxviii.7 (1941) 169–86.

Hooker, Brad. “Moral Particularism and the Real World.” In Challenging Moral Particularism, edited by M. Lance et al., 12–30. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Howat, Andrew W. “Hookway’s Peirce on Assertion and Truth.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 51.4 (2015) 419–43.

Lane, Robert. Peirce on Realism and Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Legg, Catherine. “Logic, Ethics and the Ethics of Logic.” In Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words, edited by T. Thellefsen and B. Sorenson. Boston: de Gruyter, 2014.

Misak, Cheryl. “Richard Rorty’s Place in the Pragmatist Pantheon.” In Auxier and Hahn, Philosophy of Richard Rorty, 40–43.

———. Truth and the End of Inquiry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (2004).

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–6, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Vols. 7–8, edited by A. Burks. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1931–58. Cited as CP, plus volume and paragraph number.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

———. “Replay to Misak.” In Auxier and Hahn, Philosophy of Richard Rorty, 44–45.

Prof. Heney's responses to my commentary are careful and thorough, and her pushback on my two main challenges to her pragmatist metaethics forces me to think further about them in a useful way.

Second challenge

My second challenge concerns whether epistemic self-reflection one one's own ethical deliberations (in one's own tiny corner of the world) can generate enough resources to build a theory of the preconditions and presuppositions of moral discourse. Heney suggests that it can because, however humble, our own ethical deliberations will be guided by *some* sense of what counts as an adequate answer to them, and why, and this already constitutes metaethics as it's generally understood. Fair enough! I can accept this answer. But it will have implications for our debate over the first challenge, to which I now turn.

First challenge

The first challenge, then, concerns whether the very idea of a pragmatist metaethics contains unavoidable tensions. This is because a popular way to understand pragmatism is that it dissolves traditional distinctions between theory and practice, and metaethics is predicated on separating ethical theory from practice. Heney responds that our metaethical commitments have real implications for practice. They show up and make a difference in the ways in which we conduct our ethical deliberations. She cites specific differences in argumentative strategy pursued in her classes by students with divergent metaethical commitments. (I found this a fascinating snapshot from the chalkface!)

In response, I say - I'm happy with all of this. My question is really this. Why take our implicit, ever-evolving sense of what makes a move in ethical deliberation acceptable and put it on a special 'meta-' level? Why do we treat decisions about acceptable reasoning for an ethical position as somehow a 'meta matter', while we treat decisions about other kinds of choices (e.g. whether to recycle soft plastics) as an ethical 'ground floor'?

Aren't these all just human choices, which can be brought under critical scrutiny if good enough reasons are found to do so? Aren't choices about which kinds of reasons to accept as justification for an ethical position simply choices about how to flourish along a particular domain of human life - fixing belief (a normative ethics of inquiry, if you will)?

I really appreciate the invitation to comment on this book.