Pragmatist Ethics: Theory and Practice

The present issue of the EJPAP hosts a symposium on the theme of Pragmatist Ethics: Theory and Practice, exploring the many ways in which the contribution of pragmatism to moral philosophy and the moral life has been thought of and argued for. In particular, the symposium explores the distinctive nature, reaches, and limits of a pragmatist mindset in moral matters: the plurality of voices represented showcases the extent of approaches possible, within pragmatism, to the very question of how moral reflection can touch, transform, better, halt, or even inhibit the moral life. Such variety is rather telling, although, of course, it hardly captures the whole spectrum, with many more possibilities featuring an almost overcrowded stage. The complexity and ramifications featuring pragmatist ethics pose in fact a problem for any attempt to guess its exact contours, challenging the very feasibility of the task. While there is in fact a convergence over the shape and goals of a pragmatist epistemology, philosophy of language, and even metaphysics (if any), none can be found in moral (as well as aesthetical and perhaps political1) matters. That is, not only we do find, across the pragmatist spectrum, an array of different answers to the moral question (as is of course also the case with epistemological, linguistic, and metaphysical matters), but a whole set of different questions altogether. What strikes even the occasional reader is in fact a discordance of voices about what, according to pragmatism, would count as a reflective stance on the moral life in the first place, and what does the moral life look like at all. What is in fact debated is not only the details of moral theorizing over the moral life, but also the very form such an inquiry might take as well as its very opportunity. Losing sight of this fact welcomes unfortunate miscommunications and, worse off, ambiguities in one’s very understanding of the task at issue.