Etiche pragmatiste: teoria e anti-teoria morale

In the variegated landscape of pragmatist studies, there have been several, sometimes diverging accounts of the contributions of this tra- dition of thought to philosophical ethics. Besides works dedicated to single figures of the pragmatist canon, minor and major alike, the literature is in fact hardly in agreement about the very physiognomy (or the meaning of its absence) of pragmatist ethics, with multiple narratives pointing in rather disparate directions. The present work aims to bring some order to this rather scattered scene, then moving to a tentative articulation of an inter- pretative hypothesis which sees the clash of theoretical and anti-theoretical conceptions of ethics as key to the dialectic, internal to pragmatism, about the nature, shape, and limits of moral reflection. More to the point, it will be shown that the notions of praxis and conduct, lying at the heart of pragma- tism, might be given either a theoretical (as in meta-ethical and normative) or an anti-theoretical (as in therapeutic) reading, depending on the meta- philosophical lenses one is willing to use to seizing the very subject-matter of moral reflection and interrogating the moral life accordingly.