Meta-Ethics for Neo-Pragmatists: A Normative-Pragmatic Analysis of Moral Discourse
Committee: Michael Williams (Chair), Hilary Bok, Dean Moyar, Mark Lance (Georgetown), William Egginton (JHU GRLL)
Traditional expressivist accounts of moral discourse have problems accounting for imbedded moral judgments and for the seeming objectivity of morality. I develop an alternative that solves these problems through an original synthesis between a broadly inferentialist theory of meaning and recent accounts of the evolution of morality. My alternative is a framework for the pragmatic analysis of linguistic meaning (or PALM--summarized in the PALM Tree diagram) that extends the inferentialist's focus on proprieties of inference to pragmatic and epistemic proprieties, which, I argue, shape the inferential norms of a discursive practice. I then argue that these proprieties are best explained in terms of moral discourse's evolutionary function of maintaining an environment in which ongoing social coordination is possible for reflective beings like us. The resulting account avoids embedding problems by way of inferentialism and defends moral discourse as objective in a sense opposed both to subjectivism and dogmatism. At the same time, I argue that the threat of relativism is part of the very structure of moral discourse. My account of the pragmatics of moral discourse adds much-needed detail to the pragmatist commitment to an ever-expanding discursive community embodied in Rorty’s notion of solidarity and Dewey’s understanding of democratic discourse that allows us to identify conditions under which they are possible and those under which they are likely to fail.
If you're really curious, the entire dissertation is available here.