Pragmatism, Ethics, and Correspondence Truth: Response to Gibson and Quine

Abstract

1. When I first read Quine's On the Nature of Moral Values in 1979, I was already convinced that the same arguments Quine had given for a naturalistic epistemology with both descriptive and normative components applied straightforwardly to ethics. If normative epistemology was to be the enterprise of sorting reliable techniques of knowledge acquisition from unreliable ones in theoretical domains, normative ethics was to do the same for practical knowledge. The goal of the two enterprises taken together was to lead us to rational believing and reasonable living, pragmatically understood.' Naturalism moderated by pragmatism, it seemed to me, offered a way of thinking about ethics which did not reduce it to the enterprise of merely describing the noncognitive states of persons (as in Ayer, for example), but which allowed for openly cognitivistic, fallibilistic, and nonfoundationalistic normative reflection on our lives and practices. It seemed an exciting, but largely unnoticed, prospect that Quine's general philosophy could be used to rehabilitate the sorry image of normative ethics held by many analytic philosophers at that time. I was surprised, therefore, when, upon reading his essay, I discovered that Quine resisted the picture of ethics I had envisioned; and in particular that he remained largely skeptical about the prospects for a normative ethics with anything like the cognitive respectability of normative epistemology. My aim in Quinean Ethics (1982) was to push what I thought were the considerations favoring my way of reading Quine over his way of reading himself.2 I am grateful to Roger Gibson for his thoughtful