Pragmatist quietism: A meta‐ethical system. By Andrew Sepielli, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2022. vi + 231 pp. £55 (Hbk)

Abstract

The pragmatism in the title of this original, thought-provoking (but poorly copy-edited) book is a methodological orientation according to which all “cognitive behaviors are ultimately… guided by assessments of values and reasons,” as opposed to truth or fact. The pragmatist and their “representationalist” opponent disagree “concerning the relative priority of fact and value in the order of inquiry” (p. 108). Pragmatism, thus understood, is a global thesis with potentially transformative payoffs for meta-ethics. The quietism in the title of this book is the view that nothing can be relevant to whether or not to hold an ethical belief except by being relevant to the ethical value associated with this belief (p. 72). In particular, the question whether to hold an ethical belief is independent of considerations “external” to ethical thought, such as the metaphysics and semantics of ethical discourse. In other words, the quietist asserts the epistemic and evaluative autonomy of ethics (p. 54). Quietism, thus understood, is a thesis which applies to ethical thought insofar as the only values relevant to holding ethical beliefs are values distinctive and internal to ethics, as opposed to other values, such as what Sepielli calls the “truthy” values associated with substantial representations of the world. Sepielli's quietist pragmatism is an unusual position in the contemporary meta-ethical landscape. It is also a view that has prominent theoretical precursors. The quietist element of pragmatist quietism is a variation on the autonomy theses recently espoused by theorists of a broadly realist persuasion, including Matthew Kramer, Derek Parfit, and T. M. Scanlon. The pragmatist element of pragmatist quietism is a variation on the philosophical critique of conventional metaphysics associated with Huw Price and the later work of Hilary Putnam and Simon Blackburn. This book would have benefited from a deeper engagement with the work of at least one of these writers, given that each of them has at some point or other espoused meta-ethical views that combine both pragmatist and quietist elements. Admittedly, both Putnam and Blackburn's views are tricky to get a handle on, given that they have undergone substantial changes over time. (One time-slice of Blackburn's evolving view is critically discussed in Chapter 9.) In contrast, Price's espousal of pragmatism (or what he also calls “global expressivism”) has been relatively stable over time and is arguably interchangeable with Sepielli's view in important respects. In response, it might be said that this omission is no big deal. Much of what Sepielli says about the implications of reversing the methodological priority between fact and value in meta-ethics goes beyond what has previously been said on the pragmatist's behalf by Price and others. Nevertheless, quietist pragmatism is a recognizable development of an established philosophical tradition. It did not come into existence out of nowhere. In one of the book's more personal passages, Sepielli describes how he was drawn towards pragmatist quietism by a desire to answer the challenge of ethical skepticism and so retain the courage of his first-order ethical convictions. The perceived need to do so is one that will naturally arise for anyone, such as Sepielli, who thinks that ethical judgments express genuine beliefs with objective aspirations but who also thinks there is nothing in the world that could make such beliefs true. It is partly the combination of these views that has recently generated the growing literature on moral error-theory, moral fictionalism, moral abolitionism, and the like. Pragmatist quietism responds to the skeptical challenge in three main steps. (The details of Sepielli's view are a great deal more complex than this, as is his order of exposition. But whereas the author has over 200 pages to expound his meta-ethical system, the reviewer has only a few.) The first step is to claim that purely ethical issues are “superficial,” or “purely verbal,” in the way that some definitional issues are superficial or purely verbal. Roughly speaking, how we decide those issues is in no way hostage to how the world around us truly is. Ethical beliefs have no ontologically substantial truth conditions. The second step is to claim that the objective aspirations of ethical beliefs are a function of their closer connection to feelings and action than that of at least some paradigmatic matters of verbal definition. Roughly speaking, the objective aspirations of ethics are a function of the extent to which we normally care about ethical issues. They are practical, not representational. The third step is to construct a notion of correctness, or evaluative truth, for ethical beliefs that stops short of postulating a substantial relationship of representation between beliefs and the world, while avoiding the deflationary implications of unrestricted minimalism about truth (pp. 81–82). The construction in question is a version of what many will be familiar with under the label “ideal advisor,” or “ideal observer,” theory. On Sepielli's view, an ethical belief of yours is true just in case it is a member of a set of evaluative beliefs that, if held by an otherwise ideal advisor, would result in that advisor advising you to perform all and only right actions, where being an “otherwise ideal advisor” is someone who suffers from “none of the shortcomings that we'd normally blame when someone accepts the right moral outlook but goes astray in advice or other action” (pp. 82–83). Assuming that we can make sense of the idea of such an advisor and that we can have reasonable confidence in the advice that such an advisor would give us, we can have reasonable confidence in some of our ethical beliefs. Perhaps it is no surprise that a meta-ethical system that implies the autonomy of ethics should come with an account of ethical truth that is ultimately circular. In this respect, Sepielli is in distinguished company. What is a surprise is that he comes down in favor of a constructed notion of truth the historical precedents of which have been motivated by some of the same epistemological and metaphysical concerns that some versions of pragmatism, such as Price's version, are supposed to deflate (p. 84). Sepielli's key examples of paradigmatically superficial, or purely verbal, disputes include William James's question of whether a man who is chasing a squirrel around a tree is also going round the squirrel and Karen Bennett's question whether a drink of sour green apple liqueur in a martini glass is truly a martini. The main difference between these questions and paradigmatically ethical questions is supposed to be that the answer to the latter kind of question would normally matter to us in a way that the aforementioned two normally would not. However, there does seem to be at least one further difference. A man who runs around a stationary squirrel is definitely running around a squirrel. A martini glass filled with the standard alcoholic ingredients is definitely a martini. The questions involving these terms only seem to become superficial or purely verbal when addressed to a set of possibilities for which the terms in question are not sharply or well defined. No doubt we can come up with analogous cases in ethical thought for which the key terms are similarly not sharply or well defined. Yet if the analogy between ethical disputes and paradigmatically superficial, or purely verbal, disputes were perfect in all relevant respects, then every paradigmatically ethical dispute would be such that the key ethical terms involved in that dispute are not sharply or well defined. Perhaps I just do not understand the proposal, but I find this hypothesis hard to accept. When I apply my own basic ethical competence (which going by the textual evidence overlaps substantially with Sepielli's), I find that there is a plurality of paradigmatically ethical questions to which there is a clear and determinate answer (even if only a negative one). Moreover, I find that there is a plurality of such questions even after I have done my best to exclude the set of ethical questions that Sepielli wants to classify as “deep” in virtue of being somehow mixed, applied, or otherwise impure in virtue of including the “truthy” values associated with substantial representations of the world. If so, the analogy is not perfect in all relevant respects. It, therefore, remains to be established how much the appeal to superficial, or purely verbal, disputes can explain about what is philosophically puzzling about ethical questions in particular. (I cannot be entirely sure about this, because this is one of a number of topics in this book on which I would very much have liked to see more detail.) The issue I have just raised for pragmatist quietism has the ring of a well-known problem faced by the logical positivists, and which ultimately led to the demise of that particular research program. In their case, the problem arose because of the way in which ethical thought was classified along with some philosophically puzzling claims as meaningless nonsense. In Sepielli's case, the problem arises because of the way in which ethical thought is classified along with some philosophical puzzling claims as superficial, or purely verbal. In the former case, the question arose as to how to distinguish the serious kind of meaningless nonsense from the not so serious kind. In the latter case, the question arises as to how to distinguish the serious kind of superficial or purely verbal disputes from the not so serious kind. Sepielli's answer in the case of ethics is to appeal to the concept of value and propose a constructed notion of evaluative correctness to make sense of its objective aspirations. Yet it is one thing to agree (as I think we should) that a wide range of putatively “external” questions about ethics are best interpreted as “internal” and therefore as evaluative. It is another thing to infer from the explanatory fruitfulness of this deflationary strategy in some cases that ethics is fully autonomous. One concern about going down this route is that in doing so we shall fail to make adequate sense of the conceptual centrality of those unmistakable aspects of ethical thought that have historically relied on the idea that there are limits on how it is intelligible to think about how human beings ought to act and live, limits that depend on what kind of creatures they are and on the worldly circumstance in which they find themselves.1