A Procedural, Pragmatist Account of Ethical Objectivity

A Procedural, Pragmatist Account of Ethical Objectivity

Amanda Roth

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Volume 23, Number 2, June 2013,pp. 169-200 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/ken.2013.0005

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Roth • A PRoceduRAl, PRAgmAtist Account of ethicAl objectivity

[ 169 ]Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal Vol. 22, No. 2, 169–200 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Amanda Roth

A Procedural, Pragmatist Account of Ethical Objectivity1

ABSTRACT. This article offers a procedural, pragmatist account of objectivity in the domain of the good that is inspired by pragmatic and feminist critiques of objectivity in philosophy of science and epistemology. I begin by asking first what we want to capture—or ought to want to capture—with a notion of ethi-cal objectivity and in answer to this question I identify four “points” to ethical objectivity: undergirding the possibility of mistakenness, making genuine dis-agreement possible, making sense of our appreciation of the ethical perspectives of others, and making possible a sense of ethical improvement or learning. I then lay out a process-based account of objectivity in ethics that makes good on the four points I have identified. Finally, I consider worries related to convergence, bias, and ontology and defend the procedural, pragmatist account in light of those potential objections.

In this paper I aim to lay out the major aspects of a procedural, prag-matist account of objectivity in ethics. This account is “procedural” insofar as it holds that the objectivity of inquiry depends not on what

the results of that inquiry are, but rather whether the proper procedure of inquiry was followed to generate the results. The account is “pragmatic” insofar as it coheres with a broader approach to ethics that conceives of ethical inquiry and progress in terms of resolving problems (Roth 2010a, 2012).

Why should we want this sort of account of ethical objectivity? In addition to its contribution to a larger pragmatist conception of ethical inquiry, this account has two desirable features. First, it makes room for recent feminist critiques of traditional conceptions of epistemology and science to bear on the question of objectivity in ethics. Second, it allows us to see an important point about domain specificity and the contrast between ethical objectivity and moral objectivity.

kennedy institute of ethics jouRnAl • june 2013

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In both common-language usage as well as philosophical usage, ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ are often employed interchangeably, though these terms have slightly different connotations that can be brought out by consider-ing the notion of morality in the wide versus narrow sense (Scanlon 1998; Williams 1985).2 Common to those drawing this distinction is a character-ization of “morality” as being primarily concerned about how we can live together, what sorts of demands we can legitimately make on one another, and what our obligations to others are. At issue here are concerns such as justice, fairness, equality, reciprocity, and respect—concerns typically referred to as falling under “the right.”

On the other hand, “ethics” is sometimes taken to refer to concerns about how to live best, ideals of excellence, and perhaps duties within personal relationships. We can refer to this domain as “the good,” with the main concerns being virtue and vice, integrity, and excellences. In this paper, I will be primarily concerned with ethical objectivity, by which I refer to what sort of life is good for an individual and what sorts of ideals one should aspire to. The reasons for emphasizing this distinction will become clearer as the paper proceeds, but the general motivation for maintaining the distinction is that these domains of value contrast in ways that make a different conception of objectivity appropriate in each. Recognizing this point is vital to the vindication of the procedural account of ethical objectivity I put forth in the paper.

I begin in section I by asking what, if anything, a conception of objec-tivity must involve in order to count as a notion of objectivity. I approach this question by looking to the point of objectivity—asking how objectivity typically functions in our ethical inquiry or in our meta-concerns about our practice of ethical inquiry and what would be missing in this inquiry if we gave up on objectivity altogether. In response to these questions, I identify four “points” to objectivity—having to do with mistakenness, disagreement, appreciating the perspectives of others, and improvement or learning—that motivate the account of ethical objectivity I go on to offer in the rest of the paper. In section I, I also take up the question of how the conception of objectivity I am after relates to current controversies in metaethics—particularly whether the minimal conception of objectivity I have in mind rules out all forms of relativism and subjectivism and whether this conception of objectivity commits me to cognitivism.

In section II, I lay out the procedural, pragmatist account of ethical objectivity I favor in formal terms by listing and describing four pillars of the view and showing how the view captures all of the functions of


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objectivity discussed in section I. I then go on in section III to consider a significant challenge to this sort of procedural account of objectivity—the worry that it cannot capture important aspects of our traditional notion of objectivity. Here I have in mind concerns about ontology, bias, and convergence, which often (but in my view mistakenly) are taken to support an “objectivist” conception of objectivity—that is, one that emphasizes a correspondence theory of truth, mind-independence, Really-realness, value neutrality, lack of bias, emotional detachment, and convergence. In response to this objection, I consider concerns about ontology, bias, and convergence respectively and ask why and to what extent these concerns are appropriate in the ethical domain and how my procedural view speaks to them. In the end, I argue that a procedural account offers all the objec-tivity we need and should want in ethics.

Toward the end of the paper I quickly explore a lingering question about what sort of ontology might fit with the conception of ethical inquiry and ethical objectivity I am offering. Finally, in concluding I sum up what I have argued for throughout the paper.

I. WHAT IS THE POINT OF (ETHICAL) OBJECTIVITY?

Why begin with the question titling this section? Why not begin by saying simply what objectivity is?

The answer is that ‘objectivity’ refers to so many related but distinct ideas that defining objectivity is no simple matter. For instance, Marianne Janack (2002, p. 275) in surveying philosophical work has found uses of ‘objectivity’ meaning all of the following: value neutrality, lack of bias (with bias meaning any of the following: personal attachment, political aims, ideological commitments, preferences, desires, interests, or emo-tion), scientific method, rationality, an attitude of psychological distance, world-directedness, impersonality, impartiality, having to do with the facts, having to do with things in themselves/universality, disinterestedness, commensurablity, and intersubjective agreement.3 Here Janack appears to have confined her survey of the literature to the domain of science and epistemology. Reflecting on the notions of objectivity at work in the value domains is likely to add further to the list.

Given the multiplicity of meanings associated with the term ‘objectivity’ I think we would do well to take a step back and ask the question titling this section. What does objectivity—on any of the understandings discussed above—do for us? Which of those meanings are worth maintaining and clarifying, and which might be given up without any problematic result?


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I.1 Four Functions of Objectivity

In reflecting on the above questions, I want to explore a number of po-tential “points” to objectivity in the domain of ethics in particular. Some of the important things objectivity does for us in ethics include (1) making good on our sense that mistakenness in ethics is possible, (2) undergird-ing the possibility of genuine disagreement, (3) providing an appropriate way for us to appreciate the perspectives of others, and (4) providing for a sense of ethical learning or improvement.

Consider first the function objectivity performs of making it possible for an individual to be mistaken in some ethical belief or value. Take, for instance, two contrasting attitudes that an individual might hold toward her own previous values or tastes. Suppose a particular woman, upon be-coming pregnant, experiences a change—both in her preferences in tastes and also in her values regarding work versus family life—that remains after she gives birth. Where she formerly preferred red meat and dairy products as “comfort food,” she now finds herself drawn instead to chocolate and seafood. Similarly, whereas she previously valued career achievements as providing the ultimate sort of meaning in life, she now has a much more complicated view of different ways in which a life can be given meaning.

In cases like these, attempts to justify one’s new palette appear to be rare. For most of us, we simply do not see such changes in taste as being progressive (or regressive) such that we can (or feel we should) explain what makes one set of tastes better than the other. In the case of a preg-nancy, in particular, it is well known that hormonal changes greatly affect one’s food preferences; and in some cases these changes can persist even after the pregnancy has ended. A rational explanation of why the change was apt and what makes the new appetite better than the old is not ap-propriate since the change was driven not by the woman’s learning, or deliberating, or reflecting in the first place.

On the other hand, it is quite often the case that after experiencing pro-found life changes—such as having a child—we do feel that our new view is better than our old view and, thus, that there is a rational explanation of why such a change in values was apt.4 So it would not be at all surprising if the woman I have been characterizing conceives of her transition in tastes as a mere change, while conceiving of her transition in values as being a progressive change. She might even go so far as to say, of herself, that she was mistaken in formerly prioritizing career achievements above all else.

I simply take for granted here that whatever else we want in a metaethi-cal theory, one desideratum is that it allows us to make sense of the idea


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that some values are better than others, and that therefore it is possible for some ethical values, attitudes, or judgments to be mistakes. Suppos-ing, then, that we want to capture a sense of mistakenness in ethics, why should we think, as I suggested above, that there must be some sense of ethical objectivity in order for ethical mistakes to be possible?

Well, mistakes are errors. One obvious way to make an ethical error is to have a belief that fails to accurately capture what the world is really like. For example, I might believe it is raining outside my window right now, but that would be a false belief, because in fact it is sunny with no precipitation outside of my window right now.5 Given the controversies over the question of whether and how ethical judgments are truth-apt, however, I want to avoid cashing out the idea of mistakenness in terms of true and false beliefs.

Rather, we might generally characterize a mistaken belief, value, or judgment as a belief, value, or judgment not sufficiently in accord with how things are.6 We might put the point similarly to the sort of schema invoked to explicate a deflationary account of truth. We could say, for instance, that the judgment that career achievements are the ultimate source of meaning in life is mistaken if and only if it is not the case that career achievements are the ultimate source of meaning in life.

Whatever the precise manner in which we cash out the idea of mistaken-ness, in order to make good on this notion in ethics it must at minimum be the case that our ethical beliefs/judgments/values are not naïvely relativistic in the sense of being self-justifying. In the case of naïve relativism at the individual level, an agent could not be mistaken about her ethical views because simply believing or judging x would make it the case that x is true (for that agent, at least). In the case of group-level naïve relativism, there is room for at least some sense of ethical mistakenness—particularly in the sense of an inaccurate understanding of the dominant ethical view amongst a given group of people.7 But this sense of mistakenness—according to which ethical mistakes are merely errors of arithmetic—is not, I take it, what we have in mind in a case in which we believe we have transition from worse to a better values.

Another important function of objectivity that we would be remiss to give up in ethics is undergirding ethical disagreement in such a way that genuine disagreement is possible. By “genuine” disagreement, I mean a situation in which one individual accepts or endorses X and another accepts or endorses a claim inconsistent with X and only one of the individuals can be correct—that is, the other is making a mistake.8 Here we see that


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simple subjectivism and emotivism are ruled out. After all, a subjectivism that conceives of ethical judgments as merely reporting our own prefer-ences would allow room for genuine disagreement only about the subject of whether our reports of our preferences/emotions are accurate. Similarly, emotivism would undermine the sense in which at least sometimes when we disagree with others about ethics one of us can be “right” or at least can be more warranted in our ethical judgments than the other; thus a disagreement might exist, but not a genuine one.

A third consequence of objectivity that, in my view, we cannot do with-out is our ability take seriously (in an epistemic sense) the perspectives of others. If naïve relativism, simple subjectivism, or emotivism is true, then it appears that we have no epistemic reasons to consult others in thinking about ethics. We could not, in those cases, improve our ethical inquiry by engaging with, debating, or receiving constructive criticism from oth-ers—for it is not possible on those accounts that someone else might have better access to ethical truth, have more warranted ethical judgments, or even have reasons for their ethical values that we are compelled (by our own epistemic commitments) to take seriously.

Notice, though, that treating others’ perspectives on ethical issues as in principle irrelevant to the quality of our own ethical inquiry flies in the face of everyday ethical experience. Typically when we consider ethi-cal questions we do attribute a certain degree of epistemic authority to others. And we think that these other perspectives matter: not merely in the sense that in attempting to be respectful of others we ought to allow them room to voice dissenting opinions. Rather, the perspectives of others matter because they can potentially provide concerns that challenge our values and judgments. When these sorts of considerations are voiced by others we feel epistemic pressure to respond to them, perhaps by point-ing out a difficulty in their own view or revising our original judgment to take account of the new insights they have provided. But these practices, it seems, presume that we can be mistaken in our ethical views, that we can make more or less warranted judgments, and that our usual epistemic norms apply to our reasoning in ethics as well as in non-value domains. This is just to say, that our very practices of ethical inquiry and debate assume a minimal kind of objectivity.

Finally, some sense of objectivity within a domain seems necessary if we are to be able to make sense of learning or improving in terms of the beliefs or practices that fall within that domain. To make an improvement in one’s beliefs about, for example, the age of the planet requires that some


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beliefs on the topic be better or more worthy than others. This, again, will rule out naïve relativism, simple subjectivism, and emotivism and reinforces the point discussed in the last paragraph—that we must make room for reasons or evidence to play a role in justifying ethical judgments.

With regard to all four functions, what seems to be at stake is that ethics cannot be naïvely relativistic or naïvely subjective such that an ethical belief or judgment is in some way self-justifying or that all such beliefs/judgments are equally epistemically good. So ethical inquiry must be at least “objective” in the sense that there can better or worse views to hold (and what makes a view better or worse cannot merely be the fact that a certain person or group holds it). This is, at a minimum, what we want—or at least, what we ought to want—from objectivity in ethics. It is with these four “points” to objectivity in mind that I offer the procedural conception of ethical objectivity in section II.

I.2 Situating My Conception of Ethical Objectivity in Contemporary Metaethics

Before moving on to lay out the procedural, pragmatist view, I want to pause here to consider how the minimal conception of objectivity I have so far described fits within the terrain of contemporary metaethics. Recall the four functions of ethical objectivity that I identified above: (1) making good on our sense that mistakenness in ethics is possible, (2) undergird-ing the possibility of genuine disagreement, (3) providing an appropriate way for us to appreciate the perspectives of others, and (4) providing for a sense of ethical learning or improvement. I suggested that if objectivity in this minimal sense is a desideratum for a satisfactory metaethical view, then simple subjectivist views, naïve relativisms, and emotivist views will be necessarily be unsatisfactory. To rule out these metaethical approaches, however, is not yet to say much about contemporary metaethics—for few contemporary philosophers advocate views of these sorts.

A more interesting question, then, is whether the minimal sort of ob-jectivity that I aim to offer in this paper is inconsistent with more plau-sible metaethical views such as sophisticated relativism or subjectivism or various forms of non-cognitivism. For instance, it is worth examining whether sophisticated relativism of pluralist views like Gilbert Harman’s and David Wong’s, the sophisticated subjectivism of secondary-property views like David Wiggins’s, or the quasi-realist views of Simon Blackburn’s and Allan Gibbard’s are able to capture the four functions discussed above (Harman and Thomson 1996; Wong 2006; Wiggins 1987; Blackburn 1993; Gibbard 1992, 2003).


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The discussion here must be framed by the aims I take up in this paper. I do not here aim to defend the procedural, pragmatist view against all pos-sible challenges, nor do I intend to argue that it is the best possible account of ethical inquiry and ethical objectivity. Rather, I restrict myself in this paper to the more manageable goal of simply motivating and sketching out this new way of approaching the issue of ethical objectivity and responding to the most serious worries that are likely to arise in response to it. In this vein, then, I will not spend much time attempting to demonstrate flaws in other metaethical approaches. In fact, it is quite possible that a variety of metaethical approaches will turn out to be more-or-less compatible with the minimal conception of objectivity described in section II.

With that framing in mind, we can take up the question of what my minimal sense of objectivity implies regarding sophisticated relativism and subjectivism as well as quasi-realist forms of non-cognitivism. For the most part, the procedural, pragmatist account need not have any quarrel with these metaethical positions. Certainly, there is nothing incompatible about sophisticated subjectivism in the form of sensibility theories. In fact, in section III I will suggest explicitly that what Wiggins’ secondary-property view offers might be usefully co-opted and modified for my purposes here.

Similarly, quasi-realist forms of non-cognitivism need not be viewed as enemies (at least, not with regard to the issue of objectivity). Consider in particular the first function of objectivity—undergirding our sense that mistakenness in ethics is possible. To speak of ethical mistakes seems on the face of it to assume that ethical statements are truth-apt. But I held in my discussion of mistakenness that we ought to avoid talk of truth as much as possible and/or might need to accept only a deflationary ac-count of truth in order to provide a sense of mistakenness in ethics. In that case, however, it seems that some of the most sophisticated sorts of non-cognitivism such as Blackburn’s and Gibbard’s views might very well be able to capture this sense of mistakenness, along with the other three functions as well. Blackburn and Gibbard, after all, hold that their quasi-realist views “earn the right” to talk of truth and other aspects of realism (Blackburn 1993; Gibbard 1992, 2003). If they are correct about this—and I leave evaluating their claim to others—then my conception of objectivity does not presuppose cognitivism or (full blown) realism.

Finally, what of sophisticated relativisms or pluralisms along the lines of Harman’s and Wong’s views (Harman and Thomson 1996; Wong 2006)? I leave it as an open question whether these views can capture the four aspects of objectivity I think it is worth capturing in ethics—for


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exploring the details of these views goes beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say, if a relativist or pluralistic view can make good on the four functions of objectivity, which I have suggested are desiderata for a metaethical theory, then the procedural, pragmatist account need not be seen as necessarily having any quarrel with those views. Given the minimal conception of objectivity I am arguing for here, it would not be surprising if sophisticated relativisms and pluralisms could provide at least that much objectivity—indeed, as we will see in section II and beyond, the procedural, pragmatist view itself builds in room for a certain kind of pluralism.

II. THE PROCEDURAL, PRAGMATIST (PROBLEM-SOLVING) VIEW

Having laid out what it is that we should want from an account of ethi-cal objectivity, I now move on to explain my account in more detail. In section II.1, I sketch out the account I have in mind based on four pillars. I then show in section II.2 how on this account objectivity fulfills all four of the functions discussed above.

II.1 Four Pillars

The four pillars of the procedural pragmatist view are as follows:

(1) ethical objectivity is process-based;(2) our ethical inquiry must live up to the world;(3) objective ethical inquiry is possible at both the community and indi-

vidual level; and(4) ethical epistemology is naturalized.

As stated in (1), the view I am offering is a procedural or process-based view. To make clear what I mean here, we can contrast a process-based view of objectivity with a results-based view. These two approaches to conceiving of objectivity differ in two important ways. First—as is made clear by the terminology—these approaches disagree about where objec-tivity is located. On a results-based view, objectivity is primarily located in the beliefs, judgments, or values that result from our inquiry, whereas on a procedural view like mine, individual beliefs, judgments, or values are objective only derivatively. It is the system or process itself that is the primary bearer of objectivity on a process-based view.

This difference as to the location of objectivity is related to a second difference between results-based and process-based views. On results-based views, the objectivity of beliefs, judgments, or values depends on whether and to what extent they accurately capture the world as it is ex-


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isting apart from our inquiry about it (Putnam 1981, p. 49). In contrast, on my procedural account, a system or process of inquiry is objective to the extent that it adheres to certain epistemic norms or emulates a certain kind of epistemic process.

I cannot here offer a thorough description of the sort of process I have in mind. Rather, I offer only a mere sketch. In previous work, I have characterized the process in terms of problem resolution (Roth 2012). On this account, we are prompted to engage in ethical deliberation—delibera-tion that can potentially lead to value transitions—when we come upon a problem; that is, a conflict amongst our empirical beliefs, our values, and our experience of the world. In response, we look for a solution to the problem—a way of revising some belief or value or a way of chang-ing the world that resolves the conflict. We will, then, often be prompted to reexamine our values, and when forced to so reflect we might find new reasons to adjust, revise, or reject some values in such a way that we overcome the prior conflict amongst our beliefs, our values, and the world (Roth 2012).9

If we imagine such problem resolving to occur over time, with one resolution then prompting new conflicts that themselves call for solutions, we can see how an ongoing process of ethical inquiry will get going. Such a process would be one in which each revision, reaffirmation, or rejection that occurred could be shown to be intelligible. In other words, each tran-sition would be warranted or supported by reasons given (a) our starting place, (b) all of the warranted transitions that preceded the transition in question, and (c) the usual epistemic norms that govern any rational inquiry (for example, coherence). Note, however, that it does not follow from the fact that each individual transition can be made intelligible given (a)–(c) that we can tell an overarching story about the end result of our inquiry given our starting place.

Thus on the view I am advocating, objective inquiry is importantly path dependent. A different but equally warranted transition at a much earlier point in inquiry might have set us upon a very different path, and the end result of that alternative path might have been very different be-liefs or values than we came to given the path we in fact took. It is quite possible, then, for extremely different systems of inquiry—which support very different resulting beliefs and values—to be equally objective on a process-based conception of objectivity.

We should note here an important first-pass worry in relation to the first pillar of my view. The objection is that process-based views of objec-


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tivity—in disentangling the notion of objectivity from the way the world really is—abandon the goal of getting the world right and so open the door to pernicious sorts of relativism and/or subjectivism. After all, can we not imagine a process of inquiry in which each transition is warranted given the starting point and the past warranted transitions and coherence is preserved, yet the system reflects nothing but our own hunches and hopes, completely detached from the world itself?

Such a system of inquiry is indeed imaginable given what I have said so far in describing the kind of process I have in mind. Indeed, a procedural view of objectivity can involve abandoning the goal of getting the world right. Notice, however, that admitting this much is far from admitting what the objector claims—that my procedural account must involve “giv-ing up on the world.”

In contrasting process-based and results-based views of objectivity above, I characterized the former as rejecting the notion that whether a belief or judgment is objective depends on whether that belief or judgment accurately represents the world as it really is, apart from our inquiry about it. There are, in fact, two aspects of this rejected claim that are indeed problematic from my point of view: first, this claim characterizes objec-tivity in overly metaphysical terms (with reference to the “Really real”), and second, the claim incorrectly identifies beliefs/judgments—rather than the process or system itself—as the primary bearers of objectivity. I do not, however, have any objection to the assertion that inquiry should in some sense live up to the world (so long as “living up to the world” is not understood so as to involve either of the above difficulties).

To make clear the commitment of the procedural, pragmatist view to the usual standards of empirical adequacy for inquiry, the second pillar of the view just is (2) that our ethical inquiry must live up to the world. In other words, empirical evidence will properly play a role of constrain-ing and informing our ethical inquiry on my view. But this is not because objectivity should be understood as results based; it is rather because one hallmark of an objective process of inquiry is responding to feedback from the world.

Here it is helpful to draw a parallel to another well-known procedural account of objectivity in the scientific realm—Helen Longino’s social conception of scientific objectivity. For Longino, the degree of objectivity of a scientific community depends upon the extent to which the commu-nity fulfills her four requirements for a maximally objective community and scientific process; numerous of these requirements have to do with


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making room for criticism and responding to evidence that can prompt transitions in beliefs (Longino 1990, pp. 76–79).10 In this way, a concern for getting the world right is built into the process a community would need to undertake in order to produce derivatively objective beliefs. So the worry stated above that a process-based view of objectivity will inevitably abandon concern for what the world is like misfires. In an analogous way, the conception of ethical objectivity I am advocating has a concern for living up to the world built into the standards for an objective process.

One might object here to the appeal to Longino’s procedural account of objectivity given that her concern is science and not ethics; surely it is easier to see how a procedural account of objectivity can incorporate feedback from the world in the realm of science than in the realm of eth-ics. This can be easily seen by considering a typical procedural account of moral objectivity that we can find in Rawls’s contractualism. For Rawls the objectivity of the principles governing the basic structure of society appears to depend upon the shape of the original position; in particular, it seems that (hypothetical) convergence amongst rational decision makers in an intuitively equal and fair starting point does the work of providing objectivity (Rawls 1971, pp. 17–21).11 However, there does not seem to be a clear analogy in Rawls’s theory to Longino’s requirement of public standards of evidence that would require inquirers (or individuals in the original position) to consult the way the world is as part of the process of inquiry.12

This contrast between Rawls’s and Longino’s views might be taken to show that a process-based view in ethics is vulnerable to worries about a lack of independence from our own opinions in a way that process-based views in science need not be. There is a grain of truth in this worry inas-much as it is simply more complicated to talk about and account for “the world” in the realm of ethics. However, it seems to me that the world can and does condition and inform our ethical inquiry.

As a short example of the role the world can play in ethical inquiry, consider a problem like the (comparatively) high rate of teenage preg-nancy in the United States.13 In trying to solve this problem, both back-ground values and empirical realities given by the world will determine what sorts of potential solutions can satisfactorily solve the problem. A course of action or policy—say, abstinence-only sex-ed—that fails to live up to the world will not be a sufficient solution even if it does live up to certain values that some inquirers hold dear. Suppose, for instance, that abstinence-only sex-ed were shown definitively—and on the basis of em-


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pirical evidence accepted by all—to fail to lower the unwanted pregnancy rate amongst teens. In that case, the world will have presented those who support abstinence-only sex education based on their conservative sexual values with a value conflict. Faced with the contingent incompatibility of two very important value-based goals, social conservatives will be prompted to reevaluate their values and ask whether these values are, in fact, as important as they assumed them to be. This is the sense I have in mind when I claim that the world can inform our ethical inquiry and tell in favor of or against values. Thus, while science and ethics do differ with regard to the role of the world, this appears to be a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.14

The third pillar of the procedural, pragmatist view is that objective ethical inquiry can be conducted both by a community and by individuals. This is important to note given my appeals in this paper to both Longino’s and Rawls’s views in attempting to explicate the procedural account of objectivity. For both Longino and Rawls, objectivity is primarily a community-level pursuit, while I intend to capture a sense of objectivity that applies equally to the community or individual case.

Much transformative moral revision comes as a result of community-wide debate and deliberation, and so I do wish to emphasize the importance of community in producing objective ethical inquiry and, in particular, in providing important kinds of evidence about what is worth valuing.15

However, at the same time, much ethical inquiry occurs at the individual level as an agent tries to solve problems having to do with her own personal commitments or ideals of excellence; in these cases the question is “what is a good life for me?” Thus it seems to me that a satisfactory account of ethical inquiry cannot take community-level inquiry as the primary bearer of objectivity.

Finally, the fourth pillar of the view is the naturalizing of ethical episte-mology. According to Richmond Campbell and Bruce Hunter, naturalized ethical epistemology involves “explain[ing] how [ethical] knowledge is possible (or why it is not) by appealing to an empirically based understand-ing of the natural world and our place within it” (Campbell and Hunter 2001, p. 3). Similarly, in interpreting feminist epistemology as a branch of naturalized (social) epistemology, Elizabeth Anderson (1995a, p. 54) characterizes the naturalization of epistemology as involving an under-standing of “knowledge production as an activity in which inquirers are subject to the same causal forces that affect their objects of study” (An-derson 1995a, p. 54).16 This means that inquiry itself can be an object of


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study that allows us to investigate which sorts of epistemological practices, what sort of experimental design, what sort of organization of inquirers, etc. are best given our knowledge-producing aims. For example, Anderson points to the model of placebo-controlled, double-blind, multi-center trials for drug testing as a success of naturalized epistemology, as each of these aspects of trials was introduced in order to improve inquiry based on the recognition of failures in prior inquiry (Anderson 1995a, p. 55).

This is a case of naturalized epistemology in science, but what might naturalized ethical epistemology look like? How do we learn about how best to conduct ethical inquiry through inquiry itself? One important avenue is to reflect on the many ways in which we have been wrong about fundamentally held values in the past and how the psychological and social facts about how we think, feel, value, deliberate, and conduct inquiry might explain those mistakes.17 For example, consider Susan Fiske’s (2007) psychological research. Fiske finds that subjects looking at pictures of homeless people typically do not react to the photos as if they are seeing actual individual persons; but this effect is significantly altered when subjects are asked to consider a mundane question—say what one likes to eat—from the perspective of the person in the photo. Thus, forcing the subject to attribute agency to those in the photograph and to think about the world from their perspective has a significant effect on cognitive reactions to the photographs (Fiske 2007, p. 158).

We might plausibly take the results of Fiske’s work to demonstrate a need to cultivate an approach to ethical inquiry in which the dignity of all parties is emphasized, in which we appropriately empathize with the interested parties, and perhaps in which we simulate what it is like to be in their situations. After all, Fiske’s findings demonstrate that we are subject to making a kind of mistake in our everyday conception of and treatment of others. Upon reflection, we of course do not condone or endorse think-ing of or treating others differently depending upon how similar to us they seem or whether they appear to be members of a disfavored group. Thus if these patterns in fact typify our actual automatic cognitive processes, then we have reason to distrust our automatic cognitive processes and even to try to counter their biasing effects.18

The naturalizing of ethical epistemology—and the particular example of Fiske’s research—makes room for an important point feminist epistemolo-gists have stressed about the importance of diversity in the community of inquirers and the potential relevance of social identity or position to knowledge production. It may be, after all, that some people or some


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community arrangements are better at producing an attitude of empathy or dignity toward all parties of a moral dispute than others.19

The results of bringing empirical work to bear on our ethical inquiry will likely lead us either to reaffirm the fundamental values we hold—and be even more assured of their warrant given that they still speak to us even under the improved conditions of testing—or to reject or revise fundamental values because under improved testing or upon reflection we cannot continue to endorse them. One might wonder what could shake us of some of our most deeply held values. Sometimes empirical facts can—after all, many instances of historical prejudice and oppres-sion that we now condemn were in part justified by empirical beliefs that we now know were both false and pernicious.20 In other cases it may be a sort of simulation—imagining what it is like to live differently or be in another’s position—that leads to transformative change in our values. And importantly, sometimes such insights come not from simulation alone, but from actually trying to live a certain way; we can learn through our actual experience that we are moving in the wrong direction, and this knowledge may demonstrate the need for a radical change in the other direction (Roth 2012).21

II.2 How the Procedural, Pragmatist Account Makes Good on the Four Functions

Before going on to discuss what aspects of traditional notions of ob-jectivity the procedural, pragmatist account of objectivity dispenses with and why, I will in the following section offer a short summary of how this four-pillared view captures all four of the functions discussed above (undergirding mistakenness, genuine disagreement, appreciation of others’ points of view, and learning.)

First we should note that objectivity understood in terms of the four pillars allows plenty of room for mistakenness that is emphasized in the second pillar—that our inquiry is constrained by the world. Since the procedural, pragmatist view is one according to which evidence from the world must inform our ethical views, it is always possible that in light of new evidence we will find that our previous ethical views were flawed. We can see this in the controversy over how best to approach the problem of teenage pregnancy in the United States—a case in which it is clear that value judgments and empirical beliefs are deeply intertwined. As I pointed out in section II.1, the potential truth or falsity of empirical beliefs about what will lead to a lower teen pregnancy rate can go a long


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way in undermining certain value judgments (if only we were able to come to consensus about the relevant empirical facts.) After all, if one’s values dictate that the only acceptable programs are those that are, in fact, unable to improve the situation, then one will likely have to reconsider those values (on potential pain of incoherence) and might find them to have been mistaken given how the world is.22

The ability of the procedural account of objectivity to undergird a sense of mistakenness is importantly connected to the other three “points” men-tioned above. For example, consider that a genuine ethical disagreement is one in which two or more individuals espouse contradictory values and both individuals cannot be correct (or at least, one individual’s view is better than the other’s). In order for such a situation to occur, it must be possible to distinguish between better and worse ethical beliefs or values. The procedural, pragmatist view provides exactly that, inasmuch as the world constrains our beliefs and values as described in the teen pregnancy example.

Similarly, take the third “function” of objectivity that has to do with appreciating the viewpoints of others. Here what I have in mind is that giving serious consideration to others’ beliefs or values—and, importantly, their reasons for these beliefs or values—can improve an individual’s or community’s inquiry. But how could my own inquiry improve by reflecting on the views of others unless it is possible that their views better capture something about the natural and social world (or about us, given that we are part of the natural and social world) than does mine? So once again pillar two plays a significant role in the account, capturing the third func-tion of objectivity.

In addition, the naturalization of ethical epistemology also contributes significantly here, as one of the things we might learn as we reflect on our community’s practices of inquiry is that different social relations or dif-ferent make-ups of epistemic communities can make for better or worse inquiry. This is essentially the very claim that much work in social and feminist epistemology has made especially in regard to the realm of science; here it becomes clear that the procedural account can also embrace this strand of epistemic work in the case of ethics (Anderson 1995a; Ruetsche 2004; Roth 2010b).

Finally, the fourth pillar—that learning is possible in the realm of eth-ics—is captured on my view inasmuch as we can distinguish better and worse views and can make sensible revisions to our own views on the basis of evidence from the world and from our experience of living taken along with general epistemic values.


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This pillar makes clear the pragmatist orientation of the general concep-tion of ethical objectivity I have in mind. I have in other work offered a sustained discussion and argument for a conception of ethical inquiry as problem solving. On this view, we make progress in ethics by resolving ethical problems that we face through living. Resolving problems entails overcoming troubles, particularly in ways that involve rejecting or revising flawed values on the basis of new insights or deepening our understanding of and commitment to values that continue to speak to us as we confront new difficulties.23 This problem-resolving account of what we are doing when we inquire about ethics is what captures the fourth function of objectivity—that it is possible to learn and/or improve our ethical beliefs.

III. AGAINST OBJECTIVIST OBJECTIVITY IN ETHICS

So far I have been describing a procedural account of objectivity that I have motivated in a number of ways. I suggested that a procedural account of objectivity helpfully allows us to bring feminist work on the notion of objectivity in epistemology and science to bear in thinking about objectivity in ethics and illuminates a point about domain specificity and conceptions of objectivity—that what we want from objectivity in ethics versus moral-ity might be quite different (as I believe it is). But even in the face of these strengths, we can still ask: why should we prefer a procedural, pragmatist conception of objectivity to more traditional—objectivist—conceptions? In the present section I will lay out what objectivism is, why its various aspects often seem so attractive to us, and how my account is thoroughly anti-objectivist.

Objectivist conceptions of objectivity typically share most or all of the following characteristics: a correspondence view of truth; a strong sense of independence (often stated in terms of “mind-independence”); a pre-sumption about the connection between particular methods of inquiry and the ability of inquiry to get at what is Really-real about the world; a requirement of value neutrality, lack of bias, and emotional detachment in inquirers; and an assumption that—at least once all the evidence is in—rational inquirers will come to convergence. Such a view is sometimes alternatively referred to in the literature as “totalizing objectivity,” “the view from nowhere,” “the no-eye view,” and “ontological tyranny,” and is almost exclusively found in work that is concerned not with the ethical domain in particular, but rather with non-value domains (Lloyd 1995; Nagel 1989; Putnam 1981).


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Hilary Putnam offers a representative characterization of such a view—which he calls the “no-eye” view: “On this perspective, the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is.’ Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things” (Putnam 1981, p. 49). Similarly, Peter Railton takes the traditional logical empiricist view of objectivity to include value neutrality and disinterestedness, the theory neutrality of evidence, procedures that are public and intersubjective, and convergence amongst rational inquirers assuming complete evidence (Railton 1994, pp. 76–77). Finally, Elisabeth Lloyd identifies a related conception of objec-tivity that involves (a) detachment or lack of bias, (b) public accessibility, (c) independent existence with relation to knowers, and (d) Really-real existence (Lloyd 1995, pp. 353–357).

Why might one think that objectivism as characterized in some man-ner like those above offers the best conception of objectivity? It is quite understandable why many of these aspects of objectivism seem attractive to us, both in value and non-value domains, though for each set of under-lying concerns that might lead us to objectivism, I will argue that they can be satisfied by the procedural account—at least in the domain of ethics.

III.1 Truth, “Really-Realness,” and Independence

Consider first the correspondence theory of truth, Really-realness, and mind-independence; these aspects of objectivism can be grouped together given that each appears to involve an assumption that objectivity must have to do with ontological status. Peter Railton offers a plausible explanation of the connection between ontological status and objectivity; we rightly worry, he suggests, about “having the evolution of our beliefs controlled by uncorrected-for and potentially arbitrary subjective factors rather than by the objects of inquiry themselves” (Railton 1991, p. 767).

The above concern is particularly acute if the objects of inquiry—in the ethical case, ethical facts or properties—turn out not to be real and fundamental aspects of the world, but instead are merely something like projections of our own desires or emotions. If this were the case, how could ethical inquiry ever be objective in the way that (we presume) theoretical inquiry is? Does not ethical discourse then begin to look analogous to seventeenth-century discourse about witches in that just as there are no witches (in the Puritan’s sense of the term)—and so all claims assuming the existence of witches (in this sense) are false—there are no ethical properties


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or facts either (Joyce 2001, pp. 156–157)? It might seem that if we want to avoid ethical discourse going the way of witch discourse, we need to show that ethical facts or properties do exist in a mind-independent, Really-real way, perhaps as something like Dworkin’s notion of “morons”—moral properties that can causally impact humans just as other basic components of the physical universe can (Dworkin 1996, pp. 104).24

What can the procedural, pragmatist view say in response to these con-cerns? Unsurprisingly, given the pragmatist underpinnings of the view, this account does not lend itself to a correspondence account of truth. After all, on a procedural account, an objective outcome is merely one that results from following certain epistemic norms. The world informs and constrains what transitions in beliefs or values we can make, but in any particular case we will never be forced by empirical facts to accept any particular value or vice versa. Just as in the theoretical case, underdetermination means that by revising background values we can, in principle, avoid accepting any particular value or fact we desire come what may (Quine 1951; Longino 1990; Nelson 1990). Given this sort of holism, our inquiry will be path dependent and there will not necessarily be only one objective story to be told about the world. It is possible, then, that different individuals or groups could engage in bouts of inquiry that result in different outcomes but that are equally objective.25

Given the above admission that more than one outcome can be equally objective, one might wonder if I am here embracing a pragmatic account of truth according to which truth is just “what works.”26 In fact, I reject such an understanding of truth for two reasons. First, it does not leave room for the possibility that some beliefs “work” in the sense of being instrumentally successful while still failing to be warranted as descriptions of how things are. Consider placebos as a quintessential case of beliefs “working” yet being false according to our commonsense understanding of truth and falsity.27 Second—and here we see the underlying difficulty with regard to the first reason—the pragmatic conception of truth also fails to distinguish the (or a) reason we typically aim at truth in our in-quiry and what it is for a claim to be true. Perhaps we aim at truth in our inquiry for higher-order reasons that are not about truth per se; thus in an important sense, it might be the case that “what works” is the ultimate value that guides our inquiry and the reason why we aim at truth.28 But this is to say something quite different than that what it is for a claim to be true is merely for it to “work.”


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Thus in contrast to both the correspondence view and the pragmatic view, I prefer a deflationary account of truth. Such an understanding of truth avoids the overly metaphysical flavor of the correspondence view while also preserving the link between evidence and the aims of inquiry.

What about Really-realness and mind-independence—what, on my account, guarantees that our inquiry will lead us to capture only what is “Really-real” about the ethical world? And relatedly, in what sense are the objects of inquiry—ethical properties or facts—independent of us on my view?

Talk of Really-realness depends importantly on notions of indepen-dence. In fact, I suggest that once we give up on the strong sense of in-dependence—for instance, mind-independence—there seems to be little reason to speak of Really-realness at all (Lloyd 1995, pp. 353–354). The procedural, pragmatist view aims to offer all the independence that we need with regard to the truth or validity of ethical claims, but in a manner that (happily) falls quite short of mind-independence. After all, if ethical properties or facts were mind independent, their validity could not depend on psychological, emotional, and social facts about humans; but it is hard to see how this makes sense as a conception of morality or ethics. Rather, it seems that the sort of independence we should care about is independence from of our beliefs or preferences about ethical claims. In other words, we need ethical facts to be independent in the sense that they are the case whether or not we believe, feel, or hope them to be the case.29

This sort of independence seems to be quite enough to avoid an “any-thing goes” sort of relativism and to offer a response to the worry about subjectivism as characterized earlier by Railton in terms of “a worry about having the evolution of our beliefs controlled by uncorrected-for and po-tentially arbitrary subjective factors rather than by the objects of inquiry themselves” (Railton 1991, p. 767). This, I suggest, is all the independence we should want in ethics.

III.2 Values, Bias, and Emotions

What of the requirements of value neutrality, lack of bias, and emotional detachment? At issue here is whether individuals’ preferences or desires will be allowed to inform their inquiry in ways that may lead them to less accurately characterize the way the world is. This concern connects up with the worry about correspondence, independence, and Really-realness. We think certain aspects of the world are as they are regardless of whether we believe or prefer things to be otherwise. The fear, then, is that individuals


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who bring their values, biases, or emotions into inquiry will be unable or unwilling to see the world for what it really is, and thus inquiry will be less successful in its aim at getting at truth.30 And surely there does seem to be something prima facie worrisome here. Consider a few examples of values seemingly biasing public understanding of issues of national importance and public policy decision-making: politicized news coverage by major networks in the United States, the public’s misunderstanding of the cur-rent state of consensus about global warming amongst climate scientists, and the government-mandated spreading of scientifically unsupported information about breast cancer to women considering abortion (Ander-son 2011; National Cancer Institute 2011; Richardson and Nash 2006).

What, on my account, can prevent these sorts of outcomes in our sys-tem of ethical inquiry? First we ought to note some important differences between science and ethics when it comes to the concern about emotions, values, and bias. Given that my main concern here is objectivity in ethics, it is hard to see how a satisfactory account could require value neutrality (as some claim science requires). How could we avoid bringing values to bear in our attempts to confirm other values? Just as in science we must bring other theoretical beliefs to bear as background assumptions in con-firming theories, so it seems analogously that we must bring other values to bear in our ethical confirmation.

In addition, we might think that worries about emotional detachment play a different role in the case of science vs. ethics. We can understand the worry in science in terms of the relationship of the inquirer to the object of study. Perhaps we should be wary of cases in which inquirers have personal relationships of emotional depth with those participating in the study or those being observed. This sounds quite reasonable in some cases, but more problematic in others. Certainly we might reason-ably object to a drug trial in which the medical professionals who have designed and are running the trial have family members in the trial. Yet some scholars have also suggested that some kinds of attachment could be scientifically useful.31

Whatever we might think of detachment in science, in the case of ethics, detachment seems clearly neither desirable nor possible. Ethics, after all, is about us—our lives, our desires, our emotions. Surely when we inquire about what is valuable and how to live, we are attached to certain kinds of answers and we bring our own experience of living to bear on our an-swers. How could we avoid this kind of attachment given ethics’ content?

Finally bias, like emotional detachment, might refer to many different things. On the face of it, one might think that bias has no more a place in


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ethics than in science, since typically we talk of bias only in a pejorative sense. And surely, if bias refers to something like radical subjectivism or to favoritism based on personal preference, then bias would clearly be an obstacle to objectivity in ethics. However, if by “bias” we mean only the bringing of one’s background beliefs, or social position, or experience of the world to bear in one’s inquiry, then in my view it looks much less threatening to objectivity.

Bias then looks rather like an inevitable aspect of any inquiry under-taken by human beings—beings who are, of course, themselves objects of the world and who, therefore, are acted upon by social forces. To ac-knowledge the sense in which we inquirers are both subjects and objects of the world, and hence that we must turn our inquiry to ourselves and our own processes of knowledge production, is just to acknowledge the naturalization of ethical epistemology—the fourth pillar of the procedural, pragmatist view (Anderson 1995a).

III.3 Convergence

Finally let us consider the last potentially attractive feature of objectiv-ism—convergence. We might reasonably suspect that if our most rational inquirers who employ our best methods and who have equal and full access to the evidence still fail to come to agreement in a domain, then we are failing to get at what the world is really like in that domain. Perhaps in the case of such a failure at convergence the aspect of the world under inquiry is not appropriately independent of us. This lack of independence, then, could explain why convergence was impossible even in ideal conditions.

This issue of convergence is of particular concern in the ethical domain, as it has been deployed often in the form of the argument for moral dis-agreement against ethical realism and ethical objectivity (Donald Loeb 1998). This argument often proceeds by implicitly or explicitly contrasting ethical inquiry with theoretical inquiry; the idea is that in the ideal condi-tions discussed above, rational inquirers would come to agreement about science, but not about ethics or morality. After all, we see examples in our actual lives in which seemingly reasonable people appear to agree about all of the relevant non-moral/ethical facts—say with regard to abortion—yet still disagree as to the morality of most abortions.32

The view I have been developing throughout this paper can make no guarantees about convergence on ethical questions; thus as discussed above, it is entirely possible that more than one objective view of ethics will emerge from the sort of procedures sketched above. But why, exactly,


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should this result be an unwelcome one? In addition to concerns about independence, the desire for convergence results from reasoning that goes something like this. Let’s suppose there are two equally warranted and objective—but incompatible—ethical claims. If they are incompatible, then at least one of them cannot be true. But has not something then gone wrong if our supposedly objective inquiry might end up endorsing incompatible values and hence at least one false ethical belief/value?

My response here is to call into question the sense in which the ob-jectively produced but incompatible ethical beliefs in the above thought experiment are truly inconsistent. Recall that throughout the paper I have stressed a general approach to ethics that involves conceiving of ethical inquiry and progress in terms of resolving problems. So to say that incon-sistent beliefs or values might result from objective inquiry is just to say that there might be different ways of solving ethical problems that prove equally good solutions.

But why should this outcome be worrisome? I want to suggest, instead, that this is the more intuitively plausible outcome. We should expect this sort of pluralism about the good because there are likely to be a variety of solutions to the problems we face in living that live up to the world and live up to our values. We should not expect, then, that there can be only one unique solution to each ethical problem we face anymore than we would assume this to be the case when it comes to solving other sorts of problems such as a bad economy, a high crime rate, an unstable building, or an unhealthy lifestyle.33 Thus, I am suggesting that we give up on the idea that convergence is necessary for objectivity, at least in the ethical domain.

III.4 A Final Worry: What of Ontology?

I want to respond, now, to what is likely a lingering worry for some readers. I have argued that a procedural account of objectivity that gives up on the notion that objectivity requires convergence, embraces a deflation-ary account of truth, and requires only a moderate sense of independence, is more attractive than objectivist-oriented views. And I suggested that such a process-based account will make plenty of room for the world to inform our inquiry.

But how exactly, one might ask, does the world constrain and correct what otherwise might be merely our projections or subjective tastes? How can I make this sort of claim without first offering an ethical ontology, according to which more than mere projections or tastes are at issue?


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It is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper to offer a thorough-going account of ethical ontology. Rather than doing so, I will respond to the questions above by pointing to two well-known ontologies that cohere with the type of procedural account I have thus far been describing. I have in mind here the secondary-property view as offered by David Wiggins as well as the “ethics without ontology” view as put forth by Hilary Putnam.

Wiggins’s sensibility theory in “A Sensible Subjectivism?” analogizes moral/ethical properties to color and humor properties; while color and humor properties cannot, of course, be found in the physical structure of the universe and so are not completely mind independent, they are also not mere projections that are subject to a devolving relativism. Colors are really in the world from the perspective of (normal) human beings and they appear to make good on the very sort of independence I have been claiming for ethics—color-claims depend on human responses to the world, but our merely believing or hoping a color-claim to be true is not the same as its being true (Wiggins 1987, pp. 185–214). Thus one possible response to worries about ontology is to combine the procedural account of objectivity with a sensibility theory.

On the other hand, Hilary Putnam offers a more radical view about ontology in a lecture appropriately titled “Ontology: An Obituary.” Put-nam there suggests that we can satisfactorily conceive of ethics in a way that avoids concerns about the ontology of value altogether. In doing so, he draws an analogy between ethical judgments and methodological value judgments in the sciences—such as those having to do with simplicity and coherence—and compares the realm of ethics to logic and mathematics. The point of such parallels seems to be that philosophers hold a double standard in taking ontological worries to undermine ethical objectiv-ity, but not objectivity in logic, math, or even epistemology and science (Putnam 2004, pp. 67–73). In contrast to metaphysically heavy ways of conceiving of moral objects, Putnam posits “pragmatic pluralism” that holds that there is no one type of language that can satisfactorily describe all of reality, and so we have many different sorts of languages with dif-ferent sorts of structures such that not every language requires there to be “mysterious and supersensible objects behind” that language (Putnam 2004, pp. 21–22). Thus another possibility for the procedural view is to take the more radical Putnam-inspired position that all we need to make good on ethical objectivity is pluralism about kinds of languages.

The procedural, pragmatist account of objectivity could—with small adjustments—cohere with either the Wiggins-style or the Putnam-style approach to ontology. For the purposes of this paper, then, I intend to


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remain agnostic about ontology. From a pragmatic point of view, there is no reason why questions about ontology need to be settled before epistemic questions about values and objectivity. So long as there is at least one plausible ontology that is compatible with the view, then, it makes sense to continue to work out those epistemic and value-related issues first and to leave committing to a particular ontology for later work.

IV. CONCLUSION

In the proceeding sections I have tried to both sketch out the major details regarding what a procedural, pragmatist account of ethical objec-tivity looks like and make clear what is attractive about such an account. A procedural, pragmatist account of ethical objectivity, I have argued, can capture everything we want—or ought to want—from objectivity in the domain of the good, helpfully allows us to bring recent work in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science to bear on issues in ethics, and illuminates an important difference in the nature of the moral and ethical domains. In addition, I have tried to put to rest many of the likely objec-tions to the very notion of a procedural account of ethical objectivity—that it fails in some respect or another to be objectivist enough. To the contrary, I have suggested that when we pay close attention the nature of the ethical (in contrast to the moral) we will likely see that we ought not to have wanted the trappings of objectivist objectivity in the first place.

NOTES

1. I owe special thanks to Elizabeth Anderson, Peter Railton, and Laura Ru-etsche for substantial comments on multiple versions of this work. Thanks also to Marie Jayasekera and Vanessa Carbonell for helpful comments and encouragement and to the audience at the 2011 Three Rivers Philosophy Conference for useful feedback. I am grateful in addition to three anonymous reviewers and the editors for comments and suggestions.

2. Scanlon (1998, pp. 171–72) refers to narrow morality in terms of “what we owe to each other”—the domain of morality he intends to capture with his contractualist account—and contrasts it with concerns having to do with the duties involved in personal relationships, sexual morality, and ideals of excellence that involve concerns that are not primarily about “what we owe to each other.” Williams (1985, chapter entitled “Morality, the Peculiar In-stitution,” pp. 174–196) notes that morality goes beyond deontic concerns such as obligation, but suggests that too often moral philosophy mistakenly subsumes all sorts of moral concerns under the “deontic” umbrella.


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3. Janack (2002) draws these meanings from a variety of philosophers includ-ing Samuel Scheffler, Richard Rorty, Susan Bordo, Evelyn Fox Keller, Helen Longino, Paul Moser, Nicholas Rescher, Sandra Harding, Martha Nussbaum, and Susan Haack.

4. At least, it seems if we are really to be able to make sense of the idea that the new value is better than the old value, there had better be some rational explanation of the change.

5. Another less obvious way we might make an error in ethics might be for one to give too high a level of credence to an ethical belief (which, say, happens to be true) when we are not warranted in having such certainty in its truth. In this case, though, it seems we would not say that the (true) belief was mistaken, but rather our degree of credence in the belief.

6. I will from this point on use the term “belief” with the colloquial meaning in mind. That is, I am not here assuming a cognitivist metaethic.

7. For instance, an individual member of the group, G, might believe that condemnation of cannibalism is a majority-held view amongst members of her group and therefore that (for members of G at least), cannibalism is wrong. But suppose the individual is actually factually mistaken about what the members of G think about cannibalism—the majority, in fact, morally approve of it; in that case, the individual is mistaken in her moral judgment about cannibalism.

8. Or, we might want to say that at least one individual can be “more right”—that is, be more warranted or have better reasons than the other individual.

9. See section III in particular.10. Her four requirements are (1) there must be publicly recognized forums for

criticism; (2) the body of belief accepted by the community must change over time (in response to evidence and reasoning embodied by criticisms of com-munity members made in accordance with recognized standards); (3) there must be recognized standards of evidence; and (4) the community must be cognitively democratic.

11. Rawls discusses the work the original position does in terms of “justifica-tion,” but I think much of the concern about objectivity is also implicitly at issue in the discussion.

12. This is not to say that there is no room for evidence to play a role in Rawls’s contractualism—after all, the parties in the original position are assumed to know facts about political affairs, economics, and human psychology or as Rawls puts it “whatever general facts affect the choice of the principles of justice” (Rawls 1971, p. 137).

13. I have previously discussed the case of teenage pregnancy as an ethical prob-lem in Roth (2012).


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14. Moreover, the fact that Rawls does not seem to make much room for the world to constrain our views should not be surprising given that Rawls is primarily concerned with the narrow moral/political question of what jus-tice looks like in a liberal democratic society. His contractualist view is not intended to offer a conception of the good, the domain of ethics with which I am here concerned. It seems to me that the world likely has a greater role to play in inquiry about the good, whereas in our inquiry about the right/the political Rawls is correct to focus on justification to others.

15. The role of a community will be of even more importance when it comes to moral objectivity—that is, objectivity in the deontic domain, regarding issues of rights and obligations—but I cannot take up this issue here.

16. Anderson is citing Quine (1969).17. In this vein, Dewey suggests that “[m]istakes are . . . [not] mere unavoidable

accidents to be mourned or moral sins to be expiated and forgiven. They are lessons in wrong methods. . . . They are indications of the need of revision, development, readjustment. Ends grow, standards of judgment are improved” (Dewey 1957, p. 175).

18. I say our cognitive processes are “biasing” inasmuch as they involve our failing to accurately grasp what the world is like. Homeless people we all agree are no more and no less individuals in possession of human dignity and worthy of respect than anyone else, yet our cognitive processes lead us to erroneously experience viewing such an individual as if the opposite is true.

19. Of course, which arrangements are better than others at producing those sorts of relations is itself an empirical question to be determined by further inquiry.

20. Consider, for example, scientific racism. See Clough and Loges (2008) for a view about the moral failing involved in contemporary scientific hypotheses positing inherent racial differences in the face of devastating empirical prob-lems with such hypotheses.

21. See especially section V.22. One might here doubt that the empirical facts are relevant to value judg-

ments about sexual behavior in the way I have suggested. After all, one could always be unrepentantly dogmatic about sexuality. That is, one could insist that sexual behavior outside of heterosexual marriage is immoral and that therefore teens should not be taught anything but abstinence-only sex-ed, come what may, no matter how bad the consequences of these policies would be.

This is true of course—one could have such value commitments. But it does not seem that most opponents of comprehensive sex-ed do view things this way (at least not if we take them at their word). Political debates over


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sex education in the United States, after all, are always about both the proper way of valuing sexuality and how to reduce the teen pregnancy rate. If most traditionalists were actually unrepentant dogmatists of this sort, why do they bother engaging in the empirical debate over the best way to lower teen pregnancy rates? I think the answer is that most people who are drawn to traditional sexual values really do care about lowering the teen pregnancy rate and really would find themselves with a difficult value conflict if it turned out that only liberal attitudes toward sex and comprehensive sex-ed could lower that rate. That is just to say, they are not unrepentant dogmatists—faced with such a conflict they might very well rather revise their sexual values than simply ignore the societal ills associated with emotionally, financially, and socially unprepared teens getting pregnant. (Note that the kind of revision I have in mind here need not involve the complete embracing of the liberal view. Plenty of U.S. citizens, after all, support comprehensive sex education as public policy in public schools, yet still maintain conservative personal sexual values that they convey to their children at home. This might be the sort of position that former traditionalists could transition to in order to avoid dogmatism and restore coherence in their system of beliefs and values. (Roth 2012).

23. For a fuller account of the problem-resolving view, see Roth (2012).24. Dworkin, of course, takes the notion of morons to be absurd.25. This is not to say, though, that we cannot criticize another group’s story or

that we should not continually question our own story. We may think that another group has not fully appreciated all of the values at stake in a particular problem or all of the reasons in favor of one type of solution. Or, as we face new difficulties in trying to live, we may rightly question whether we have properly recognized all of the values and considered all the reasons.

26. Shannon Sullivan, for instance, suggests that a “judgment or belief is true not if it matches the state of affairs it attempts to report, but rather if, when acted on, it produces the transformation of experience that was desired by those engaged in that experience” (Sullivan 2002, p. 220).

27. Of course, it matters here how we characterize the belief in question. The belief that “if I take the blue pill every day, I will feel less joint pain” might be true if the blue pill is a placebo and the patient does not know that it is a placebo. The belief “the blue pill will act physiologically to reduce the inflammation in my joints and therefore lessen my pain” is false, as is the belief that “the blue pill will make me feel less pain no matter what I happen to believe about the blue pill.” Supernatural or religious beliefs might be another example, as they might have positive effects on the well-being of individuals or social


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cohesion of social groups regardless of the actual existence of any particular higher being.

28. Louis Loeb has pointed out, for example, that traditional epistemologists such as Descartes and Hume take one of our ultimate aims in believing to be contentment. According to Loeb, though for Descartes, Hume, Sextus, and Peirce truth is one objective at which our beliefs aim, we also have a higher-order objective of inquiry that is characterized in purely psychologi-cal terms (Loeb 1998, pp. 208–209). Anderson makes a different but related point when she argues that “being true may be no defense of a theory” given that what we actually care about in inquiry is significant truth—that is, a theory that does justice to the objects of inquiry—not merely a theory that collects an incoherent or incomplete set of claims all of which happen to be true (Anderson 1995b, pp. 37, 55).

29. Here there is a significant similarity with the sort of independence Allan Gibbard means to capture in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Gibbard 1992, p. 155).

30. Something like this worry seems to underlie the concerns voiced by Susan Haack regarding feminist epistemological work that argues that values can productively be brought into science. See Elizabeth Anderson (1995b, pp. 32–36) for a helpful summary and response to such worries; also (Haack 1993, pp. 31–43; 1996, pp. 79–94; Anderson 1995b, pp. 27–58).

31. For instance, primatologist Sarah Hrdy suggests that primatologists often identify and empathize—in both subtle and overt ways—with the primates they study and that this sort of emotional attachment likely affects what sorts of questions a researcher asks and thus what sorts of theories are likely to dominate the field (Hrdy 1986).

32. Things are complicated here inasmuch as it might seem that on some moral issues inquirers in ideal conditions would converge. One might opt for a more fine-grained analysis of the likelihood of convergence in different value domains. For instance, Doris and Plakias suggest the possibility of a “patchy realism”—presumably bringing with it a “patchy” sense of ethical or moral objectivity (Doris and Plakias 2008). Thanks to Alex Plakias for pointing out this strain of thought to me.

33. And, of course, we also should not assume that problems can be easily and neatly delineated in the way they would need to be in order for there to be only one unique solution to each problem.


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A Procedural, Pragmatist Account of Ethical Objectivity

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