Australasian Association of Philosophy Annual Conference

Abstract: There has been a lot of talk about reason and rationalism in the recent theory of ethics. Many writers envisage a kind of wholesale takeover of ethics by something different: the theory of reason. In this paper I argue that this is wholly chimerical, and that talk of reason and rationality gives us at best a number of notational variants of various kinds of endorsements we feel inclined to make. Writers in the firing line include Williams, Quinn, Parfit, and Wallace.

Abstract: Dick Rorty has claimed that the meaning of basic normative terms such as ‘good’, ‘just’ and ‘true’ is really a problem only for philosophers – that we all know what these terms are well enough for the uses they serve, and do not need philosophers to explain their meanings. I think that there is something to Rorty’s point here, although it may be that it is not quite the same as Rorty intended. Rather than begin with what the way in which the question of a possible foundation for ethics might be configured within current discussions, I want to begin from a perspective that seems suggested by Rorty’s comment, namely, that ethics already carries its own ‘foundation’ with it, and that it is a foundation given in ethical practice. The approach that I will sketch, and to some extent defend, can be viewed as an instance of a broadly ‘hermeneutical’ style of thinking that looks always to find the ground of our practices in the practices themselves (a move that is suggested by, as well as expressed in, the idea of hermeneutical circularity). It seems likely that this will involve some rethinking of what ethics itself might be – perhaps a more modest conception of ethics, in some respects, but also a more robust conception in others. However, since such a hermeneutical approach (which can be seen to be evident, not just in Gadamer, but also in Socrates) itself appears to draw on a certain conception of reason, I will also suggest that the rethinking of ethics at issue here is not such as to remove ethics from the ‘space’ of reason, although it does involve a view of reason that is similarly ‘modest’ in character.

AAP2009

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