Pragmatist Quietism

Pragmatist Quietism argues that there are objective ethical truths that neither require nor admit of a vindication or foundation from domains outside of ethics—metaphysics, semantics, epistemology, and so on. First, it argues that normative-ethical debates are similar in important ways to debates that philosophers call ‘merely verbal’; the key difference is that the former influence action and affect in a way that the latter do not. It then uses this set of features to explain why there are objective ethical truths that don’t need or allow for extra-ethical vindication, but also why it can sometimes seem as though ethics is not objective. This explanation of ethical objectivity without foundations is a distinctly pragmatist one, where pragmatism is the approach to inquiry and explanation on which we endeavour to guide our beliefs by considerations of value rather than by the accurate representation of the world. The meta-ethical outlook is then applied to issues in moral epistemology, including disagreement, and debunking arguments.