 An ethical pragmatist might tell you that it's probably not a good idea to steal a lady's purse. Why? Well, it's just not likely to go well for you. Okay, let's start in the middle of things because that's where everyone starts. Kicking a dog for fun is wrong. Being there for a friend when they need you is good. You have a duty to get a ride home if you've been drinking heavily instead of trying to When we see injustice or integrity or honor or cruelty, there's some moral aspect of that experience, something that is often as apparent to us as color or size. This thing is red, that thing is huge, these things are wrong, those things are good. But that moral quality of our experience doesn't have any sort of physical manifestation outside of our heads, and we sometimes disagree about the moral character of certain phenomena with no clear way to resolve that dispute. One person might see drinking alcohol as a terrible moral transgression, while someone else might see it as harmless fun, or maybe even a sacred duty. We have to ask, what the hell is going on here? There are a handful of ways people have tried to figure that out. Some philosophers analyze these experiences to try and find some underlying set of rules, an ethical rubric or algorithm that we can use to explain what's right and wrong and why, invariably running into wacky counterintuitive notions about good behavior. Others take the weirdness of the whole situation as proof that morality is nothing more than a shared human fantasy or delusion, maybe a whimsical foible of culture and evolution, which, well, maybe, but what then? What are we supposed to do with moral dilemmas and the moral aspects of our lives? Ignore them? Pick and choose what to do based on some other arbitrary criteria? And then there's the pragmatists. You may remember pragmatism from earlier episodes as a non-standard attitude towards truth. Most of the time, we talk about things being true or false as a function of correspondence. The world is like this, we believe that, if this is the same as that, if our beliefs match up to how the world is, then they're true. But pragmatists take a page from evolution and a page from science and use them to define truth a little differently. For pragmatists, the idea that humans could ever know capital T truth is overselling it. I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, and as far as I can tell, that belief is warranted. But if the sun didn't rise tomorrow, I wouldn't stamp my foot angrily and tell the universe to pull itself together because the sun will rise tomorrow is the capital T truth. My beliefs were wrong, they were false, and the only way that I know about it is because they stopped working. And there's the magic word, working, winning if you like, successfully predicting and netting desired outcomes. For pragmatists, there's no higher standard of knowledge to be aspired to than a heuristic or rule of thumb that has survived repeated testing so far. We keep the ideas that have worked for us and discard the ones that don't. We can't ever know if we've gotten anywhere close to the capital T truth, we could be standing directly on top of it and still not see it. But by throwing models that fail in the garbage, we can narrow and incrementally improve the fitness of available ideas over time, maybe ratcheting ourselves closer to what's actually going on. The pragmatist account of morality squints sideways at this whole mess with ethical systems and error theory and moral experience and asks, okay, what's useful here? The various philosophical accounts of ethics and whatnot can be helpful in highlighting some of the important features of morality, informing the models we built, but trying to figure out if moral facts really actually exist or which account of ethics is capital T true are both missing the point. The thing that's of paramount importance, what we're actually trying to do, is getting satisfactory outcomes, cultivating a model of morality that allows us to reliably succeed in our moral endeavors. That can mean lots of different things, but it cuts a neat middle path between these factions in the land of correspondence theory, rather than taking a hard line that such and such algorithm is the truth about morality, or that the only truth is that anything goes, or that the truth is that morals don't exist. Pragmatism takes a step back and says, look, I'm not really interested in whatever you think the truth is or isn't. Why don't you just tell me what works? Better yet, why don't you tell me what doesn't work? This emphasis on the importance of practice in model selection has an interesting effect on the scale at which pragmatists analyze different moral theories. As I said at the beginning, we only engage with this question of why morality is weird and how it works in the middle of things. Long before we're in a position to think about the subject in any rigorous fashion, we grow up living and thinking with numerous moral ideas and practices already in place, shaping what and how we think and act. It doesn't even cross your mind that you might have some ethical obligation to wear teal or hop in one foot right now. That's not how morals even work, right? The way that you think about those actions as lacking any significant moral character might be different if you were raised with certain notions about teal or hopping, but for some reason, for you, that's never been the thing. In that sense, when we reflect on what sorts of moral codes or theories or systems we ought to adopt to get satisfactory moral outcomes, it's not like we're starting from scratch. We're trying to evaluate and maybe slowly modify our existing moral habits, patterns of behavior and thought and environment that feed on and inform each other. Like, imagine someone who lives out in the countryside and doesn't really keep up with news, who's totally ignorant of the COVID pandemic. Her habitual behavior is to go out in public without a mask on, and for a long while, that's worked for her. She hasn't run into any moral consequences of that behavior that might be considered unsatisfactory. However, when she goes into town for her semi-monthly shopping, that habit suddenly experiences some problems. Everyone is wearing masks and she isn't. The store won't let her in without a mask on. People are scowling at her. Hopefully, before she gets to a point that her maskless habit reaps some really bad consequences, either for her or for people around her. Her intent, her behavior, or her environment can shift into a pattern that works better. Maybe she reads a sign about COVID and decides to mask up to be socially responsible. Maybe she puts a mask on just to stop people from glaring at her without really understanding why. Maybe the grocery store has a checkpoint where they give her a free mask for entry. It's unreasonable to expect her habits to change unprompted, like she should just somehow know to make a mask for herself before she leaves home to avoid negative moral consequences. But as soon as they stop working, a good pragmatist would say that they need to adapt. Adapt is a key term here. Remember when I said that pragmatist ethics takes a page from evolution? Pragmatists take a page from evolution. Okay, yeah, I did say that. If you've studied evolution, you might know the constant struggle of trying to crowbar apart adaptation from intent. Like, someone says, birds evolved wings so they could fly, and every biologist and geneticist in the room goes, not really? There's this process at work where creatures mutate and some of them die off and other ones replicate and their offspring have some of the same traits and traits that are advantageous for survival in their environment accumulate slowly over time, but there's no real desire or design in that process. These features of birds that happen to be good for flying are just genes doing what they always do, slowly changing to facilitate replication in their surroundings. One might see the same sort of process at work with the moral norms and habits that we find ourselves in the middle of. Ethicists might say that they have some overarching purpose or goal, like minimizing suffering or realizing God's will. Error theorists might argue that they're just random noise with nothing to recommend one moral assertion over any other. Pragmatists, again, find an interesting middle road of good adaptation. There are certainly moral theories that work better or worse than others in certain contexts, so there's definitely some sort of normative standard at work, but that doesn't imply that there's any one ethic to rule them all, any more than there's one optimal bird wing. It's not anything goes, but it's not an uncompromising monolith either. As per the Last Thunk episode, this view gives us some motivation to not simply fling all our moral intuitions and habits into the garbage, just because we noticed some weirdness, inconsistencies, or places that they don't work. The cultural notions about right and wrong we were raised with obviously aren't going to give us unerringly successful moral outcomes in all situations, but they are probably well adapted to our environment in some helpful ways, granting us some useful heuristics for navigating certain common moral situations. Philosophers and game theorists have devised all sorts of post hoc justifications for why breaking promises is generally wrong, or why saving more lives is generally good, all sorts of benefits that people who just follow their cultural norms of morality get without a second thought. This certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't reflect on those, or revise the places that these norms fail less, or come into conflict, but so long as they seem to be working, maybe some charity is warranted. There are obviously some important details missing from this very small summary of the pragmatist account of morality, like what it means exactly for a theory to work, how you can be sure if it's stopped working, who's making those decisions, all sorts of annoying persnickety details upon which the ultimate viability of the whole enterprise turns. But for me, it's kind of refreshing to examine the moral aspects of my experience without trying to invoke some first principles account of expected utility, or bite bullets about moral error theory, or any of that, to just look at my moral universe, see what I'm doing, what's working for me, what the world is like, and what I want to be better. At least, that's what's working for me right now. What about you? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to change this thing. Ah, damn it. Yep, it's me. Future Josh, just a reminder for anyone watching this, Episode 200 is coming up. I'm going to be rewatching some old episodes to comment on them. If you want me to sit through one in particular, be sure to visit the link that's in the description and vote for your favorites. All these favorites.