Robert Kane’s TPA keynote did not disappoint. Drawing heavily on his latest book Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom, he developed the thesis that “openness” is the key to “common ethical ground in a pluralist world.” In the process he addressed the very issue we were tussling about the other day in EEA: how to admit and embody the pluralist’s insight that there’s no one right way to live, while skirting free of the relativist’s trap of abandoning the quest for truthful wisdom.
We lift from ourselves the burden of proving our view right and all others wrong and place the burden of proof on everyone equally to prove their ways of life right or wrong by how they live and act and not merely by abstract argument.
This sounds pragmatic to the core, to me. But Kane didn’t mention James or his “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891) last night, the seminal essay that begins:
The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which determine what that “say” shall be.
Must ask Kane about that, as the TPA’s concurrent sessions kick off in just a couple of hours. If you happen to be reading this in middle Tennessee, you have time to get there. Y’all come!
-From "On Common Ground"-Up@dawn
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