Moral Philosophers as Ethical Engineers: Limits of Moral Philosophy and a Pragmatist Alternative

Suppose that moral philosophers would reach a firm consensus about some major challenge currently facing humankind. Suppose, for example, that all moral philosophers were suddenly to agree that carbon dioxide emissions beyond a certain level are unequivocally bad and should be morally condemned. What then? Which key political actors would change their actions based on this philosophical consensus? Despite a growing consensus among scientific experts, the institutions, the behavior of corporations, and the habits of the general public are slow to change. This suggests that environmental problems are not solved by simply demonstrating who is right and who is wrong. Resolving all the technical philosophical disputes regarding climate change will most probably do very little to take us closer to resolving the actual issue of climate change.

Andrew Light argues that the environmental challenges we are facing today are so serious that environmental ethicists should not get sidetracked into some intramural philosophical disputes that are all too easy to ignore. Instead, there is a need for arguments that focus on the “moral motivation of humans to respond to environmental issues” in order to make environmental ethics “more useful to the larger environmental community” (Light 2002, 441, 443). Every month and every year that we are unable to agree on and implement effective climate policies takes us closer to an irreversible global environmental catastrophe. Therefore, as regards the problems of contemporary environmental ethics, currently “their resolution in more practical terms is more important than their resolution in philosophical terms” (Light 2002, 435).

But perhaps this practical urgency is not something that applies only to environmental ethics. As Bernard Williams puts it, “The only serious enterprise is living, and we have to live after the reflection; moreover … we have to live during it as well” (1985, 117). Our lives are already unfolding (Martela 2015a); millions and millions of people face tough ethical choices every single day. If moral philosophers hold back the practical implications of their theoretical conclusions until all the philosophical issues have been resolved, they are denying the public a chance to benefit from their work. The world does not stand still until philosophers have reached the final, solid truths. People facing real-life moral conundrums need the expertise that moral philosophy can provide today already.

There is a sense of urgency built into the nature of ethics. As regards the proper standards of conduct, many have been afraid that unless such standards can be delivered, we are left vulnerable to relativism, amoralism, and general disorder. No matter whether philosophers look at ethics as something divine, as a social contract, as standards we are bound to through our rationality, or a system built upon certain moral sentiments, they seem to agree on one thing: we need ethics. Certain normative guidelines are necessary for proper living—especially for living together with others.

One philosophical reaction to this sense of urgency is the task of attempting to discover or to justify the proper standards of living that would bind us all. Many seem to think that unless our ethical convictions can be justified through philosophy, society could slide into general disorder or even anarchy where every person fights for himself or herself. Kant described this urgency as follows: “A metaphysics of morals is … indispensably necessary … because morals themselves are liable to all kinds of corruption as long as the guide and supreme norm for correctly estimating them are missing” (1785, 3). Kant states that his mission is to attempt to find morally valid laws that carry with them “absolute necessity” (2). For him it is also clear that these kinds of laws are not to be found through empirical examination. He states boldly: “All moral philosophy rests entirely on its pure part. When applied to man, it does not in the least borrow from acquaintance with him (anthropology) but gives a priori laws to him as a rational being” (3). This means that “ground of obligation … must be sought a priori solely in the concepts of pure reason” (2).

From a historical point of view, what Kant does here is essentially to narrow down the basic ethical question. In the broadest form, the question of ethics has been “How should one live?” This is a question that addresses the whole of one's life, taking all possible dimensions of it into account (Williams 1985, 5). Through the Enlightenment and since Kant, however, the modern question of morality has often been narrowed to concern the obligations and duties of self-sufficient, autonomous, and rational subjects (see Williams 1985). From this point of view, the actual moral practices of human beings, as well as the emotions they might have, are seen as irrelevant for proper moral philosophy. Emotions are at most contingent and uncertain sources of proper behavior. What moral philosophers of this brand have been after is something much more solid: universal and inescapable law-like rules that bind all sentient beings.

Ever since Kant, this bold mission has been one of the guiding forces of moral philosophers. Philosophers such as G. E. Moore (1903), R. M. Hare (1952), Crispin Wright (1992), and Christine Korsgaard (2004) have sought solid foundations and strict definitions upon which ethics could be laid and through which moral disputes could be settled. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries this torch has been carried especially by analytical philosophers animated by the hope of settling moral questions through a careful analysis of moral language. What analytical realists and antirealists share in common is a firm belief that it is necessary to settle the question of moral realism through careful analytical arguments (see Miller 2003; Sayre-McCord 1988). The quest for certainty in ethics has been long and elaborated. But could ethics ever deliver on this hope?

Bernard Williams gives a dismissive diagnostics of the capabilities of moral philosophy in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). He offers a sharp critique against the ideas of rationality embodied in contemporary moral philosophy. In particular, he attacks the idea that there could be any Archimedean point upon which a solid ethical theory could be built. Here he echoes Dewey, who states that “whatever may be the differences which separate moral theories, all postulate one single principle as an explanation of moral life” and dismisses this reductionism (Dewey 1930, 315). Williams goes through different suggested foundations one by one, aiming to show how they fail at the task. In the course of this he shows how antique ideas about the essential connection between morality and well-being are based on assumptions we cannot accept, how Kantian ideas about the demands of practical rationality and rational agency offer no route to an impartial standpoint, and how utilitarianism, consequentialism, and other moral theories fail as attempts to reduce the richness of our ethical lives to one standard or technical formula.

It is of course open to debate how well Williams is able to refute the different moral foundations he criticizes. But there is a deeper point in Williams's book that is even harder to rebut. Williams asks: What can an ethical theory do, if we are able to build a convincing case for one? He is skeptical about the force of ethical considerations and reminds us that even if we were to have a justified ethical theory, the person in question might not be concerned about it. Even if we could prove to some amoralists that what they are about to do is (a) against some universal ethical standard, (b) is detrimental to their own well-being, and/or (c) is against the demands of rationality or internal coherence, they still have the choice of whether to care about this or not. They can choose to act even if they know that what they are about to do is against some standard that they believe in. Robert Nozick—whom Williams quotes—describes this as follows: “Suppose that we show that some X he [the immoral man] holds or accepts or does commits him to behaving morally. He now must give up at least one of the following: (a) behaving immorally, (b) maintaining X, (c) being consistent about this matter in this respect. The immoral man tells us, ‘To tell you the truth, if I had to make the choice, I would give up being consistent’” (Nozick 1981, 408).

What Williams in effect says is that the noble task of finding ultimate justification for some ethical standards could not—even if it was successful—deliver any final argument in practical debates about how to behave. “Objective truth” would have only the motivational weight that the parties involved choose to give to it. It no longer is obvious what a philosophical justification of an ethical standard is supposed to do or even “why we should need such a thing” (Williams 1985, 23).

Yet when we look at many contemporary ethical debates, we can see that that they proceed as if the solutions to the questions they pose would matter. In most scientific disciplines the journal articles have a standard section called “practical bearings,” where the practical relevance of the accumulated results are discussed. Not so for metaethical articles, even though they otherwise simulate the academic and peer-reviewed writing style of scientific articles. When we read someone presenting a number of technical counterarguments against quasi-realist solutions to the Frege-Geach problem, there usually is no debate about what practical bearings the discussion would have, whether these arguments would be successful or not. Suppose that in some idealized future the questions posed by the Frege-Geach problem would be conclusively solved. A new argument would emerge that all parties would see as so valid and sound that they would agree that the problem has now been finally settled. What then? How would ordinary people behave differently, after the solution has been delivered to them? I would guess it is fair to say—at least until it is proven otherwise—that the outcome of these debates is only marginally relevant for any ordinary person's ethical life.

When ethical debates are not anchored in practice—when the problems they deal with have no connection with the ethical problems people face in their everyday life, and when their technical solutions seem to have no practical relevance—then these debates tend to get sidetracked into technical arguments and counterarguments related to some analytic detail in the overall picture. This leads to a situation that Philip Kitcher paints as follows: “Any defense of the idea that philosophy, like particle physics and molecular biology, proceeds by the accumulation of reliable answers to technical questions would have to provide examples of consensus on which larger agreements are built. Yet, as philosophical questions diminish in size, disagreement and controversy persist, new distinctions are drawn, and yet tinier issues are generated. Decomposition continues downwards, until the interested community becomes too exhausted, too small, or too tired to play the game any further” (2011a, 251).

Through ignoring practical relevance, moral philosophy will make itself into a discipline that is all too easy to ignore. It becomes, as Dewey once put it, “sentimental indulgence for a few” or “mere arbitrary dogma” (1916, 315). During the Second World War, Melanesian cargo cult leaders observed how goods were airdropped from airplanes to Western troops on their islands. They mimicked the behavior of these troops by building runways and wooden towers in the hope that some deity would drop goods for them also. Sometimes the reaction of the philosophical community to the success of empirical sciences resembles the reaction of these isolated tribal leaders. Philosophers mimic the cumulative processes of science but get so involved in technical debates that a clear awareness of what aims these debates are serving is forgotten. They know all the maneuvers and are able to perform the rituals in a satisfactory manner but are not able to deliver what the general public is expecting from the field. Just as the rituals of cargo priests remain empty unless they can provide something valuable for the tribe, adequate performance of technical philosophy remains empty unless the debates are able to produce something that is of value for the society at large.

There is nothing wrong with discussing deep philosophical questions and engaging in detailed critique and countercritique of certain philosophical positions. They serve as important background studies for the solution of more general problems, in the same way some basic studies in genetics serve as building blocks for accumulating knowledge about inherited human diseases and their prevention. In fact, in the division of labor within a society, the task of philosophers is precisely to delve deeper into questions than others dare to. Yet “unless one can show that the more abstract questions do contribute to the solution of problems of more general concern, that they are not simply exercises in virtuosity, they should be seen as preludes to philosophy rather than the substance of it” (Kitcher 2011a, 259).

Accordingly, many view the efforts to find firm foundations, and the perpetual technical debates that ensue, as a historical curiosity that no longer animates the minds of young philosophers (Kitcher 2011a). But if moral philosophy were no longer to aim at discovering the ultimate justificatory force for certain moral standards, then what would be the alternative mission for moral philosophy?

“Moral conceptions and processes,” writes Dewey, “grow naturally out of the very conditions of human life” (1932, 343). Williams, having dismissed any foundational starting points for ethical theories, concludes that ethical theories still have to start from somewhere. “And the only starting point left is ethical experience itself” (Williams 1985, 93). This is where Deweyan experientalism steps into the picture.1 For Dewey, lived experience is both a “starting point and [a] terminal point”; experience is both what sets the problems and what we test proposed solutions in (Dewey 1929, 3). Experience is thus a part of philosophy in three essential phases: “(1) the starting point in everyday experience of all our attempts to enhance the meaning of our lives, (2) the process of the experiential transformation of such experience, and (3) the experience of consummatory achievement” (Browning 1999; quoted in Pappas 2008, 11).

Applied to moral philosophy, this means that inquiry into morality should start with actual human experience. “The legitimate starting and ending point … is our own everyday, concrete experience, that is, nothing more or less than that which appears, rough-and-tumble as it usually does, in our lives from day to day” (Pappas 2008, xii). This is a more radical suggestion than it might initially appear to be. It means that starting from any givens, be they certain basic distinctions, moral concepts, or objective moral facts, is premature. No matter how strongly we cling to some of our moral intuitions, we should not carve them into stone with letters of fire and then start to idolize the stone. The closed possibilities for pragmatist ethics2 are stated by Joseph Margolis: “Philosophy … cannot ignore or deny its own historicized setting; and … admitting that, it cannot recover any form of privileged neutrality, objectivity, universality, apodicticity, apriority, or modal necessity” (Margolis 1996, 7). All that we are left with is our particular ethical experiences that we might influence—and the justification for this influencing is to be found within this experiencing itself (Martela 2015b).

This doesn't mean, however, that we could start moral inquiry from a no-limits tabula rasa position. Ethical inquiry never starts from ground zero, where we might invent our moral convictions from scratch. Rather than starting moral inquiry empty-handed, we start “in the midstream of our lives” (Pappas 2008, 22). And in our lives we are already equipped with quite a keen ethical worldview that colors our experience with ethically loaded observations. In particular situations, we feel that one course of action is the right way to behave and that doing something else would be horribly wrong. More generally, we rely on certain distinctions, use certain morally loaded concepts, and rely on certain moral principles in our moral reasoning. These everyday moral convictions are deeply anchored within our emotional reactions and habitual ways of behaving. And it is within this situation, rather than outside it, that any form of ethical inquiry starts. In other words, our ethical inquiry takes place within a situation that is already morally loaded and shaped by our current beliefs and values—and taken more broadly, by the current beliefs and values of the culture or cultures we are in contact with. Moral philosophy is not done in a vacuum; instead, it is done against the already existing ethical landscape, its theses, theories, and basic valuations.

Pragmatism thus starts with the acknowledgment that morality is already a part of our societies as well as our individual lives. Moral standards and a sense of right and wrong existed before moral philosophy. This morality might or might not have some foundation in human nature. I would argue—along with many other moral philosophers and moral psychologists (such as Haidt [2012], Kitcher [2011b], and Prinz [2008])—that human beings are equipped with certain dispositions for feeling sympathy and compassion toward others, as well as with a sensibility to detect justice and fairness. Be that as it may, it is a contingent fact that standards of proper conduct are part of the fabric of every known human society. And it is within the interactions and discourses between people in different societies where morality takes its forms and within which it is constantly evolving. We come to uphold certain forms of moral generalizations through our upbringing and the cultural milieu in which we enact our lives. We enter into debates about the proper way of behaving, we explain and justify to others our conduct in particular situations, we educate the young to uphold certain moral standards, we signal our moral praise and blame both verbally and nonverbally, to both friends and strangers. Moral questions are discussed in the private sphere but also in the public: on television, in magazines, in books, or on the Internet. Thus there is a constantly ongoing dialogue within cultures—and between cultures—about the proper ways of behaving and the proper moral principles. It is mainly through this dialogue that the actual moralities of people are formed and changed.

Dewey had a keen eye for this socially constructed nature of much of what we understand as moral.3 He saw how “men live together naturally and inevitably in society” and how the social relations they have there with each other “are expressed in demands, claims, expectations” in a way in which one person's conviction of his rights becomes for others obligations (Dewey 1932, 343). Out of the interplay of these claims and obligations “there arises the general concept of Law, Duty, Moral Authority, or Right” (354). These ongoing discourses affect what ethical principles we come to uphold, but also what we take to be ethical considerations in the first place. For example, Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009) have shown that while almost all people seem to view issues of justice and care as moral, there are considerable differences between people as to whether they consider questions of purity, authority, and in-group loyalty as moral or nonmoral.

Everyday morality is thus about the intuitions, principles, justifications, and sacred doctrines that each of us has acquired throughout a lifetime. And it is through the interaction between human beings that these moral principles are discussed, challenged, refined, and strengthened. All this would exist even if the discipline of moral philosophy had never been invented. This web of existing concepts, convictions, and intuitions is the landscape within which moral philosophers must operate.

This understanding of morality means that we have to think anew what moral inquiry should aim at. As there is nothing foundational to rely on, and no promise of a purifying truth, the goal of the inquiry has to be found within experiencing. “Moral judgment is experimental and subject to revision by its issue” (Dewey 1922, 279). Whatever justification can be given for one moral doctrine over the other, it has to be found in practice—simply because there are no other options available. Accordingly, for pragmatists, moral inquiry is in the end directed toward practice, its successfulness is ultimately judged by the practical bearings it has on people's experiences: “Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic—or verbal—or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect in conduct” (Dewey 1916, 315). Moral inquiry should thus aim at practice; its successfulness is ultimately measured by how it is able to influence people's moral outlook and behavior.

In pragmatism, moral inquiry starts and ends in practice. What happens in between is a process in which we aim to refine, redevelop, and improve our current moral outlook. Philosophical inquiry becomes an effort to transform our current ways of experiencing into some other ways of experiencing that we deem to be better from some point of view (Dewey 1938). And the standards for what we deem to be better are part of this process; they too are shaped through it. So we start where we are, “from the midst of our pre-reflective and immediate qualitative experiences,” but these experiences can be changed and transformed through the philosophical inquiry we undertake (Pappas 2008, 23).

Before we move on, it might be interesting to note that this account of ethics is not exclusively Deweyan; we can find similar accounts elsewhere within the history of philosophy. For example, it comes quite close to what Martha Nussbaum describes as the Aristotelian conception of ethical theorizing: “It holds that ethical theorizing proceeds by way of a reflective dialogue between the intuitions and beliefs of the interlocutor, or reader, and a series of complex ethical conceptions, presented for exploration… . Such an inquiry cannot get started without readers or interlocutors who are already brought up as people of a certain sort. Its aim is to arrive at an account of the values and judgments of people who already have definite attachments and intuitions; these must, ultimately, be the material of the inquiry” (1989, 10).

Moral theorizing thus takes place against current moral practices. Its problems and materials to work with are found in people's contemporary moral experiences (as well as in historically documented experiences of those who lived before us). But the pragmatist outlook also gives us a new understanding of the nature of moral theories and moral conclusions one has drawn. Instead of being firm and final rules—let alone universal rules—that should be applied to particular acts to derive their moral rightness or wrongness, rules, standards, and principles should be seen as “intellectual instruments to be tested and confirmed—and altered—through consequences effected by acting upon them” (Dewey 1960, 277; see also Fesmire 2003, 59). It is appropriate to quote Dewey at length here: “A moral principle, such as that of chastity, of justice, of the Golden Rule, gives the agent a basis for looking at and examining a particular question that comes up. It holds before him certain possible aspects of the act; it warns him against taking a short or partial view of the act. It economizes his thinking by supplying him with the main heads by reference to which to consider the bearings of his desires and purposes; it guides him in his thinking by suggesting to him the important considerations for which he should be on the outlook” (Dewey 1932, 309).

Moral principles, ideals, rules, theories, or conclusions should thus be seen “neither as a cookbook, nor a remote calculus” (Pappas 1997, 546) but as instruments that we can use to understand our behavior and change it for the better. Instead of trying to discover the correct ethical theories, the task becomes one of designing the most functional ethical theories. Ethics serves certain functions in human lives and in societies, and the task is to improve its ability to serve these functions (Kitcher 2011b). In other words, the aim of ethical theorizing is to provide people with tools (see Hickman 1990, 113–14) that help them in living their lives in a good and ethically sound way. As Dewey notes: “Like every analysis, it [the analysis of moral activity] requires that the one making it be in possession of certain working tools. I cannot resolve this practical situation which faces me by merely looking at it. I must attack it with such instruments of analysis as I have at hand. What we call moral rules are precisely such tools of analysis” (1891, 194; emphasis in the original).

Accordingly, the role of moral philosopher becomes that of a toolmaker, a designer of well-working tools that have the potential to improve peoples’ capability to live ethically sound lives. Moral philosophers are not priests who emerge from their ivory towers to educate lesser minds about the truths of the matter—or who ignore the general public altogether in their discussions of more noble matters. Instead, moral philosophers are public servants. They should be seen as ethical engineers4 who aim to shape our current moral outlook into a better one, while also simultaneously shaping what we take to be better in the first place. Theirs is a challenging engineering feat: fixing a boat while sailing on it.

When we view ethical theories as tools, we can see that they serve certain important functions within our ethical practice (Kitcher 2011b). In fact, we can identify at least four different functions that ethical theories as tools can perform in human societies.

First, acquired principles and rules as records “of past moral experimentation” (Fesmire 2003, 59) can be indispensable for “economizing effort in foresight” (Dewey 1922, 244). Stopping before every single action to think through all the possible moral consequences and principles in play would paralyze a human being. Instead, we mainly rely on heuristics or acquired ethical principles that guide us relatively automatically toward certain experiential outcomes and avoidance of some other outcomes. In a moment of outrage, the Ten Commandments might remind us that it is wrong to kill, and we throw away the knife without further reflection. Moral rules thus function as heuristics that make practical living within certain ethical boundaries easier, and often they operate automatically, without conscious awareness. These heuristics are also what usually alert us when the situation involves some conflict between different rules or commitments, requiring us to engage in more reflective moral considerations. Moral rules thus guide us toward noticing certain morally relevant characteristics of a situation, and give us general guidelines on how to act in these situations. They can be seen as generalizations that have proved their functionality in the past but that are always open for reconsideration in the future.

Second, moral theories can serve as tools of criticism (Pappas 1997, 546) of current moral practices. Here, moral theories can provide us with some ideals toward which to aim and through which we can evaluate, criticize, and attempt to improve our present behavior and particular ways of living. As Pappas rightly concludes, “A moral theory can be an effort to articulate and make explicit ideals (in the form of kinds of character and ways of life) in order to make it available for criticism of present beliefs and institutions” (1997, 548). Moral inquiry can thus serve the function of moral imagination; it entails thinking beyond our current convictions and practices to find ways of living that might be better than what is currently seen as possible. Iris Murdoch called for this function of moral philosophy: “Ethics should not be merely an analysis of ordinary mediocre conduct, it should be a hypothesis about good conduct and about how this can be achieved. How can we make ourselves better? is a question moral philosophers should attempt to answer” (1997, 364).

Often, this process of moral refinement means moving back and forth between our explicit theoretical conclusions and our partly implicit moral intuitions. Each can be used to criticize the other: we can subject “the more refined reflective products of our inquiry to the test of primary experience” but can also criticize what at any time is taken as primary experience from the point of view of some theoretical construct (Pappas 2008, 23). For example, we can unveil some historical-cultural factors that have conditioned our experience in an unwanted way or reveal some hidden assumptions behind the beliefs now taken as primary. There is thus room for deep genealogical analysis within this vision of moral philosophy. This kind of work can serve as the basic research upon which more applied and practically relevant ethical considerations can build.

Third, philosophical inquiry into morals serves the important function of sorting out and making explicit one's existing convictions in order to make them available for refinement. In Nussbaum's reading of Socrates there are a few convictions that motivated him (Nussbaum 2002, 508). First, he believed that most people already have reasonable ethical competence. But at the same time their views are usually “an ill-sorted mass of material derived from experience and tradition” that can contain inconsistencies and tensions that most people have never sorted out (Nussbaum 2002, 508). There is thus progress in ethics at least in the sense that through an analysis—or cross-examination—that reveals the inconsistencies, fallacious inferences, unwarranted generalizations, and false premises one has had as part of one's moral outlook, one can start sorting it out and make it more internally coherent. This has been one of the primary functions moral philosophy has had ever since Socrates. One contemporary example is Alasdair MacIntyre's work (especially After Virtue [1984]), which has tried to analyze the contemporary state of moral discourse by showing its historical roots and how it carries within it fragments from earlier traditions that do not fit into our modern worldview anymore.

Fourth, moral concepts and principles serve an especially important function in moral discussions and arguments. Without these concepts, a moral dispute can't move beyond the “I am right, you are wrong” phase. The vocabulary around moral issues makes it possible to articulate the reasons and principles behind one's own moral convictions, to search for common ground, to criticize each other's moral outlooks, and in general to enter into a genuine dialogue about the issue, instead of having a polarized yes-or-no battle. The tools that moral philosophy provides can thus be used to make it possible to understand each other in moral matters, and to discuss these topics in a fruitful way.

All in all, in building explicit moral theories, clarifying existing moral concepts, imagining new moral principles, or performing other forms of moral inquiry, the philosophers are—according to pragmatism—in the end serving the general public. The conceptualizations they generate should be seen as tools that can serve people better or worse in their ethical quest. Moral theories should thus be viewed as concentrated moral wisdom which is made available to people and which they can utilize in their lives to identify and deal with moral challenges.

The image of ethical theories as tools might strike some readers as alarmingly relativistic. If one's philosophical temperament is characterized by a “lack of faith in the power of the elements and processes of experience and life to guarantee their own security and prosperity,” then the feeling that the world of experience is so “unstable, mistaken, and fragmentary” might be so strong that one is firmly convinced that ethics must be grounded in something “absolutely permanent, true, and complete” (Dewey 1908, 87). This is something pragmatism cannot deliver, leaving these readers cold.

But besides these irrational ontological fears, there are more particular concerns that the pragmatist outlook gives rise to. First, one could ask whether the present outlook on ethics makes resolving moral disagreements impossible. If you have your moral tools and I have mine, derived as solutions to different life challenges, should we then just conclude that both might be right, even when we hold apparently contradictory opinions?

It is true that the lack of foundational principles in ethics denies the pragmatist moral philosopher the luxury of being objectively right in some moral question. In moral disagreements, a pragmatist cannot “solve” the disagreement by relying on some objective standards that deliver the “right” and final answer. But going back to Williams's argument raised at the beginning of this article, we can ask what would it help if we were to “solve” the problem. The other party still has the option to ignore our solution. Furthermore, despite the long history of ethics we still haven't found many objective standards or “final solutions” that everyone would agree on, and thus it seems that waiting for such standards to emerge is futile.

In practice, there seem to be two ways in which moral disagreements are resolved. First is brute force. In some moral disputes I am in a position in which I can force the other party to comply with my standards whether that other party agrees with me or not. The state with its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence can force its citizens to comply with certain laws even when the personal moral code of these citizens would disagree with the law. The second way to resolve a moral disagreement is to find some common ground, some standards that the other believes in, and start building from there a case for one's own position.

In the end, it might be beneficial that pragmatism annihilates the possibility of believing that I am absolutely right and the other party is absolutely wrong. As Margolis notes: “The most monstrous crimes the race has ever (been judged to have) perpetrated are the work of the partisans of ‘right principles’ and privileged revelation” (1996, 213). Instead of dismissing the other's perspective as wrong, one must try to understand it in order to find common ground and shared principles that might help in progressing the dialogue around the problem. If one really wants to change the opinion of the other party, instead of invoking some objective standards one should invoke some standards that the other already believes in. This means that one has to listen to the other person, try to see the world from his or her point of view. Only through understanding the other's perspective one can have a chance to find a way to change it—or to change one's own opinion, if this learning process should lead to that. One can aim to clarify the other's points of view, unveil their hidden assumptions and values, or challenge their arguments, but one must do this by drawing on principles and values that the other is already committed to if one wants to have a chance to have a real impact on the other's way of seeing the world, or actually to resolve the disagreement. I believe that this kind of approach, rather than a claim for a more objective position, has a much better chance of actually building common understanding around the moral issue at hand.

What about progress, then? Does the pragmatic outlook on ethics leave room for genuine moral progress? In attempting to answer this question we must first admit that if by progress we mean some kind of objective progress transcending the particularities of actual human lives, then that gate is closed for pragmatism. There are no divine, objective values against which ethical progress could be measured. But in a more humble sense, we can speak of progress in ethics (see Dewey 1922, esp. part 4, section 1; Kitcher 2011b).

What is progress in engineering? Bridges built in the twenty-first century seem to be technically more advanced than the ones built in the Middle Ages. They are more reliable and cheaper to build, there are more possibilities for different kinds of bridges, they can connect places that medieval bridges never could have connected. There seems to be progress involved here, but it is not progress as measured against some objective standard. Instead, it is progress in the sense that new bridges fulfill the functions assigned to bridges better than the old ones. Modern bridges allow human beings to achieve certain goals that would have been impossible to achieve before. More particularly, instead of talking about progress in the singular, we should talk about progress in the plural. In bridge building there is progress when lighter materials are invented, when new techniques to keep the bridge in place are designed, when more economical ways to build the bridge are found, and so forth. Dewey argues that we don't need “remote good to inspire” us; our present troubles and aspirations are more than enough to motivate us to strive toward progress (1922, 282). Together these different frontiers of progress in bridge building contribute toward there being bridges that better serve various human purposes and projects.

Similarly, in ethical engineering we should talk about progresses rather than progress. As already discussed, tools developed by moral philosophy serve certain functions in individual human lives and in societies, and they can serve those functions better or worse. For example, people can be more aware or less aware of the guiding values and principles of their lives. One form of progress that moral philosophy can contribute to, therefore, is to make individuals and societies more aware of the basic standards upon which their way of life is built. Second, people can be more able or less able to live together in harmony and without conflicts. Another form of progress that moral philosophy can contribute to is thus being able to design codes of conduct that work better in making living together with others possible. Third, members of different cultures can be better or worse at understanding each other's point of view and moral outlook. Progress here would be about providing concepts and insights that would increase people's ability to really understand each other's point of view even across cultural boundaries. Fourth, if the adaptation of a certain moral system within a society would enable more people to realize their vision of a good life, this might be taken as a mark of its superiority over some other moral systems. Here, thus, in outline are a few ways through which moral philosophy can serve the public, and the better moral philosophy is able to perform its tasks as regards these functions, the more progress it has achieved in these particular tasks.

Particular progress is thus possible, as certain moral systems can progress as measured by the standards seen as important in those particular moral systems. The moral systems encompass also the standards used to evaluate such systems, and as the moral systems evolve, so do the standards they use to evaluate the goodness of such systems. Pragmatism does not, however, foreclose the possibility of a more universal sense of progress (see Martela 2015b). Across the differences in cultural and material conditions, there are still many similarities in the human condition: people around the world seem to value similar things, such as safety, belonging to a caring community, having the autonomy to express oneself, and being able to give to others (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Chirkov et al. 2003; Martela and Ryan 2016; Sheldon et al. 2001). Although we do not have the space here to dive into the vast psychological, anthropological, and sociological literatures on the differences and similarities of human needs and values, it is possible that beyond surface differences there are certain “natural goods of life” (Dewey 1948, 104), and accordingly, a vision of what human flourishing is—and the commitment to making such flourishing possible for all members of a society—might be relatively similar across the globe.

Similarly, no matter the cultural context, there are certain basic ethical challenges all people and societies must address: How to distribute different goods? How to design the code of conduct of a society so that it best serves all involved? How to settle the inevitable conflicts between different individuals and groups? Whose interests should the society serve? What to do with those who can't take care of themselves? How to embrace a set of different values in a harmonious way? Given the similarities in our lives in our shared human condition, and the similarities in our different moral outlooks and different moral problems, it is not impossible that there could be some standards of conduct that would generally serve human beings better than some others. And thus it is not impossible that various designers of ethical systems starting from different cultural backgrounds could converge, given enough time, toward the same ethical standards and toward embracing the same kind of values (cf. Peirce 1878). The movement toward these more all-encompassing ethical tools could then be seen as general progress in ethics as a practice. Pragmatism doesn't close out this possibility—it is a genuine possibility—but pragmatism is not stuck with it either. Pragmatist moral engineers can strive toward designing standards that have wider and wider appeal across cultural and other boundaries. Whether or not such striving leads to a set of universally agreeable standards, the progress made on the way will serve many particular purposes and address many particular challenges that humans face in many particular societies, and such “active process of transforming the existent situation” (Dewey 1948, 102) toward the better is itself valuable and significant.

There is a sense of urgency inherent in ethics, but perhaps it is time to look at this urgency anew. Perhaps it is not an urgency that is answered through solving all the detailed philosophical questions. Perhaps it is an urgency that calls for more practical solutions.

As regards issues such as climate change, engagement in “intramural philosophical debate,” where one attempts to offer technical arguments and counterarguments to settle the ultimate rightness or wrongness of a certain position, means that “environmental ethics is not living up to its promise as a field of philosophy attempting to help resolve environmental problems” (Light 2002, 436). As Dewey (e.g., 1948, vii) has repeatedly emphasized, the intention of philosophy should be connected with human affairs. Accordingly, a more effective philosophical response might include a careful analysis of the reasons and convictions that keep people stubborn and unmoved on these issues. The philosopher could try to find the common ground between disagreeing parties or aim to expose the structure of the complex decision-making environment and how it hinders effective action. Or one could aim to identify the principles and values that people denying the existence of climate change believe in, in order to show a path for action that builds on those principles. The philosopher could aim to improve the quality of the general discourse by clarifying the concepts used, by unveiling the hidden assumptions and values of the participants involved, by challenging certain popular arguments, or by building new ethical principles and trying to convince others of their soundness. Through these ways of participating, the philosopher has a much better chance for practical impact than through a claim for a more objective position.

A good contemporary example of successful application of engineering approach to moral philosophy is Peter Singer's work. Instead of arguing from an elevated, objective position, Singer usually starts with some convictions that people are already committed to—and then shows how this commitment should lead them to commit to some other moral principles. This is perhaps most clearly manifested in “Famine, Affluence, Morality,” where he aims to show how “anyone who accepts certain assumptions” should “accept my conclusion” (1972, 231). He goes on to argue that suffering and death are bad, and “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (231). To demonstrate our intuitive agreement with these premises, he uses the thought experiment of a child drowning in a pond, arguing that everyone agrees that we ought to save the child, even if our own clothes are ruined in the process. And then he goes on to argue that given these premises, we should give a significant part of our income to different organizations that help fight poverty, malaria, and other mortal calamities in developing countries. In a similar vein, he argues for certain rights for animals based on our commitment to granting these rights to humans. In terms of practical impact, it might not be wrong to say that of contemporary moral philosophers, Singer has had the most influential direct impact. His Animal Liberation (1975) is considered a canonical book in the animal rights movement, and he has been influential also in debates about foreign aid and bioethical questions.

By highlighting Singer's work my aim is not to say that only applied work should be done in ethics. As in science, there is a need for more basic research and more applied research, and Singer is a scholar who frequently operates on the more practical end of the spectrum. Philosophy often makes itself valuable for society, however, precisely by committing to the exploration of deeper questions without direct connection to practice. A good example of this kind of work is found in Charles Taylor's analysis of how the modern sense of individuality has historically emerged and how it has influenced the way we have come to see our human condition and our aims in life today (Taylor 1989 and 1991). The work is elaborate and doesn't include practical conclusions, but it serves society through making visible structures of thinking and underlying values that most contemporary Westerners are committed to but nevertheless rarely aware of. It thus is a prime example of the sort of clarificatory task that moral philosophers as ethical engineers can carry out.

“I believe,” writes Hilary Putnam, “that Dewey's perceptive and realistic refusal to reduce ethics to a single biological trait (such as sympathy) or to any single concern or to any one rule or system of rules, coupled, as it was, with his insistence that nonetheless intelligence—situated intelligence—is both possible and necessary in the resolution of political and ethical problems, makes him particularly relevant to our time” (2005, 10). Within the pragmatist outlook, morality is seen as a necessary invention—a backbone—of society. Morality “grows out of our needs and our social condition—it is, if you like, a social technology that responds to the problems of that condition” (Kitcher 2011a, 256). It might be partly based on some basic psychological dispositions toward empathy, justice, and so forth that human beings have acquired through evolution (see, e.g., Prinz 2008), but to a large extent it is a social invention that has been shaped by cultural evolution. There is an ongoing discourse about the proper standards for living and behaving in our society that we all are more or less shaped by and shaping. Ethics is a cultural project—the ethical project—in which “we have been engaged for most of our history as a species” (Kitcher 2011b, 2).

What is the role of moral philosophers in this ethical project, then? Understanding morality as a social technology leads to a vision of moral philosophers as ethical engineers who are experts in constructing sound moral systems for the use of people. Martha Nussbaum concludes that philosophizing about morals is nothing categorically different from what ordinary people do, but that there “nonetheless is a genuine sphere of expertise,” and therefore moral philosophers—who by education should be experts in moral topics—can provide an important public service (2002, 513). Indeed, one could even argue that this is their duty. Understood as ethical engineers, moral philosophers have as their task to use their expertise in ethical matters to clarify and evaluate existing solutions, and to propose novel solutions that enhance people's capabilities to live together and to lead good and ethically sound lives. This “fallible inquiry with ethical ends-in-view” (Martela 2015b, 537) is, in a nutshell, the alternative, pragmatist vision for what the aim of moral philosophy should be.