From complaints about student protests over Israel in Gaza, to the morality of new House Speaker Johnson, and even to the reality and consequences of economic inequality, there is a dynamic conversation in the media over what is morally right and, importantly, why it should be considered right. It’s perfectly normal for those discussions and considered monologues to present ideas, cases, and weigh the consequences to American life, power, and the well-being of people around the world. It also demonstrates the fact that ideas like divine command theory become irrelevant for most if not all of these discussions since they still require secular analysis and resolution. Contributions from the Abrahamic faiths (and similarly from Hindu nationalism) are largely objectionable moral ideas (“The Chosen People,” jihad, anti-woman, etc.) that are inherently preferential and exclusionary.
Indeed, this public dialogue perhaps best shows how modern people build ethical systems. It looks mostly like Rawl’s concept of “reflective equilibrium” with dashes of utilitarianism and occasional influences from religious tradition and sentiment. And reflective equilibrium has few foundational ideas beyond a basic commitment to fairness as justice using the “original position” as its starting point. That is, if we had to create a society with no advance knowledge about what our role and position might be within it (a veil of ignorance), the best for us would be to create an equal, fair, and just society.
So ethics is cognitively rubbery, with changing attachments and valences as we process options into a coherent whole. We might justify civilian deaths for a greater good when we have few options, imprecise weapons, and existential fear (say, the atom bomb in World War II). We might choose to allow for medical procedures that have a risk of false positives if it also results in better overall outcomes. We might choose a more chaotic economic system with more winners and losers rather than a less dynamic one that is safer. We weigh the risks. We weigh the rewards. We weigh also the impact on the individual and their sense of autonomy and well-being and fairness (which distinguishes the method from pure utilitarianism). We often arrive at tentative solutions that are imperfect, but the dialogue continues and there are refinements.
This coherence and justification methodology follows directly from the problem of meaning and synonymy that was elucidated by Quine in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and later in his work on radical translation. In essence, it is very strange to suggest that two words or phrases are perfectly interchangeable in all possible contexts (or worlds). Instead, meanings are collections of relationships between words that have a kind of rubbery spread to them that is developed over time within individual heads and through an active social process that elucidates areas of meaning agreement and distinction. This is most apparent when learning new concepts in science, philosophy, and related intellectual pursuits, and especially true of evolving ideas that are explained by metaphors with other concepts, much like thought experiments in ethical reflection.
If we had to identify a comparatively basic semantic pier that assists in maintaining coherence in a manner similar to the original position, it might be metaphysical naturalism that best anchors our thinking to the world. We assume that ideas have occasional correspondence to perceptions and that those perceptions arise from a locally uniform and consistent world. Then the ideas that orbit around those piers build on triangulations of agreement and coherence to them, through discussion, thought, and dialogue. But that is, again, contingent and subject to change as we learn more and think more about the concepts. If we compared more closely the original position in ethics to metaphysical naturalism in semantics, we could say that the latter is the position that if we had to design a physical world to live in, we would want a world that was predictable and understandable. Only a coherent world governed by discoverable and measurable relationships could provide that level of semantic grounding. Adding non-natural, arbitrary, or decision-based influences on the world disturbs it away from coherence.
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