The paper considers three possible definitions of what it is for an action to be ‘morally’ good: (1) that it is overall important to do; (2) that it is overall important to do in virtue of a universalisable principle; and (3) that it is overall important to do in virtue of a universalisable principle, belonging to a system of such principles, which includes almost all of certain moral fixed points. I defend (3) and show how we can reach such a system, starting from the basic beliefs with which we find ourselves, through the process of reflective equilibrium. Moral realism is then the doctrine that there is such a system of true moral beliefs. My optimistic view is that all human communities could eventually reach the same such system. But, if they cannot, then there will be two (or more) different such systems, and so two (or more) different senses of ‘moral realism’.

Rarely do everyday discussions of ethical issues invoke ethical theories. Even ethicists deploy ethical theories less frequently than one might expect. In my experience, the most powerful ethical arguments rarely appeal to an ethical theory. How is this possible? I contend that ethical argumentation can proceed successfully without invoking any ethical theory because the structure of good ethical argumentation involves leveraging a sturdy norm, where the norm is usually far more specific than a complete ethical theory. To illustrate this idea, I present the argumentative structure of five powerful articles in the ethics literature. I further argue that the present model of ethical argumentation is consistent with the coherence model of ethical justification, but the former need not--and usually should not--invoke the latter explicitly for various practical reasons.

The question that this paper tries to answer is Q: “Can good academic bioethics be done without commitment to moral theory?” It is argued that the answer to Q is an unequivocal “Yes” for most of what we could call “critical bioethics,” that is, the kind of bioethics work that primarily criticizes positions or arguments already in the literature or put forward by policymakers. The answer is also “Yes” for much of empirical bioethics. The second part of the paper then provides an analysis of Q in relation to “constructive bioethics,” that is, bioethics work aimed at providing an argument for a particular position. In this part, it is argued that a number of the approaches or methods used that initially look like they involve no commitment to moral theory, nevertheless, involve such a commitment. This is shown to be the case for reflective equilibrium, mid-level theory, the use of theory fragments, and argument by analogy.

Rationalization occurs when a person has performed an action and then concocts the beliefs and desires that would have made it rational. Then, people often adjust their own beliefs and desires to match the concocted ones. While many studies demonstrate rationalization, and a few theories describe its underlying cognitive mechanisms, we have little understanding of its function. Why is the mind designed to construct post hoc rationalizations of its behavior, and then to adopt them? This may accomplish an important task: transferring information between the different kinds of processes and representations that influence our behavior. Human decision making does not rely on a single process; it is influenced by reason, habit, instinct, norms, and so on. Several of these influences are not organized according to rational choice (i.e., computing and maximizing expected value). Rationalization extracts implicit information – true beliefs and useful desires – from the influence of these non-rational systems on behavior. This is a useful fiction – fiction, because it imputes reason to non-rational psychological processes; useful, because it can improve subsequent reasoning. More generally, rationalization belongs to the broader class of representational exchange mechanisms, which transfer information between many different kinds of psychological representations that guide our behavior. Representational exchange enables us to represent any information in the manner best suited to the particular tasks that require it, balancing accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility in thought. The theory of representational exchange reveals connections between rationalization and theory of mind, inverse reinforcement learning, thought experiments, and reflective equilibrium.

When people must either save a greater number of people from a smaller harm or a smaller number from a greater harm, do their choices reflect a reasonable moral outlook? We pursue this question with the help of an experiment. In our experiment, two-fifths of subjects employ a similarity heuristic. When alternatives appear dissimilar in terms of the number saved but similar in terms of the magnitude of harm prevented, this heuristic mandates saving the greater number. In our experiment, this leads to choices that are inconsistent with all standard theories of justice. We argue that this demonstrates the untrustworthiness of distributive judgements in cases that elicit similarity-based choice.

This article makes a positive case for an ethnographic sensibility in political theory. Drawing on published ethnographies and original fieldwork, it argues that an ethnographic sensibility can contribute to normative reflection in five distinct ways. It can help uncover the nature of situated normative demands (epistemic argument); diagnose obstacles encountered when responding to these demands (diagnostic argument); evaluate practices and institutions against a given set of values (evaluative argument); probe, question and refine our understanding of values (valuational argument); and uncover underlying social ontologies (ontological argument). The contribution of ethnography to normative theory is distinguished from that of other forms of empirical research, and the dangers of perspectival absorption, bias and particularism are addressed.

This article engages with debates concerning the moral worth of human beings with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMDs). Some argue that those with such disabilities are morally less valuable than so-called normal human beings, whereas others argue that all human beings have equal moral value and that, therefore, each group of humans ought to be treated with equal concern. We will argue in favor of a view that takes points from opposing camps in the debates about the moral worth of humans with such disabilities. Our position, roughly, is this: most humans with PIMDs are persons in the morally significant sense and, therefore, deserve moral consideration equal to that granted to so-called “normal” human beings. Some humans with PIMD may not be persons, but nevertheless deserve moral consideration equal to that of persons because they stand in a special relation to persons.

Moral realism entails that there are metaphysically necessary moral principles of the form ‘all actions of nonmoral kind Z are morally good’; being discoverable a priori, these must be (in a wide sense) logically necessary. This article seeks to justify this apparently puzzling consequence. A sentence expresses a logically necessary proposition iff its negation entails a contradiction. The method of reflective equilibrium assumes that the simplest account of the apparently correct use of sentences of some type in paradigm examples is probably logically necessary. An account is simple insofar as it uses few predicates designating properties easily recognizable in many different kinds of paradigm examples. I illustrate how reflective equilibrium uses these criteria to discover logically necessary nonmoral propositions such as ‘if S remembers doing X, S believes that he did X’ and ‘if it is scarlet, it is red’. I then illustrate how exactly the same procedures can lead us from paradigm examples of apparently true sentences asserting that actions of some kind are good to discovering moral principles. I advance the contingent hypothesis that most contemporary humans, although they initially disagree about moral issues, have derived from different paradigm examples the same concept of moral goodness, which will ensure that the use of reflective equilibrium will lead to eventual agreement about moral issues. That strongly suggests that the moral principles eventually reached by reflective equilibrium are logically necessary ones.

This article argues that practicality is currently overemphasized in philosophical contributions to bioethics. The inclinations to aim at relevance, to ground normativity on common morality, and to involve many academic disciplines in ethical discussions is understandable, but they are all poorly founded. When answers to difficult questions are already known at the outset, these endeavors can help decisionmakers in gaining the acceptance of the general public. Wider theoretical analyses, in which philosophers could excel, however, tend to be lost in these practical enterprises.