A reflection on critical realism and ethics

ABSTRACT

Drawing on my own work and experience, this paper brings together the various connections between critical realism (CR) and ethics. It argues that, against both determinism and physicalist reductionism, CR provides the very conditions of possibility for ethics. It goes on to identify a number of ethical matters that CR addresses that have not received adequate notice: Truth as among the conditions of possibility for ethics and as a democratic value in itself; the ethics of belief as opposed to action; the distinction between micro and macro-morality and the privatization of the latter; and moral purpose. The paper argues finally that ethics need to be grounded ontologically somehow, presumably in some transcendental way, which implies a connection with religion or at least some grounding secular worldview that treads on the religious domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• morality
• doxastic voluntarism
• moral purpose
• truth
• privatization of morality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Douglas V. Porpora is a professor of sociology in the Department of Communication at Drexel University. He has been a critical realist since 1982 and a member of IACR since 1998. He has written widely on politics and social theory. Among his books are How Holocausts Happen: The U.S. in Central America (Temple 1990) and, most recently, Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach (Cambridge 2015).