Common Grounds Without Foundations: A Pragmatic Approach to Ethical Disagreements Across Cultural, Philosophical, and Religious Traditions

The current globalized nature of ethical discourse serves to heighten the perennial tension between universalism and relativism, especially as the latter emphasizes the tradition-dependence of moral reasoning. While those in the former camp point to a putative core of universal normative principles, contemporary critics such as Alasdair MacIntyre have cogently argued that even the rationality with which we judge our varied notions of justice is formed by our traditional worldviews. This can seem to lend support to those who would claim immunity from such universals as international human rights, based upon the divergent understandings of their various cultural or philosophical traditions. This traditionalist problem acquires, moreover, additional complexity when appeal is made to the distinctive character of religious moral traditions.

In Common Grounds without Foundations, David Kratz Mathies offers an alternative, fallibilist model of moral reasoning rooted in the American Pragmatic tradition. Additional resources drawn from Chinese philosophy, Jain epistemology, modern philosophy of mathematics, and the Gadamerian hermeneutical tradition serve both to corroborate the argumentation and to provide examples of continuities in reasoning that cross the boundaries of disparate traditions. Ironically, the very success of arguments for the tradition-dependent nature of rationality belies their conclusions even religious claims make their appeal with some level of public reason and a nonfoundationalist theory of knowledge more accurately reflects both our scientific progress and our projects of everyday enquiry. Ultimately, an analysis of our best epistemic practices provides us with prima facie biases in favor of both diversity and free speech (without the need to appeal to any tradition-dependent axioms like inherent worth, human dignity, or the possession of a soul) to be concretized in institutions like human rights and democracy.