Morality in Practice: A Response to Claudia Card and Lorraine Code

I briefly reprise a few themes of my book Moral Understandings in order to address some questions about responsibility and justification. I argue for a thoroughly situated and naturalized view of moral justification that warns us not to take moral universalism too easily at face value. I also argue for the significance of reports of experience, among other kinds of empirical evidence, in testing the habitability of moral forms of life. Claudia Card and Lorraine Code are two philosophers whose achievements in ethics, epistemology, and feminist philosophy I greatly admire, and from whose work I have learned so much for many years. They have provided a precise and sympathetic reading of my book Moral Understandings in a collaborative but also thought-provoking way. The questions they raise are difficult and deep. Without trying to respond to their concerns point for point, I will put in focus some central themes of the book so that I can address some of their questions about responsibility and justification. Moral Understandings is a work in metaethics. Its critique of the "theoreticaljuridical" model of moral philosophy is meant to clear space for an "expressivecollaborative" one. The expressive-collaborative model isn't another normative moral theory-it's a guiding picture of how we could look at morality in order to better serve two goals of moral inquiry that I assume many moral philosophers share: giving adequate description and illuminating analysis of what morality