Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study. Appiah’s recent work on honor in moral revolutions is an important exception, but even he is careful to separate honor from morality, regarding it as only “an ally” of morality. In this paper we take Appiah to be right about the psychological, social, and historical role honor has played in three notable moral revolutions, but wrong about the moral nature of honor. We defend two new theses: (...) First, honor is an emotional and moral form of recognition respect that can hinder or aid moral progress. Second, honor, so conceived, can play a rational role in progressive moral change, as it did among the working class in the British abolition of slave trade, when the pressure of moral consistency moved them to protest American slavery as an affront to their honor without change in their moral belief that slavery is wrong. (shrink)

It is more than a half-century since Nelson Goodman [1955] applied what we call the Reflective Equilibrium model of justification to the problem of justifying induction, and more than three decades since Rawls [1971] and Daniels [1979] applied celebrated extensions of this model to the problem of justifying principles of social justice. The resulting Wide Reflective Equilibrium model (WRE) is generally thought to capture an acceptable way to reconcile inconsistency between an intuitively plausible general principle and an intuitively plausible judgment (...) about a particular case. Recently a different model for reconciling moral inconsistency has emerged: Moral Consistency Reasoning [Campbell and Kumar 2012, 2013a; Kumar and Campbell 2012; Campbell 2009: 86?7; Campbell and Woodrow 2003; Wong 2002]. MCR applies when two moral judgments give opposing assessments of (what appear to be) relevantly similar particular cases. Though WRE and MCR are strikingly different, each arguably captures a rationally acceptable method for reconciling moral inconsistency. Moreover, as will be shown, they function in complementary ways. Are they parts of a more comprehensive model of moral reasoning in the face of inconsistency that would explain the attractions of each? This essay first spells out the relevant differences between the models and then formulates a more general model of moral reasoning in the face of inconsistency. ?1 reviews the emergence of Goodman's model that he offers in the spirit of epistemology naturalized, almost a decade before Quine coined the term [1969a]. ?2 analyses six salient features of WRE to be compared with six contrasting features of MCR in ?3. ?4 presents the general model. (shrink)

In Kitcher’s ‘pragmatic naturalism’ moral evolution consists in pragmatically motivated moral changes in response to practical difficulties in social life. No moral truths or facts exist that could serve as an ‘external’ measure for moral progress. We propose a psychologically realistic conception of moral objectivity consistent with this pragmatic naturalism yet alive to the familiar sense that moral progress has an objective basis that transcends convention and consensus in moral opinion, even when these are products of serious, extended and collaborative (...) reflection. (shrink)