3Alongside detailed and sometimes exquisite studies focused on the ethical elaboration of the major figures of the tradition (e.g., de Waal & Skowronski 2012, Massecar 2016, and Liszka 2021a on Peirce; Throntveit 2014, and Marchetti 2015 on James; Hamington 2009 on Jane Addams; Welchman 1995, and Pappas 2008 on Dewey; Koons 2019 on Sellars; Marchetti 2021 on Rorty) a feast of volumes which recently attempted to seize the tradition as a whole competed to the challenge of guessing the contours of a pragmatist approach to ethics (Fesmire 2003; Lekan 2003; Pihlström 2005; LaFollette 2007; Frega 2012; Rosenbaum 2015; and Liszka 2021b). The study of this literature is at once exhilarating and frustrating, since the sense of a communal project – one, as said, hinged on the attempt to refashion moral practice from within and in the first person singular and plural – is gradually replaced with the realization that such conviction is much thinner and perhaps more blurred than one would have expected and is happy with. The many criteria employed to show how moral reflection actually impinges on the moral life by renewing it from within rather than schooling it from without share at best a family resemblance, rather than graduating into a compact program towards which the various parties might converge. There is in fact no single, if minimal, list of features equally agreed upon, but rather selected convergences and divergences around which the pragmatist conversation revolves. While this is perhaps one of the strengths of the pragmatist approach, given its inbuilt distrust for settled solutions to perennial problems, still this plurality calls for an effort and exercise in classification.

5These two lines – which, as said, admit a number of intermediate shades – are all the more puzzling to hold next to each other since we sometimes find them juxtaposed or even mixed up in the attempt to fashioning a reflective morality equally avoiding the pitfalls of “remote exercise in conceptual analysis or […] a mere mode of preaching.” Says Dewey, following this train of thought, that “it is not the business of moral theory to provide a ready-made solution to large moral perplexities […] [since] while the solution has to be reached by action based on personal choice, theory can enlighten and guide choice and action by revealing alternatives, and by bringing to light what is entailed when we choose one alternative rather than another” (1932: 316). Here we find, in the very same author and text (and not in a minor one) two ideas equally featuring a pragmatist approach to moral matters: namely, the theoretical suggestion to take a hard look at the consequences, both external and internal, of our philosophical and ordinary moral conceptions of the moral life they aim to be guiding, and a therapeutic exhortation at checking one’s very understanding of our moral practices in the light of disregarded or even hidden assumptions inbuilt in the very use (and hence consequences) of a theory allegedly guiding them. If according to the former model moral reflection enlightens the moral life by means of examples and possibilities with the potential of transforming the course of our actions and the reasons for our choices, according to the latter the effect of moral reflection is that of bringing to light what is genuinely at stake in our moral life when we so act and choose. What we have here is a clash, or perhaps an interplay, between a picture of moral reflection as the tool(s) through which we address and resolve moral conflicts, and a picture of it as the deepening and redescription of the experienced conflict. If both approaches equally resist the moral disengagement often featuring meta-ethical analyses of moral discourse and practice, of which pragmatism challenged the alleged neutrality over the practical options taken into reflective consideration, as well as the moral propaganda inbuilt in normative and applied approaches to ethics, with their faith in the modelling and standardization of moral issues for their practical handling, pragmatic theory and therapy offer slightly different pictures of the individual and collective work at the heart of moral amelioration: the first by focusing on the methodologies through which we can learn to handle the moral uncertainty about what to think, say, and do without falling back on absolutes and fixed principles, while the second being interested in the removed, the unsaid, and the disowned informing our ways of approaching problematic situations or even (apparently) effortless ones.

6In the light of this master partition, we can sort the many attempts at fashioning a pragmatist ethics as leaning towards one or the other (or both) understanding. At least this is a key I personally find quite promising to chart the pragmatist territory in ethics (as well as in kindred fields). The works of and on pragmatist ethics differ in fact in topics covered as well as in figures taken in consideration or prioritized. To encompass such variety, a focus on the way in which these different approaches attempted at reconstructing the relationship between moral reflection and the moral life is a promising criterion for assessing the very establishment and furthering of the tradition. The materials gathered for this special issue are equally suitable for such an investigation. With different emphases and from different angles, they all in fact call for a problematization of the way in which moral reflection touches upon the moral life, and how the very conceptualization of the moral life affects the desiderata of moral philosophy. If the task of finding out what a pragmatist approach to ethics amounts to does not leave us empty handed, it is from the understanding of the centrality of the notion of moral practice that we must start.

7The three papers which open the symposium are methodologically-driven. James Liszka sketches a problem-based approach to moral matters hinged on the possibility for moral practice to better itself in the making without appeals to bannisters securing moral progress independently of experience and our situated reflection on it. The challenge of marking our practices as progressive or rather regressive with reference to the judgment and wisdom of those involved in them only is topped with the belief that the way in which we consider a certain situation as morally problematic is itself a mark of our moral upbringing and outlook. Matteo Santarelli takes an historical turn, highlighting the role that a genealogical approach to moral reflection plays in our understanding of moral experience and practice. In particular, the author critically engages some recent works on genealogical methodology in moral matters, showing how the kind of problematization offered by a genealogical outlook might endow us with a notion of moral normativity which escapes the pitfalls of being either too complimentary or too disparaging with the moral practices we live by. Belén Pueyo Ibanez puts moral experimentalism up front, and argues for the advantages of conceiving moral reflection as an open-ended activity of moral landscaping. By taking Dewey’s conception of inquiry as a particularly fruitful way to understand the interactive nature of our being in the world, the author shows how a number of tensions and contradictions featuring standard subjectivist and objectivists approaches alike can be released if experimentalism is applied in moral matters.

8Moving to more particular issues and themes, the next four contributions detail further aspects of a pragmatist approach to ethics. Michael Klenk engages the central meta-ethical issue of moral objectivity, arguing for a variety of Peircean pragmatism capable of making sense of the objective aspirations of our moral discourse and practice without relying on burdensome metaphysical and epistemological assumptions about their essential nature and working. In this sense pragmatism builds up a notion of moral objectivity hinged on the fallibilism about what truth in a certain domain might consist in, with moral truth and objectivity becoming matters of inquiry rather than predetermined goals. Daniel de Vasconcelos Costa tackles another key issue about the nature of moral reflection: namely, its unfortunate dismissal of character formation for the resolution of the moral dilemmas we often face in experience. Taking the shaping of a self as a key moral activity, the author argues against the tendency and temptation inbuilt in moral theorizing to rule out genuine ethical impasse, showing on the contrary how moral reasoning is sounder when attuned to the lively experience of moral uncertainty and conflict. Frederik Kellogg equally engages the issue of moral dilemmas within the context of the clash between generalist and particularist approaches to moral justification. Pragmatism is once again presented as an alternative to the stand-off of views witnessed in moral (and legal) debates, with its emphasis on the transformational character of inquiry understood as imaginative rehearsal of questioned hypotheses. Finally, Jovy Chan looks at C.I. Lewis as a promising guide for the understanding of the place and significance of norms and normative considerations in moral experience. The rational principle par excellence is that of the a priori, which in the hands of pragmatism becomes a regulative idea capable of guiding our (moral, in the case at hand) practices because it embodies a certain way of looking, living, and in the end criticizing practice from within.

9This symposium will hopefully bring the reader closer to an understanding of some of the signature features of a pragmatist approach to ethics. An approach which is as tentative and in the making as pragmatism thinks all inquiry should be, at pains of detaching us from an experience equally volatile and always on the verge of losing itself and turning enigmatic for those living and reflecting on it.