Pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the Virtues: Three Heterodox Approaches to Ethics

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The conference explores the historical and theoretical dialogues between pragmatist ethics, Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, and virtue ethics. Charting different philosophical programs, these three heterodox approaches to ethics offer metaphilosophical alternatives to both the disengaged project of meta-ethics and to  the prescriptive project of normative ethics. As against the meta-ethical aspect of moral theory, they question the independence of second-order ethical analysis from first order moral inquiry, while contrary to the prescriptive aspect they recommend a descriptive investigation of moral normativity. The conference surveys the convergences and  divergences of  these traditions as they have shape d the course of the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century debate s about the goals, methods, and limits of moral philosophy.