I have only read the summarybot comment but based on that I wanted to leave a literature suggestion that could be interesting to people who liked this post and want to think more about how to put a pragmatic approach to ethics into practice.
Abstract: Major contemporary conceptions of ethics such as discourse ethics and neocontractarian ethics are not grounded in a sufficiently pragmatic notion of practice. They suffer from serious problems of application and thus can hardly be said to respond to the needs of professionals and decision makers. A main reason lies in the tendency of these approaches to focus more on the requirements of ethical universalization than on those of doing justice to particular contexts of action – at the expense of practicality and relevance to practitioners. If this diagnosis is not entirely mistaken, a major methodological challenge for professional and business ethics consists in finding a new balance between ethical universalism and ethical contextualism. A reformulation of the pragmatic maxim (the methodological core principle of American pragmatism) in terms of systematic boundary critique (the methodological core principle of the author’s work on critical systems thinking and reflective professional practice) may provide a framework to this end, critical pragmatism.
I have only read the summarybot comment but based on that I wanted to leave a literature suggestion that could be interesting to people who liked this post and want to think more about how to put a pragmatic approach to ethics into practice.
Ulrich, W. (2006). Critical Pragmatism: A New Approach to Professional and Business Ethics. In Interdisciplinary Yearbook for Business Ethics. V. 1, v. 1,. Peter Lang Pub Inc.
Abstract: Major contemporary conceptions of ethics such as discourse ethics and neocontractarian ethics are not grounded in a sufficiently pragmatic notion of practice. They suffer from serious problems of application and thus can hardly be said to respond to the needs of professionals and decision makers. A main reason lies in the tendency of these approaches to focus more on the requirements of ethical universalization than on those of doing justice to particular contexts of action – at the expense of practicality and relevance to practitioners. If this diagnosis is not entirely mistaken, a major methodological challenge for professional and business ethics consists in finding a new balance between ethical universalism and ethical contextualism. A reformulation of the pragmatic maxim (the methodological core principle of American pragmatism) in terms of systematic boundary critique (the methodological core principle of the author’s work on critical systems thinking and reflective professional practice) may provide a framework to this end, critical pragmatism.