This is just plain wrong. For example a pragmatist can still be religious and a moral realist. A pragmatist can believe in the concept of pragmatic moral truth and pure yet unknowable moral truth. He just resigns himself to using pragmatic truth in place of pure truth but understands that the drive to find pure truth is what leads to improving pragmatic truth. — Mark Dennis

I don't think you're understanding what I wrote there. For pragmatism to IMPLY a belief in objective morality, that means that one can not be a pragmatist without buying objective morality.

But that's not the case. One can be a pragmatist and either think that morality is subjective or one could remain agnostic about the question.

“For pragmatism to IMPLY a belief in objective morality, that means that one can not be a pragmatist without buying objective morality.” That’s like saying all Kantian ethicists believe that no lies are justified just because Kant believed that.

Since the implication is subjective we can’t really know but I would argue that any pragmatist who thinks pragmatism doesn’t make this implication is wrong and they will think I am wrong.

Is it correct to say pragmatism implies pure moral truth? I don’t know and neither do you (and you’ll never believe there is anything to know) but it is completely correct to say that my belief is that it does imply this.

But knowledge about the outside appearance of a (supposed) subject doesn't tell us anything about their internal perspective. Only with other humans can we confidently make conclusions about their internal perspective based on their external behaviour, and even that is fraught with errors (like the fundamental attribution error).

And technically, our understanding of other human's internal perspective is fake, too, since what we're actually doing is imagining ourselves in their shoes. This works well enough for people we share a lot of common cultural ground with, and with very basic emotions. But Modeling the internal perspective of a chimpanzee is going to be a lot less accurate, to say nothing of housecats, fish or bacteria. — Echarmion

Knowledge about how potential energy appears to behave doesn’t tell us anything about potential energy, either - but we make predictions and conclusions based on this behaviour anyway, and it turns out to be far less error-prone than human behaviour. I would argue that animals are somewhere between these two in terms of potential for error.

Our understanding of other human’s internal perspective isn’t ‘fake’ simply because we use our imagination. I’ve already explained why assuming the causal conditions behind human behaviour is prone to error. I disagree that it’s going to be less accurate for simpler organisms. It’s just that we don’t tend to care enough to find out.

The problem I see with this approach is that, even if we profess to care about everything, our value judgements are necessarily anthropocentric. There is no way for us to actually judge the interests of a bacteria, and hence decide what counts as harm to then. What we'd actually do if we tried is to anthropomorphise the bacteria and assume it has human interests. This results not in a relationship of moral subjects, but in a kind of paternalism, where humans decide what they feel comfortable doing. — Echarmion

I would argue that they are not necessarily anthropocentric - it’s a preference that we would argue is justified. And we can approach an understanding of the general interests of bacteria, and of what counts as harm to them. Microbiologists do this as a matter of course. The difference is that there is a tendency to evaluate harm for bacteria as ‘good’ for humans - although probiotics is certainly changing that view to some extent.

It seems conceivable that one might argue that future people have no standing at all — Echarmion

I believe no single future individual has any standing, because we do not know exactly who is going to exist in the future. Therefore it would be impossible to give unborn individuals their own moral standing. However future people in general do deserve some moral standing. Particularly when conceiving of the ways in which we shape our societies and laws. For example if we pollute the earth to the point where we can't live on it, not only could it deprive many alive today of their life, it could potentially lead to the great suffering or deaths of future people. In this more general context these potential future lives do hold moral weight and that responsibility would be those who caused that suffering to future generations.

There is a bit of an irony there; that if we acted out of care of the moral standing of future people we’d be benefitting ourselves in the present. I’d certainly like to breathe clean air in 20 years too.

While we can’t know much about the individual personal identities of future peoples, intuiting their needs should be fairly easy. Same needs as us in the present.

Creating real stability and balance across as many areas as possible is the best thing we can do for ourselves and future peoples.

Is it correct to say pragmatism implies pure moral truth? — Mark Dennis

I didn't see this reply until now. First, "pure moral truth" wouldn't imply objectivism necessarily, either.

At any rate, can you explain how in your view pragmatism implies that the pragmatist is an ethical objectivist?

I don’t know — Mark Dennis

Sure we know. You simply look at what people label as "pragmatism," especially when people are self-identifying as a pragmatist. Do those views they're labeling as pragmatism imply objectivism with respect to ethics? It's not difficult to figure that out.

Simple. You’re either an ethical pragmatist who believes there is an objective moral truth that you don’t know; or an ethical pragmatist who is living as if pragmatism is the objective moral truth whether you’re consciously identifying it as such or not.

Although, I suppose you could be someone who understands pragmatic ethics but willingly goes against it because you don’t believe in objective moral truth. That isn’t the same as behaving like a pragmatist.

Would you agree with Wikipedia's characterization of pragmatic ethics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_ethics