Hi Ray, and hi everyone,

Thanks for holding the discussion for me . . . and thanks to Steven
Thompson for making a copy of Minteer's essay available for us to consider.

>Ray here:
>Minteer seems to me to be saying that "foundationalism" means that somewhere
>in
>Mother Nature's Law there is a section that says there is some immutable
>basis (a genetic basis?) for philosophy and thus for ethics.

I think this characterization of "foundationalism" is basically accurate.
(Perhaps what you are alluding to as "a genetic basis" is something perhaps
more akin to natural law theory.)  I take foundationalism in ethics to be
the search for infallible and/or absolute first principles from which all
our other moral knowledge follows in strictly deductively valid logical
fashion.  The model is essentially geometric: starting first with
infallible axioms/premises, one then deduces the rest of the ethical system
from that foundational starting point.

In contrast, what might be termed "anti-foundationalism" is the view that
there are likely no antecedently axiomatic starting points for the system,
and that the real goal of ethics and philosophy, as you suggest below, is
"agreement among the discussants."

>Thus, it appears to me that the way ethics begins its work is to identify
>general characteristics of ethical issues.  Then comes developing parameters
>for rules of conduct.  All of the work of ethicists depends on exchange of
>ideas among the discussion participants.  *If* there is *a* foundation, it
>is the result of agreement reached among the discussants.  There is *no*
>fundamental law of nature involved except that which gives humans the
>propensity to consider that there is a problem to be considered.

Now, critics of the anti-foundationalist position(s) generally feel
uncomfortable with such a seemingly flimsy criterion for knowledge as
"agreement among discussants," seeing the emphasis on mere "agreement" as
the relativistic first step toward a bewildering array of arbitrary
viewpoints grounded on nothing more than consensus.  Anti-foundationalists
such as Minteer, Rorty, et al. usually counter that there is nothing
*inevitably* relativistic about it, and observe that throughout the course
of human history there has been a remarkable amount of intersubjective
agreement about moral basics, even across cultures: e.g. commitment to
truthtelling, prohibitions on killing, etc.

Minteer's use of Dewey helps situate the anti-foundationalist position
within the context of American pragmatism, and it might be helpful here to
add a few more things about Dewey and pragmatism.  From the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP):

". . . Rejecting foundationalism, Dewey accepted the fallibilism that was
characteristic of the school of pragmatism: the view that any proposition
accepted as an item of knowledge has this status only provisionally,
contingent upon its adequacy in providing a coherent understanding of the
world as the basis for human action.  .  .  .
	"One traditional question that Dewey addressed in a series of
essays between 1906 and 1909 was that of the meaning of truth. Dewey at
that time considered the pragmatic theory of truth as central to the
pragmatic school of thought, and vigorously defended its viability. Both
Dewey and William James, in his book Pragmatism (1907), argued that the
traditional correspondence theory of truth, according to which the true
idea is one that agrees or corresponds to reality, only begs the question
of what the 'agreement' or 'correspondence' of idea with reality is. Dewey
and James maintained that an idea agrees with reality, and is therefore
true, if and only if it is successfully employed in human action in pursuit
of human goals and interests, that is, if it leads to the resolution of a
problematic situation in Dewey's terms. The pragmatic theory of truth met
with strong opposition among its critics, perhaps most notably from the
British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. . . . " from
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/dewey.htm

The pragmatist view that our knowledge is, at least in principle, always
"fallible" and subject to further revision can be contrasted with the
foundationalist goal of seeking knowledge and first principles that are
timeless, universal, and immune to revision, while standing
(epistemologically speaking) outside of society and politics.  The
pragmatist denies the possibility of standing outside of society and
politics.

The correspondence theory of truth is related to foundationalism because
thinkers who historically have been inclined toward foundationalist moral
epistemologies have held up scientific or empirical knowledge as the
standard for *all* types of knowledge.  Truth = correspondence to reality,
and the foundations of our scientific knowledge are seen to lie in the
immutable physical laws that consistently hold throughout the universe.  In
a sense, these immutable laws determine our knowledge.

Moral foundationalists desire an ethical starting point that's as close to
these universal physical laws as it is possible to get.  These starting
points vary widely: sometimes thinkers attempt to ground their ethic in
biology, whereas others attempt to ground ethics in a purely rationalist
system of a priori justification.  It should also be noted that the various
theocentric systems of ethics are "foundational" in an important sense:
ethics is grounded in what God tells us to do.  The existence of God in
these systems is taken as a given--self-evident and beyond question, God is
the axiomatic starting point for which no further explanation is needed or
required.

Pragmatists (such as James and Dewey) emphasize the importance of
"believing what it is good for us to believe," and that the basis for this
conception of "truth" need not be (nor can it likely be) the unshakeable
bedrock of theoretic certainty.  In this sense, Minteer situates himself
and others in the pragmatic vein, requiring for example no immutable first
principle of "intrinsic value in nature" before allowing himself to go on
to reason about matters of practical environmental importance, such as
preservation of endangered species and the protection of biological
diversity.

Well, enough for now, perhaps more later.

Jim T.


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