Quimeras e espírito realista : (Cora Diamond acerca da natureza da filosofia moral)

Abstract

The american philosopher Cora Diamond is a specialist of Frege and Wittgenstein who pays special attention to philosophy of thought, language, logic and mathematics. Yet, she also has important things to say, from a wittgensteinian point of view, about moral philosophy. She is, in particular, very critical of the way moral philosophy is conceived as centered on action and decision and on arguments about what is rational to do by a majority of analytic philosophers. It was that critical position, which follows from her conception of philosophical method, that gave rise to her polemics with Peter Singer's and Tom Regan's approach to ethics some thirty years ago, a confrontation which took place in spite of the fact that Diamond shares many of their intuitions. In this article I analyse Diamond's view of what we do when we do moral philosophy starting from her idea that pure moral rationality is a chimera to which philosophy done with a realistic spirit should not soccomb. In the background of questions regarding the role of moral imagination in etihcs lies the more general question of the nature of philosophical method.