This chapter describes and defends my methodology in ethics: a version of the coherence model of ethical justification. The chapter begins with a contrasting picture of foundational views of ethics. It proceeds to a preliminary characterization of the coherence model and two major theoretical challenges: the problems of initial credibility and bias. In the remainder of the chapter, the model is further characterized and developed in a way that addresses these problems.

FOUND ATIONALISM

Foundational views of ethics maintain that ethics has a foundation of some kind. Some claim that ethics has a normative foundation—that is, a privileged norm or set of norms (whether principles, rules, or specific judgments)—by which all other norms may be justified. Other foundational views assert that ethics has a metaethical foundation—that there are nonmoral considerations or facts that make ethics, or a particular ethical view, rationally necessary.

As I use the term, ethical rationalism (hereafter, simply rationalism) is the view that ethics has a metaethical foundation. Deductivism is the view that ethics has a normative foundation that can be expressed as a supreme principle (or perhaps as an explicitly related—say, hierarchically arranged—set of principles). The structure of a deductivist theory is sufficiently defined that all correct moral judgments are supposedly, in principle, derivable from that structure, given relevant factual information.

As an example, R. M. Hare's metaethical theory is rationalist because it purports to show how the logic of moral language rationally compels us to accept a certain ethical theory.