Acknowledgments
Notes on In-Text Citations
Introduction
1. What's the Good of Goodness?
Plato's Doubts
James's Doubts
The Tragic Sense of Life
Problem-Based Ethics
2. Pragmatism and the Roots of Problem-Based Ethics
The Pragmatic Maxim: Theory to Practice
Truth and Goodness Reconceived
Communities of Inquiry
Democracy as a Community of Inquiry
Scientific Ethics and Experiments of Living
Meliorism: Convergence, Growth, Improvement, Progress
3. Practical Life
Practices
Practices as Solutions to Problems
What Is a Problem?
The Normative Character of Practices
The Normative Governance of Practices
4. Practical Reasoning
The Desire-Belief Model of Moral Motivation
From Practical Reasoning to Practical Knowledge
Problems as Moral Guidance
5. Normative Science
The General and the Particular in Practical Knowledge
Know-How and Know-That
Practical Hypotheses
Normative Naturalism
The Empirical Warrant for Prudential Norms
The Empirical Warrant for Good Ends and Righteous Means
6. Communities of Inquiry
The Ends and Means of Inquiry
The Problem of Epistemarchy
Problems and the Governance of Practices
7. Change for the Better
Progress as Preference for Ways of Life
The Cumulative Theory of Progress
Progress as a Function of Problem-Solving Effectiveness
Moral Progress
Has There Been Progress?
Generalizing Problem-Solving Effectiveness
Conclusion
References
Index

James Jakób Liszka is Senior Scholar at the Institute for Ethics in Public Life and Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. He is the author of Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences; Moral Competence: An Integrated Approach to the Study of Ethics (second edition); A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce; and The Semiotic of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol (Advances in Semiotics).