Questioni di metodo: contro il manicheismo

The paper deals with Filippo Magni’s explicit methodological assumptions in his book on L’etica tra genetica e neuroscienze, stressing the limits of the Manichean and “scientistic” attitude which Magni declares to share with Gilbert Harman, but which at the same time he does not – luckily – in fact apply in his philosophical line of argument. Three main objections are raised against that attitude. First, it is not true that the main task of ethics is to clarify its own relationship with science – there are many other interesting ethical questions which do not have to do with science. Second, it is not true that the attention for introspection or for a “first-person” view would be non naturalist or without philosophical interest: what about moral psychology? Third, not every normative attitude or normative implication of ethics can be refuted as a form of “moralism”, all the more that “moralism” is a very ambiguous word which should be defined – and used – with much more attention. At the end of the paper, one questions Magni’s underestimation of thought experiment in ethics, since he moves from the highly problematic thesis that this kind of experiments does imply a central role of ethical intuition as a claim of intersubjective agreement.