What Is Reality? Meaning, Sociality, and Morals

The paper focuses on the interaction between ethics and ontology, particularly with regard to social ethics and social ontology. By presenting some initial assumptions, which relate to Kant, Popper and Searle (among the others), the paper investigates the topic of reality as a human meaning activity. According to the perspective of social ontology, the paper hypothesises the existence of a set of objects, whose reality depends on a couple of criteria – interaction and sociality. Given these two criteria, the paper analyses the connection between social ontology and ethics, with the aim to show whether morals can be intended as a human production and, therefore, as a moral practice. If this is the case, then ethics has not to do with truth, but with other content: the paper tries to outline a moral criterion based on social utility, according to a specific philosophical tradition that follows Darwin’s theories, going from Rée to Dewey’s pragmatism. The goal of the paper is to outline the possibility of a new approach to ethics as system of standards of evaluation, passing by a new definition of reality, connecting truth to utility, and considering the role played by social agreement, which renders ethics a matter of standards.