various weights and probabilities interacting so as to produce a suitable solution to a question." "Various" factors with "various" weights? Is that not a little vague? But Duke's Owen Flanagan Jr. defends this highly pragmatic view of morality. "Where we get a lot of pushback from philosophers is that they'll say, 'If you go this naturalistic route that Flanagan and Churchland go, then you make ethics merely a theory of prudence.' And the answer is, Yeah, you kind of do that. Morality doesn't become any different than deciding what kind of bridge to build across a river. The reason we both think it makes sense is that the other stories" -- that morality comes from God, or from philosophical intuition -- "are just so implausible." Flanagan also thinks Churchland's approach leads to a "more democratic" morality. "It's ordinary people discussing the best thing to do in a given situation, given all the best information available at the moment." Churchland herself often underscores that democratic impulse, drawing on her own biography. She grew up on a farm, in the Okanagan Valley, in British Columbia. Speaking of her onetime neighbors, she says: "I got as much wisdom from some of those old farmers as I ever got from a seminar on moral philosophy." If building a bridge is the topic up for discussion, however, one can assume that most people think getting across the water is a sound idea. Yet mainstream philosophers object that such a sense of shared purpose cannot always