The reformist movement of religious intellectuals that flourished from the late 1980s grew out of the existing movement of the new theology (kalām-i jadīd). This intellectual movement was articulated through an instrumentalization of traditional seminarian philosophy to address the intellectual challenges of the post-war, postcolonial period in Iran (and Iraq) within the sphere of Shiʿi thought. A prominent intellectual foundation for the new theology was ʿAllāmeh Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981), leading teacher of philosophy at Qum, whose defence of metaphysical realism alongside a rejection of moral realism was critically important for reformist thought. In particular, I shall examine his notion of conceptual notions as a feature of the embodied, socially embedded nature of human practical reason that suggests a coherentist approach to moral truths and rejects the ascription of absolute and immutable value to them. While the early reception and teaching of Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s work, his polemical Uṣūl-i falsafeh va ravish-i riʾālizm that focused on rejecting idealism and dialectical materialism and his metaphysics ‘textbook’ Bidāyat al-ḥikma, focused on the defence of naïve realism and the possibility of a metaphysics of the immaterial and the intelligible (culminating in the proof for the existence of such a God), the ethical implications of realm of the conceptual notions that had no referent in extra-mental reality were largely set aside. After presenting his scheme of how these concepts make the moral universe, I will consider three questions: why did the ethical turn in the reading of Ṭabāṭabāʾī take place; what has the nature of the reception of his thought in recent debates in ethics in Iran been; and to what extent can a coherentist pragmatics and even a constructionalist approach to ethics (following pragmatic philosophers such as Nelson Goodman) arise from Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s thought? If ethical and political norms established in the political theology of the new Iranian state are conceptual and indeed conventional, then the possibilities of reform are extensive and exciting.