The good, the right & the exigencies of life: John Dewey & the value of moral disagreement

Abstract

The crucial demarcation of John Dewey’s ethical theory was to advocate a shift from promoting particular moral views to emphasising a process of reflective moral enquiry that is equipped to incorporate plurality and difference. I have attempted to revisit Dewey’s relevance to the present by setting his ideas within a broader historical context than he is normally located in Pragmatist literature. Hence, an important methodological aspect of the thesis is deriving the conceptual framework through a historical analysis of David Hume’s particular brand of sentimentalism, Immanuel Kant’s unification of sentimentalism and rationalism in the third Critique and John Stuart Mill’s notion of community under the rubrics of two terms, namely Dewey’s ‘experience’ and ‘inquiry’. I demonstrate that understanding each philosopher as building on the ideas of the previous philosopher’s ethical theory provides a background to Dewey’s pragmatist ethics. This allows me to reconfigure the tendency of standard contemporary analyses of Dewey that continue to evaluate his work in terms of the very alternatives that Dewey sought to overcome, for example, objective and subjective, cognitive and non-cognitive, plural and monist. Finally, I show how Dewey’s pragmatist ethics bear upon the value of disagreement as illustrated in three case studies from the present day. This reveals Dewey’s theory in practice. Dewey’s particular conceptions of experience and enquiry, rather than any particular set of norms or principles, are employed to define his conception of the ethical. Dewey’s pragmatic proceduralism is neither normative nor meta-theoretical. Rather it describes the basis upon which one can demonstrate that one is a part of a community of ethical progress.