John Dewey and the Moral Imagination

Abstract

Is there a moral way the world is? Do we have to be adequate to something in moral matters? Do we need firm and transhistorical standards, laws, or principles when deciding moral questions? Do those laws and principles reflect something of our inner selves? Is it necessary to turn those firm laws and principles into a system, a moral theory, in order to make moral deliberation possible? Does moral theory, moreover, need immutable and indubitable foundations? John Dewey would of course answer “no” to all these questions. His brand of pragmatism, as radical empiricism or naturalistic humanism, vehemently critiques traditional versions of moral philosophy. Dewey not only called attention to the weaknesses and shortcomings of Aristotelian virtue ethics, utilitarian ethics, and Kantian deontological ethics, he also illuminated that there are important parallels between the quest for certainty in epistemology, which I discussed in Chapter 7, and the search for firm rules and fixed ideals in morality. These quests in epistemology and morality are a hindrance to human progress and self-realization. Whereas philosophers in the field of epistemology have advanced the idea that without certainty there will never be real (pure) knowledge, moral philosophers have claimed that without firm laws and fixed ideals there will be moral chaos. Both approaches are grounded in the theory-practice dichotomy; both strive to free themselves of the messy and contingent world of everyday life; and both long for the certainty, reliability, immutability, and purity of what would be more than another human creation.