In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Jane Addams and Wicked Problems:Putting the Pragmatic Method to Use
  • Danielle Lake

To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride oneself on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.

—Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics

melioration of most social problems today—problems like health care and environmental justice—requires a feminist pragmatist methodology1 because many of these problems are not only dynamically complex, but inherently wicked. That is, many of our social problems today are characterized by intense disagreement between fragmented stakeholders, multiple and often conflicting objectives, as well as high levels of uncertainty, variability, and risk. While the burgeoning field of wicked problems implicitly relies on a feminist pragmatist methodology, it fails to do so explicitly and could benefit from a more direct and nuanced grounding.

Especially relevant to—but ignored by—current wicked problems scholars, feminist pragmatist Jane Addams, illustrates how the pragmatic method is applicable to solving wicked problems by employing this methodology on the ground in confronting the wicked problems of her time (i.e., poverty, immigration, women’s rights, and labor reform, among others). I also argue that her work provides us with valuable insights on how to go about tackling these problems in our own time. Re-animating Addams as one of the earliest to collaboratively address wicked problems through the pragmatic method is valuable not least because she has largely been remembered as the first proto-social worker and/or as an inspirational philanthropist. Both of these characterizations are at best partial and at worst misleading. Addams consistently disdained the uninformed and high-handed charity worker, arguing instead for co-action. Beyond these characterizations, there have been further efforts to recall Addams as an American philosopher. In this light, her writings have frequently been dismissed as “derivative” of the founding pragmatists and [End Page 77] thus not significant. The following proves this characterization to not only be mistaken, but also extremely unfortunate.

A feminist pragmatist methodology fruitfully expands on aspects of wicked problems (WP) work currently undeveloped and/or underdeveloped by WP scholars. In particular, Addams’s insights on the need for cooperative action, her advocacy for the expansion of our ethical framework, and her work on perplexity are shown to be foundational to tackling wicked problems. Indeed, her role as a public philosopher, social reformer, and facilitator are far more in line with both the recommendations following from the pragmatic method and the WP scholarship than are the efforts of most current philosophers today. Along these lines, her life’s greatest work, Hull House, is shown to be a highly effective bridge institution, providing a key, relatively stable, yet flexible space from which work bridging institutional, political, educational, and moral divides was done. In addition, her writings fruitfully expand the current WP scholarship through her nuanced understanding of the need for fellowship, sympathetic understanding, and reciprocity.

Defining Wicked Problems

Wicked problems are not “morally wicked, but diabolical in that they resist all the usual attempts to resolve them” (Brown et al. 4). Such problems were originally identified in contrast to “tame” problems, problems easily defined and solved one-dimensionally. The term gained traction through a 1973 article on city planning by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber and has more recently taken root in a wider array of literature on the environment. Wicked problems are dynamically complex and ill-structured, with no straightforward causal connections to help us gain a clear and simple picture of the issue. Instead, such problems are obstinate and indefinable, influenced by many dynamic and complex factors (Batie). They confront us with high levels of uncertainty in situations where both action and inaction carry high stakes. They are thus not amenable to final resolutions but cannot simply be ignored.

Adding to the difficulties here we also know that stakeholders involved in many of these wicked problems are separated from one another, have widely different interests and values, tolerate different levels of risk, and seek separate and sometimes conflicting end-goals (Salwasser 9). Such structural fragmentation explains why another “key theme in the [wicked problems] literature” calls for “the introduction of bottom...

pdf

Share