John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics

6. The Deweyan Ideal

IMPROVISATIONAL MORAL INTELLIGENCE Central to Dewey’s approach is that ethics is understood as the art of helping people to live richer, more responsive, and more emotionally engaged lives.1 This is closer to Aristotle than to Kant, who approaches ethics primarily as rational justification of an inherited moral system. Dewey’s criticism is mitigated only slightly if the inherited system is correctly acknowledged—as it is for instance by Bernard Gert in contrast with Alan Donagan—to be embodied in imaginatively constituted and applied rules and ideals. Pragmatist ethics acknowledges our inherited moral vocabulary, what Kant disparaged as “a disgusting mishmash of patchwork observations and half-reasoned principles.”2 But it is not so driven by what borders on an obsession to forge a less repelling system of this mishmash by, for example, attempting with Gert to describe in advance a conclusive test, procedure, or formula to define what can count as rational or irrational action.3 This is not to say the creative endeavor of pragmatist ethics is free of obsessions. It is by temperament fixated on the world’s qualitative ambiguity, on indeterminate , muddled situations and the imaginative virtues that fund our more admirable dealings with them.4 Martha Nussbaum’s reintroduction of Aristotelian practical wisdom is significant in this context. In a poignant passage in Love’s Knowledge, she observes that moral knowledge entails “seeing a complex, concrete reality in SIX The Deweyan Ideal  The failures of philosophy have come from lack of confidence in the directive powers that inhere in experience, if men have but the wit and courage to follow them. —John Dewey, Experience and Nature ch 6 8/22/05 4:12 P Page 92 a highly lucid and richly responsive way; it is taking in what is there, with imagination and feeling.”5 Moral decision making calls for refined sensitivity and immersion in events (in dialogue with a “rule-governed concern for general obligations,” which on her view plays an essential though subordinate role).6 It is a matter of artistry. “A responsible action,” she writes in a passage reminiscent of Havelock Ellis’s 1923 The Dance of Life, “is a highly context-specific and nuanced and responsive thing whose rightness could not be captured in a description that fell short of the artistic.”7 Considered in this light, jazz improvisation suggests an unconventional metaphor for the harmony and discord of daily interpersonal life. A jazz combo spotlights and illustrates the empathetic, impromptu, and inherently social dimensions of moral compositions. This is especially helpful in framing ideals for interpersonal relationships and group interactions, dimensions of most moral situations. The metaphor corrects Dewey’s unfortunate slips into cephalocentric descriptions of dramatic rehearsal. Moreover , it compensates for a possible misreading of deliberation as rehearsal for a ready-made drama. To whatever extent improvisation is essential to mediating interpersonal circumstances, the jazz metaphor calls attention to habits we need to cultivate, and it enables construction of improvisational ideals for which to strive. As metaphor, conceiving social interactions in terms of jazz is limited in scope. Improvisational intelligence may play only a minor role, for example , in adversarial relationships, conflict mediation, bioethics, or environmental policy; how central or peripheral this role is will not be taken up here. And cultural differences must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, the metaphor calls attention to subtleties of communal interaction that would otherwise go unnoticed. Ferrying the logic of jazz over to interpersonal conduct may initially raise caution flags, and for good reason. There are two extremes to which conduct tends, one the opposite of improvisation and the other popularly identified with it. One relies on routine ends, fixed doctrines, or closed systems of ready-made principles. It engenders cultural rigidity, conformity, and dogmatism, or is compatible with dictatorial coerciveness. The other relies on no forethought or discipline and results in behavior that is slapdash , unorganized, cursory, and discontinuous. It is haphazardly unrehearsed , “improvised” in the dictionary sense of offhand. Both extremes can have a deadening effect on moral imagination, especially on the phase of dramatic rehearsal. Dewey similarly criticized “hasty improvisation” and “patchwork policies” in progressive education (LW 13:109; LW 17:53).8 The middle course is experimental intelligence. It is guided neither by fixed ends that anesthetize perception of emerging events nor by patchwork trial and error that excludes imaginative forethought. Key aspects of this The Deweyan Ideal | 93 ch 6 8/22/05 4:12 P Page 93 [3.145.119.199] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 07...