John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics

Introduction: Revitalizing Ethics

MORAL IMAGINATION AND CLASSICAL AMERICAN PRAGMATISM Debates about moral conduct remain at an impasse. Is it rule-governed or arbitrary, objective or subjective? Responding to this deadlock, numerous moral philosophers in the past two decades have rejected the Janus faces of absolutism and relativism and challenged the Enlightenment foundations of mainstream twentieth-century moral theory.1 This has heightened attention to the ways human beings actually make sense of tangled circumstances and compose meaningful lives. As a result, we are witnessing an all too gradual shift in focus away from tedious polemics about ultimate moral criteria. Martha Nussbaum’s reintroduction of Aristotelian practical wisdom, Alasdair MacIntyre’s emphasis on narrative and character, Nel Noddings’s highlighting of feminine caring, Bernard Williams’s recognition of the role of moral luck, Charles Taylor’s appreciation of the diversity of goods, Owen Flanagan’s call for psychological realism, and Mark Johnson’s studies of imagination and metaphor are good examples of this shift.2 But most of these theorists have ignored the highly articulated and distinctive American philosophical tradition. Classical American pragmatism, Introduction: Revitalizing Ethics  The academic philosophers of ethics, had they possessed virility enough to enter the field of real life, would have realized . . . that the slavery to rigid formulas which they preached was the death of all high moral responsibility. . . . A clear-sighted eye, a many-sided sympathy, a fine daring, an endless patience, are for ever necessary to all good living. With such qualities alone may the artist in life reach success; without them even the most devoted slave to formulas can only meet disaster. —Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life¾ntro 8/22/05 4:14 P Page 1 especially as developed by John Dewey, provides a rich yet still misunderstood and underappreciated framework for clarifying and extending achievements of contemporary moral philosophy. A resurgence of interest in classical pragmatism during the past two decades has been pronounced in epistemology with comparatively scant attention to implications for ethical theory. A thoroughgoing revitalization of moral theory (deliberately used in this book interchangeably with “ethical theory”) would profit immensely from looking back to Dewey’s theory of moral understanding, an understanding that is social, imaginative, and artful in character. Traditionally, moral philosophy has been conceived as a non-empirical discipline. It professes to ascertain how we ought to deliberate and act, or it investigates the “metaethical” status of substantive moral theories and beliefs . Meanwhile, the psychology of moral behavior has, with some notable exceptions, been taken by philosophers to be of little or no direct relevance to value inquiry. We require a purified rational matrix for moral deliberation , it is claimed, precisely because our psychological propensities are such a muddle. Thus moral philosophy’s question “How ought I to live?” is severed from moral psychology’s question “How do human beings actually make sense of their moral experience?” Inattention to this latter question has shielded psychologically unrealistic theories from appropriate scrutiny. One consequence has been to ignore moral imagination. This is in large measure why most philosophers since Kant have overlooked the importance of moral imagination—that is, until recently. According to the Philosopher’s Index, over sixty books and articles in philosophy touched on the subject in the 1990s, compared to six in the 1960s. I would like to contribute to this budding awareness that imagination plays a vital role in moral judgments, and in so doing offer new insights into Dewey ’s philosophy. Although David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s theories of imagination have been the focus of careful study, Dewey’s rich insights on the subject remain largely untapped. Remedying this requires going beyond much current Dewey scholarship, where the importance of imagination is often acknowledged but seldom examined, blunting appreciation of his robust theory of intelligence as indirect exploratory action (see QC, LW 4:178).3 THE NEED FOR A NEW CENTER OF GRAVITY IN ETHICS Mainstream ethics has yet to be fundamentally transformed by this increased interest in imagination and psychological realism. Despite sharp differences, the dominant contemporary moral philosophies in the United States and Britain share a quest for an irrecusable principle or system of rules regulating human conduct. This can be seen in the two most promi2 | r ev i talizing ethics¾ntro 8/22/05 4:14 P Page 2 Revitalizing Ethics | 3 nent examples in philosophical literature: utilitarianism, which bids us to act so as to maximize aggregate happiness...