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It is time to move from the tight focus on James and Dewey to pursue a vision of a possible liberal democracy in the spirit of their work. The next three chapters follow Dewey in thinking of democracy as “a moral idea” and a “way of life.” So I do not attend here to institutional and procedural considerations pertinent to liberal democracy, which is not to deny their crucial importance. They are just not the questions I want to pursue in this text. Instead, I consider the intimate connection between politics and morality, where both are understood as efforts to shape how human interactions unfold , and then to sketch out a specifically liberal democratic ethos. In the two chapters that succeed this one, I will offer a concrete illustration of the liberal democratic ethos at work by way of a pragmatist account of human rights (chapter 4), and an alternative vision of that ethos under the sign of “secular comedy” (chapter 5). Morality can be broadly defined as the establishment of and reflection upon the terms that inform humans’ interactions with other humans and with nonhumans. It would be wrong to use the word “govern ” in place of the word “inform” in the previous sentence, because humans do not always follow morality’s prescriptions and because those prescriptions themselves do not remain constant. While a moral code does provide some “rules” that aim to guide (or even govern) action, rules that are enforced by various sanctions, a moral code also consists of attitudes and orientations toward others and toward behaviors that fall far short of the rigidity or clarity of rules. And, crucially, morality is a space for reflection upon the rules and the more vague habits, attitudes, and sentiments that influence our lived relations with the world and others. Morality, then, instantiates the fact that no individual occupies the world alone. And humans do not work out their relationships to all the other occupants of the world, human and 3. The Democratic Ethos [The] liberal picture of a global democratic utopia is that of a planet on which all members of the species are concerned about the fates of all the other members. —Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress 79 nonhuman alone. “Morality is social,” as Dewey declares (HNC, 287), and its terms emerge from human interactions. Those terms cannot be reduced to establishing, maintaining, and enforcing a set of rules, which is why I want to talk of an “ethos.” In order to combat this reduction of morality to rules, Bernard Williams has urged that we adopt a distinction between morality and ethics, where morality is confined to questions of duties and obligations that can be encoded in rules, and ethics addresses everything that “relates to us and our actions the demands, needs, claims, desires, and, generally, the lives of other people.”1 Williams admits that his notion of the ethical is “vague,” but this is precisely because it strives to encompass all that is involved in our complex relation to others (and I would add to his definition our relation to nonhuman others and the environment itself). It is doubtless a hopeless task to try to police usage in this matter, and I will not in this chapter attempt to police my use of the terms “morality” and “ethics.” But I emphatically do want to follow Williams’s more capacious concerns as I provide a pragmatist account of morality in this chapter. In particular, I find useful his sense that while morality is connected to codes, ethics attends to the broader questions of “the good life” and of “creating a community held together” by shared “dispositions.”2 This broader vision can recognize that multiple versions of the good life are possible and that a diversity of motivations underlie human actions even as an ethics strives to establish certain commitments—to affording each individual the opportunity to pursue the good life and/or to collective processes of decision making—that are shared. Finally, and crucially, the very term “disposition” suggests that ethics, the inculcation and maintenance and even revision of a shared ethos, is much less based on a Kantian (rationalistic) assessment of rules than on a Humean cultivation of sensibility.3 An ethos, then, is a way of being in the world that feels right—and that is constantly monitored for its keeping one in relation to that world in satisfying ways. It is on the development of a democratic ethos that I want to focus in this...

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