Evading Evasion, Recovering Recovery

1. Introduction

In his contribution to Cheryl Misak's New Pragmatists volume, David Bakhurst considers the "prospect of a fruitful alliance between [ethical] particularism and pragmatism." ¹ In an attempt to show that members of the two camps can "profit from critical engagement with each other's works" (124), he considers how pragmatists might help resolve three outstanding problems for ethical particularists. Unfortunately, his generosity outpaces his imagination, and he does not really find a great deal that pragmatists can contribute.

So Bakhurst's potential alliance ends up being a case of convergent evolution. He finds that he and his fellow particularists now occupy positions—positions against, among other things, generalization in normative ethics—that pragmatists like Dewey marked out some time ago. But apart from a few suggestive gestures at the world outside the philosopher's study, Deweyans can offer little assistance with "the really hard problems" that the particularist, more than the pragmatist, has identified as challenges to the approach that they share.

I fear that Bakhurst gets Dewey wrong, which is to say that I think he underestimates pragmatism's potential as a resource for contemporary ethical inquiry. Unfortunately though, I also find myself thinking that the attempt to correct this misconception pulls against certain pragmatist impulses. And to the extent that these impulses are essentially ethical impulses, fully committing to an ethical-theoretic debate with Bakhurst would seem to be in tension with the sort of ethical practice that Dewey, among others, has always recommended to me.

In what follows I will try to explain and evaluate this tension a little more fully. The first step will be to deepen the encounter between Bakhurst and Dewey, both to get Dewey right and to prompt the tension I have in mind to reveal itself. The next step will be to say more about this tension, about its sources and its meanings. The final step will be to see what remains of pragmatist ethics after all this.

2. Dewey's Particularism

Bakhurst describes particularism in a way that is worth quoting at length. He writes, "Ethical particularism is the view that sound moral judgement issues from the exercise of a sensibility that transcends codification into rules or principles. Accordingly, rationality and consistency in ethical practice cannot be explained—or fully explained—in terms of adherence to principles, and the acquisition of a moral point of view cannot be seen—or cannot primarily be seen—as a matter of grasping a set of moral rules. Moral judgement demands sensitivity to the salient moral dimensions of particular cases, and this cannot be properly anticipated by moral principles" (122). He might be describing the William James of "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" or the Dewey of the 1908 Ethics. He might be, that is, were it not for the fact that, as he points out, particularism is "a relative newcomer on the philosophical scene," with its roots in the work of living Britons (like John McDowell and Jonathan Dancy) rather than in the work of dead North Americans (122).

Chronology and geography aside, the similarities between pragmatism and particularism are still striking—so much so that Bakhurst is moved to explore the prospects for a partnership. The recent Rortian inheritance of pragmatism threatens to foil the collaboration, but a careful reading of Dewey saves the day. Unlike Rorty, Dewey has more useful things to say about ethics than "this is what we do"; but also unlike the traditions that provoked Rorty's rebellion, he tries to say these more useful things without appealing to a view from nowhere, somehow situated outside human experience and practice.

Beyond his refusal of these deal breakers for the particularist, Dewey endorses the key tenets of the view. For him as for the Britons, sound moral judgment transcends the application of principles and requires sensitivity to the ethically salient dimensions of uniquely problematic situations. The virtuous person develops this sensitivity "not by grasping rules but by enculturation into certain ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling" (134). ² These ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling reveal that "we are accountable to what...