Problem Solving and Meta-ethics



Dewey and Rawls on Metaphysics

Jon Mandle

February 24, 2010

Draft: Please do not cite without permission

In his 1917 essay, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” John Dewey famously wrote: “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”[1] Specifically, he complained about “the submergence of recent philosophizing in epistemology – that is, in discussions of the nature, possibility, and limits of knowledge in general, and in the attempt to reach conclusions regarding the ultimate nature of reality from the answers given to such questions.”[2] “Unless professional philosophy can mobilize itself sufficiently to assist in this clarification and redirection of men’s thoughts,” Dewey warned, “it is likely to get more and more sidetracked from the main currents of contemporary life.”[3] It would seem that Dewey was calling on philosophers simply to abandon the effort to identify “the ultimate nature of reality” and instead to attend to more urgent matters.[4]

But to the frustration of at least some such as Richard Rorty, throughout his life Dewey merrily pursued projects that he described – accurately – as “metaphysics.”[5] It was only very late in his life that Dewey came to regret this label. In an essay from 1949, he wrote: “I now realize that it was exceedingly naïve of me to suppose that it was possible to rescue the word [‘metaphysics’] from its deeply engrained traditional use.” He vowed never again to use the word “in connection with any aspect of any part of my own position.”[6] It is clear, however, that he viewed this as merely an adjustment in rhetoric, not a substantive shift in position: “while I think the words used were most unfortunate, I still believe that that which they were used to name is genuine and important.”[7] Despite his perceived failure to rescue the word “metaphysics” from what he regarded as its pernicious use, he continued to endorse a specific kind of naturalistic metaphysics.

If Dewey advocated simply abandoning the problems of philosophers, including the emphasis on general epistemology and the search for the “ultimate nature of reality,” what was he doing endorsing any kind of metaphysics at all? To answer this question, we need to consider the specific kind of naturalism that Dewey endorsed. Naturalism comes in many varieties, and as Dewey himself noted, “There is no word in the history of thought which carries more varied meanings than ‘nature’; naturalism shares in its diverse significations.”[8] According to one understanding of naturalism, natural science – or perhaps physics alone – is the ultimate arbiter of reality. All claims must be ratified by the natural sciences, or else reduced to such claims, or else abandoned. Consider Santayana’s criticism that Dewey’s naturalism was “half-hearted and short-winded.”[9] Here is how Santayana insisted nature must be understood:

In nature there is no foreground or background, no here, no now, no moral cathedra, no centre so really central as to reduce all other things to mere margins and mere perspectives. A foreground is by definition relative to some chosen point of view, to the station assumed in the midst of nature by some creature tethered by fortune to a particular time and place. If such a foreground becomes dominant in a philosophy naturalism is abandoned.[10]

Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics, Santayana thought, was merely half-hearted because it retained such “foregrounds.”

Dewey, for his part, rejected Santayana’s type of naturalism. Rather than deflating reality – especially, human reality – in order to submerge it in the vocabulary, claims and methods of the natural sciences, Dewey wanted to inflate our understanding of nature so that it could include an understanding of people and our concerns:

[The] gulf [that] Mr. Santayana puts between nature and man … appears incredible, unnatural and, if I am rightly informed as to the history of culture, reminiscent of supernatural beliefs. To me human affairs, associative and personal, are projections, continuations, complications, of the nature which exists in the physical and pre-human world. There is no gulf, no two spheres of existence, no ‘bifurcation.’ For this reason, there are in nature both foregrounds and backgrounds, heres and theres, centers and perspectives, foci and margins. If there were not, the story and scene of man would involve a complete break with nature, the insertion of unaccountable and unnatural conditions and factors.[11]

Dewey turned Santayana’s charge around. On his telling, it was Santayana who postulated a radical separation between the natural world and the world of human concerns precisely because he expelled the human perspective from our understanding of the natural world. And what kind of naturalism is that?

Dewey was in no way hostile to the natural sciences. On the contrary, although he denied that philosophy is “in any essential sense a form of science” he also insisted that “of course … philosophy must depend upon the best science of its day.”[12] So, what problems can philosophy properly address? Or, alternatively, what more do we want to know beyond what the natural sciences deliver? We have already seen Dewey’s answer: we want solutions to human problems. One such family of problems that transcend the scope of natural science concerns values or, more generally, practical reason. To address such problems, we must draw on the natural sciences but also go beyond them: philosophy must “persuasively use current knowledge to drive home the reasonableness of its conception of life.”[13] Dewey held that philosophy’s “central problem is the relation that exists between the beliefs about the nature of things due to natural science to beliefs about values – using that word to designate whatever is taken to have rightful authority in the direction of conduct.”[14] Philosophy must show how the ordinary world of human values and the world of modern science can be integrated in a common understanding of nature. In the 1949 paper that renounced the use of the term “metaphysics,” he explained that he had used the term “in a discussion of the relation of existence and value…. [The] sense and point of recognition of generic traits [that is, metaphysics] lies in their application in the conduct of life: that is, in their moral bearing provided moral be taken in its basic broad human sense.”[15] Santayana had understood exactly what was at issue: “the foreground of human life,” that Dewey recognized as part of his naturalistic scheme, but that Santayana rejected, was, he said, “necessarily moral and practical.”[16]

Dewey himself devoted immense energy to what we might ordinarily call “the problems of men,” famously including his participation in the development of the Chicago Lab Schools, the New School, the NAACP, and the AAUP, as well as his advocacy for women’s rights and his chairing the Dewey Commission investigating the charges against Leon Trotsky. But Dewey also thought that resolving philosophy’s “central problem” would itself have beneficial effects on culture and society – on “the problems of men” – although undoubtedly these would be far more indirect. For Dewey, and for many others of his and the previous generation, Darwin established that human beings need to be understood not as inhabiting a realm independent from and superior to the natural world, but as part of that natural world.[17] To repeat: Dewey thought that a central challenge for philosophy – one that would help solve certain “problems of men” – was to show how the perspective of natural science and of human values could be integrated into a single account of nature. In fact, he went further: “The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life.”[18]

Despite his later misgivings about the term, it would not be inaccurate to describe such a project as a kind of “metaphysics.” The problem that Dewey had with traditional metaphysics, and what eventually led him to renounce the term, was that it was typically conceived of as a foundational enterprise. It was something that philosophers took upon themselves to dictate to all others by assuming special insight into a realm that was more real than ordinary experience. Instead, Dewey endorsed what he called the ordinary metaphysics of “the common man.”[19] Philosophers, he thought, must overcome the tendency to engage in the “disparagement of the things of ordinary qualitative experiences, those which are esthetic, moral, practical … or else in an effort to justify the latter [assert the existence] of a super-scientific, supra-empirical transcendent a priori realm.”[20] Effecting such a reconciliation of science and values would have a salutary effect on culture and society as a whole.

I want now to notice a similarity between Dewey’s anti-foundationalism and that of John Rawls.[21] The title of Rawls’s 1974 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the APA was “The Independence of Moral Theory.”[22] He argued that “much of moral theory,” by which he meant “substantive moral conceptions,”

is independent from the other parts of philosophy. The theory of meaning and epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, can often contribute very little. In fact, preoccupation with the problems that define these subjects may get in the way and block the path to advance. (p.286)

As with Dewey, this might initially be read as simply a call to abandon metaphysics and other traditional philosophical subjects. But this was no more Rawls’s intent than it was Dewey’s. In fact, Rawls held that epistemic, metaphysical, and meta-ethical investigations were all perfectly legitimate. What he rejected was a certain methodological priority that was – and still is – often given to metaphysical and epistemological concerns over the investigation of substantive, ground-level moral theories. That is, he rejected the assumption that “Moral philosophy is … secondary to metaphysics and the philosophy of mind as well, which are in turn secondary to the theory of meaning and epistemology.” (p.287) Rather than asserting that ethical theory is simply unrelated to other areas of philosophy such as meta-ethics and epistemology, he held that the dependence goes both ways:

I have urged, then, that moral theory is, in important respects, independent from certain philosophical subjects sometimes regarded as methodologically prior to it. But I do not care for independence too strictly understood; an idea I like better is that each part of philosophy should have its own subject matter and problems and yet, at the same time, stand directly or indirectly in relations of mutual dependence with the others. (p.302)

This idea of mutual dependence of the various connected parts, no one of which has absolute priority over the others, is, of course, the core of Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium.

Rawls’s idea of wide reflective equilibrium is well-known, so I will merely outline the basic idea: “A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self-evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view.”[23] The “everything” which is to fit together can include particular moral judgments, abstract principles, still more abstract procedural restrictions on argument, scientific claims, metaphysical claims, social theories – anything that is potentially relevant. We come to the project of identifying principles of justice with some provisional moral commitments and knowledge. The judgments about which we are most confident – for example, our beliefs that “religious intolerance and racial discrimination are unjust” – are “provisional fixed points which we presume any conception of justice must fit.”[24] The idea, simply put, is that in an effort “to provide guidance where guidance is needed,”[25] we work from whatever premises have our greatest reflective support to those areas where we are (initially at least) unsure. The construction of the original position is part of an effort to extend our knowledge from the areas about which we have the most confidence to those areas where our beliefs are unformed or are in conflict. The idea of reflective equilibrium is, in effect, a proclamation of inclusion: all considerations are welcome to apply; none is ruled out ahead of time. In this regard, neither substantive moral convictions nor meta-ethical claims enjoy an absolute priority over the others. Each can make its own contribution based on our initial degree of confidence and how it is related to other commitments.

Consider now an anti-skeptical argument that Ronald Dworkin has made that relies on this idea of reflective equilibrium. Dworkin is interesting in arguing against certain kinds of skeptical meta-ethical positions – those that he calls “archemedian” – that deny the possibility of objective moral judgments.[26] Part of his strategy is to argue that meta-ethical theories are not neutral with respect to ground-level moral claims. “So, for example,” he writes, “the thesis that there is no right answer to the question whether abortion is wicked is itself a substantive moral claim, which must be judged and evaluated in the same way as any other substantive moral claim.”[27] Although it looks like and is a piece of meta-ethics, the claim that there is no objective fact of the matter has substantive implications for ground-level moral claims.

There is some controversy in the literature concerning whether Dworkin succeeds in showing that no meta-ethical position is morally neutral. Much of this debate turns on the ability to construct sentences that count as meta-ethical (on some definition of meta-ethical) that don’t have any implications that count as ethical (on some definition of ethical).[28] I want to avoid this debate and simply assert that Dworkin succeeds in showing that at least a wide range of meta-ethical positions that are skeptical of the possibility of objective moral claims have substantive ground-level implications. As Dworkin points out, broad moral skepticism “often presupposes a counterfactual positive moral judgment.”[29] For example, when someone claims not only that abortion is wrong, but in addition that it is objectively wrong, Dworkin suggests that we interpret the claim to be that abortion would still be wrong even if nobody believed it to be wrong. But this is itself a ground-level moral claim about a certain hypothetical situation. Whether or not we agree with Dworkin that this is a fully adequate paraphrase of an objectivity claim, I believe that he establishes at least that meta-ethical claims typically have ground-level moral implications.[30] An effort to reach reflective equilibrium must incorporate both meta-ethical claims and ground-level moral claims because they may be incompatible with or have implications for each other. The strength of our conviction in the premises of a skeptical meta-ethical argument must be weighed against the strength of our conviction in the substantive moral claims that would be inconsistent with that skepticism. Dworkin puts the point this way:

No skeptical argument can succeed, for anyone, unless it brings him skeptical conviction, and that means that none of us can accept such an argument unless we find its premises convincing even when we grasp their skeptical import. We must find these premises more plausible than what they require us to abandon.[31]

A sweeping meta-ethical skepticism is inconsistent with a great variety of ground-level moral claims, many of which we think we have strong reason to accept – stronger reasons, in fact, than virtually any speculative, metaphysical thesis.

Consider, however, a recent reply by Brian Leiter, who argues that there is a strong pragmatic reason to accept the criteria for objectivity that he claims are found in the natural sciences. According to this “Naturalistic Conception,” “objectivity in any domain must be understood on the model of the natural sciences, whose objects of study are objective in the sense of being ‘mind-independent’ and causally efficacious (i.e., in making a causal difference to the course of experience).”[32] If purported “moral facts” cannot meet the demands of a scientific epistemology, he claims, they should “suffer the same fate as witches and the ether.” (p.78) For Leiter, the priority that we should give to this metaphysical picture in opposition to the purported objectivity of moral facts is not determined by mere philosophical speculation. Rather: “Science has earned its claim to be a guide to the real and the unreal by depopulating our world of gods and witches and ethers and substituting a picture of the world and how it works of immense practical value” (p.77) – “it sends the planes into the sky, eradicates certain cancerous growths, makes possible the storage of millions of pages of data on a tiny chip, and the like.” (p.71)

If, in fact, we had to make a wholesale choice between science and our values, it is unclear whether we could reach any reflective equilibrium. As we saw above, working our way to seeing that this represents a false dilemma was exactly what Dewey called “philosophy’s central problem.” Our first step toward seeing that the dilemma is false is to notice that Leiter’s account of our rejection of witches and the ether is at least incomplete. We properly reject their existence because the explanations that rely on their existence compete with, and indeed are incompatible with the explanations offered by modern science of the same phenomena. The previous explanations that invoked them were supplanted by rival and ultimately superior explanations. Unlike witches and the ether, however, moral values and practical norms do not (by themselves) provide competing explanations to the claims of science. The primary role of practical norms is to provide evaluative and practical guidance – guidance which modern science does not even purport to provide. When we engage in practical deliberation, either individually or collectively, we consider the reasons for and against the various options that confront us.[33] We reflect on what considerations tell in favor of or against the practical options that we face. To abandon practical norms – as we abandoned witches and the ether – would be to hold that no consideration actually tells for or against any action. If science tells us what is mind-independent and causally efficacious, it could not possibly support such a conclusion. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what argument could succeed in forcing us to embrace such a conclusion. This is especially hard to image when we recognize that any such argument would itself rely on practical norms and values.

Leiter recognizes that his defense of the Naturalistic Conception is itself a defense of certain epistemic norms and values:

Skepticism about moral value need not go hand-in-hand with skepticism about all kinds of value: it depends on the sorts of arguments being advanced for skepticism. In the case of the moral skepticism at issue here, it is motivated precisely by accepting first certain epistemic values for essentially pragmatic reasons, as discussed earlier.[34]

But Leiter’s pragmatic defense of the Naturalistic Conception not only supports certain epistemic values. It is based on non-epistemic values, and therefore sits awkwardly with his moral skepticism. It depends on the assumption that we properly value “the goods” that science has delivered. There is no denying that modern science has indeed allowed us very dramatically to increase many of our powers and practical capabilities. Many such increases in power are undoubtedly good and vindicate the methods that produce them. But not all of the ends that we can achieve on the basis of scientific knowledge are good or valuable, and Leiter does not assert that they are. Modern technology allows us to do things that are purely destructive and evil on a much wider scale than ever before.[35] More importantly, an increase in technological power is not the only thing we value. If the epistemic norms presupposed by science are justified because they deliver “the goods,” there is then nothing to prevent us from saying in parallel that certain practical norms and values are justified because they deliver some other goods. I believe that the end of a just society is valuable. The widespread acceptance of certain norms of social justice would undoubtedly make a significant contribution to achieving that end. If epistemic norms can be justified on the basis of their contribution to valuable ends, so too can moral and practical norms.[36]

I want to make two further points about Rawls before concluding. Moving beyond the issue of reflective equilibrium, it might be said that in his later work, Rawls turned decisively against anything that could be called “metaphysical.” The whole point of a political conception of justice and his discussion of public reason, it might be said, was to show that philosophy should abandon its traditional investigations of comprehensive religious, moral, or philosophical theories. We’re finally past the point – I hope and trust – where people charge Rawls with advocating restrictions on free speech and inquiry. His point about the limits of public reason concerns what should count as a good argument – not what people should be legally permitted to say. But there is still a widespread misinterpretation that Rawls believed that no argument based on a comprehensive doctrine is ever a good one. This was not his position at all. It is only in very specific circumstances that an argument ought to respect the strictures of public reason and therefore avoid reliance on a specific comprehensive doctrine. Rawls held that properly understood, political power is “the power of free and equal citizens as a collective body.”[37] This more or less directly requires a democratic political structure. Anything else would obviously involve treating citizens as unequal in an important sense. But for Rawls, in order for the political actions of a society to be truly collective, the society’s reasons for its action or decision must be shared as well. Now this does not mean that there must be unanimous agreement in order for a society’s decision to be legitimate. But it does mean that all reasonable people must be able to recognize that the considerations cited in favor of a decision do, in fact, support it. And this means that citizens must strive to provide justifications for political decisions that others can accept. That the premises of an argument are true, and the argument valid, is insufficient for justification. Already in A Theory of Justice, Rawls wrote:

justification is argument addressed to those who disagree with us, or to ourselves when we are of two minds… Being designed to reconcile by reason, justification proceeds from what all parties to the discussion hold in common. Ideally, to justify a conception of justice to someone is to give him a proof of its principles from premises that we both accept, these principles having in turn consequences that match our considered judgments. Thus mere proof is not justification.[38]

Assuming there is a diversity of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, the justifications that citizens offer to one another for the exercise of political power should not be dependent on any particular comprehensive doctrine. But this is not based on any hostility toward any metaphysical doctrine any more than it is based on hostility to religious faith.

But even in this case, Rawls came to endorse what he called the “wide view” of public reason, according to which “reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support.”[39] Because of this “proviso” – that public reasons must also be given “in due course” – the introduction of comprehensive doctrines “does not change the nature and content of justification in public reason itself.”[40] Why, then, is this important? Rawls’s thought is that by introducing one’s full comprehensive doctrine into public discussion, one displays the deep grounds on which one is committed to public reason itself. These grounds are not shared by everyone, but they demonstrate that one’s own comprehensive doctrine is, in fact, reasonable. They demonstrate that the commitment to resolving questions of basic political morality according to a shared political conception of justice is itself deep. This may be of great importance in a sharply divided society where each side questions the good faith of the other and accuses the other of hypocrisy. Rawls gives the following illustration:

Consider, for example, a highly contested political issue – the issue of public support for church schools. Those on different sides are likely to come to doubt one another’s allegiance to basic constitutional and political values. It is wise, then, for all sides to introduce their comprehensive doctrines, whether religious or secular, so as to open the way for them to explain to one another how their views do indeed support those basic political values.[41]

The case that we’ve been discussing conforms to this model, as well. It would be of significant value to our society to show that modern science is not incompatible with a commitment of reasonable moral and political principles.

Furthermore, Rawls endorses political constructivism as part of a political conception of justice, and political constructivism contains within itself “an appropriate conception of objectivity.” (PL 89) It establishes “a public framework sufficient for the concept of judgment to apply and conclusions to be reached on the basis of mutually recognizable reasons and evidence.” (PL 115) Judgments made from within this framework aim at being correct and are not defined by the point of view of any particular person but rather by the perspective of “reasonable and rational persons suitably specified.” (PL 115) Comprehensive (metaphysical) doctrines will explain in different ways how the features of political constructivism establish objectivity.[42] While it is true that a political conception is not dependent on any particular comprehensive doctrine, that does not mean it is compatible with all comprehensive doctrines. As we have seen, some comprehensive metaphysical doctrines simply deny the possibility of objectivity in the practical realm altogether. Just as some religious views are incompatible with a political conception of justice, some metaphysical views are as well. Rawls is clear that we should not expect a political conception to be compatible with unreasonable comprehensive doctrines. There is some dispute about what exactly the criteria are for a comprehensive doctrine to be reasonable.[43] But however the details are worked out, a form of naturalism – or any metaphysical view – that denies the possibility of objective moral judgment is unreasonable. If we accept Rawls’s claim that “To deny certain metaphysical doctrines is to assert another such doctrine” (PL, 379 n.8), this implies that he is committed to certain metaphysical claims.[44] These are minimal claims, appropriate to their role in a political conception of justice. While not assuming any particular comprehensive doctrine, political liberalism is incompatible with unreasonable ones that deny the very possibility of carrying out its project.

I said earlier that for Dewey and philosophers of his generation, Darwin represented the key challenge: how to understand human beings (and their values) as part of the natural world? Unfortunately, in recent polls only 39% of American say they believe in the theory of evolution,[45] while 44% agree with the statement that “God created human as is within the last 10,000 years.”[46] No wonder our former President thinks that so-called “intelligent design” should be taught in public schools. It is obvious that the implications of Darwin remain a pressing issue for our culture, as they were for Dewey’s. In fact, I think this is just an instance of a general ambivalence toward science in our society. There is an inchoate sense that science shows that ethical judgments are at best merely subjective feelings that are not amenable to reasonable and rational debate. Working in the background of many of our public moral debates – debates over abortion, gay marriage, and euthanasia, for example – is an assumption that either science must be resisted in the name of moral (and frequently religiously based) principles or that to defend the objectivity of science, ethical judgment must become a mere subjective matter of taste. Both of these reactions – anti-scientific dogmatism and dogmatic subjectivism – are corruptions that result in part from an assumption that modern science is incompatible with a world of objective values. Dewey diagnosed exactly this situation when he optimistically predicted: “The time will come when it will be found passing strange that we of this age take such pains to control by every means at command the formation of ideas of physical things, even those most remote from human concern, and yet are content with haphazard beliefs about the qualities of objects that regulate our deepest interests; that we are scrupulous as to methods of forming ideas of natural objects, and either dogmatic or else driven by immediate conditions in framing those of values.”[47]

Dewey’s lament remains apt today – the problems that figure prominently in the work of many contemporary philosophers are often far removed from the problems generated by ordinary thought. But contrary to the fears of some and the hopes of others, correcting this would not put an end to philosophy – or even an end to meta-ethics and metaphysics, properly understood and framed. At least some of the problems of men – for example, the infirmity of our public debates about morality – are in part the result of the failure to achieve the reconciliation that Dewey identified as the “central problem” of philosophy.

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[1] John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (1917) in The Essential Dewey, v.1, Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander, eds. (Indiana, 1998), p.68.

[2] Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” p.55.

[3] Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” p.47.

[4] On progress coming from “sheer abandonment” of older questions, see John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin in Philosophy” (1909) in The Essential Dewey, v.1, p.44.

[5] See, for example, Richard Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics” in Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

[6] John Dewey, “Experience and Existence: A Comment,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v.9, n.4 (June, 1949), pp.712, 713.

[7] Dewey, “Experience and Existence: A Comment,” p.713.

[8] John Dewey, “Half-Hearted Naturalism,” The Journal of Philosophy, v.24, n.3 (Feb., 1927), p.57.

[9] George Santayana, “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics,” The Journal of Philosophy, v.22, n.25 (Dec. 3, 1925), p.680.

[10] Santayana, “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics,” pp.678-679.

[11] Dewey, “Half-Hearted Naturalism,” p.58.

[12] John Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy” in The Essential Dewey, v.1, p.74. cf. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Open Court, 1926), p.410.

[13] Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy,” p.74.

[14] John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (Gifford Lectures 1929) (Minton, Balch & Co., 1929), p.256. Dewey also thought that philosophy has a role to play in reconciling “the relation of physical science to the things of ordinary experience.” Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p.252. If “ordinary experience” contains values, as Dewey assumed, then these are two instances of the same general problem. See John Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge, and Value: A Rejoinder” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, Paul Schilpp and Lewis Hahn, eds. (Open Court, 1939), p.522.

[15] Dewey, “Experience and Existence,” p.713.

[16] Santayana, “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics,” p.683; cf. p.681: “although Dewey avoids all inflated eloquence on this theme, it is clear that his philosophy of Experience is a transcendental moralism.”

[17] See Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy”; cf. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

[18] Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p.255.

[19] Dewey, “Half-Hearted Naturalism,” p.59.

[20] Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder,” p.524.

[21] I have not been fully able to trace the connections between Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium and the pragmatists. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls cites Nelson Goodman, W. V. Quine and Morton White as discussing similar ideas. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard, 1999), pp.18 n.7, 507 n.34. In his dissertation, Rawls comments that “The origin of rational reflection has been frequently discussed by pragmatists who have asserted the doctrine that rational thought (i.e., empirical or scientific inquiry) begins, or is stimulated by confusion, doubt, and perplexity.” He then cites Peirce and Dewey. John Rawls, A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge (Harvard, 1950), p.212, n.1.

Although I have not been able to find a passage in Dewey that precisely captures the idea of reflective equilibrium, William James attributes something like this to him in the following passage: “The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He save as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into another most felicitously and expediently.

“This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible.” William James, Pragmatism, Bruce Kuklick, ed. (Hackett, 1981 [1907]), p.31. I thank P.D. Magnus for the reference.

[22] John Rawls, “The Independence of Moral Theory” reprinted in his Collected Papers, Samuel Freeman, ed. (Harvard, 1999).

[23] Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p.19; cf. pp.506-507. On “wide” reflective equilibrium, see “The Independence of Moral Theory,” p.289.

[24] Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp.17-18.

[25] Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p.18.

[26] Ronald Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996), p.88.

[27] Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth,” p.89.

[28] See, for example, James Dreier, “Meta-Ethics and Normative Commitment,” Philosophical Issues 12 (2002), and Jeremy Fantl, “Is Metaethics Morally Neutral?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, v.87 (2006).

[29] Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth,” p.91.

[30] Despite his vigorous criticisms of Dworkin’s argument, Brian Leiter seems to concede this point. See Brian Leiter, “Objectivity, Morality, and Adjudication” in Objectivity in Law and Morals, Brian Leiter, ed. (Cambridge, 2001), p.88.

[31] Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth,” p.117. This echoes the reaction to skepticism of the pragmatists. Both Peirce and James held that skepticism, in order to succeed, must result in lived doubt, i.e., changes to behavior. I thank P.D. Magnus for pointing this out.

[32] Leiter, “Objectivity, Morality, and Adjudication,” p.67.

[33] This was one of Kant’s central claims. See, for example, Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor, ed. (Cambridge, 1996), p.143 [Ak. 378]: “People who are accustomed merely to explanations by natural sciences will not get into their heads the categorical imperative from which these laws proceed dictatorially, even though they feel themselves compelled irresistibly by it. Being unable to explain what lies entirely beyond that sphere (freedom of choice), however exalting is this very prerogative of a human being, his capacity for such an idea, they are stirred by the proud claims of speculative reason, which makes its power so strongly felt in other fields, to band together in a general call to arms, as it were, to defend the omnipotence of theoretical reason. And so now, and perhaps for a while longer, they assail the moral concept of freedom and, wherever possible, make it suspect; but in the end they must give way.”

[34] Leiter, “Objectivity, Morality, and Adjudication,” p.98 n.57.

[35] Perhaps Leiter only means to note that scientific knowledge increases our knowledge of causal relations. But the natural sciences’ success in this area cannot be the basis for establishing that causal efficacy should be a criterion for objective knowledge.

[36] One could object that it is merely the belief in principles of justice – not the principles themselves – that promises to deliver the good of a just society. But the same holds in the case of science – it is the belief in the methods and results of natural science that has generated technological success.

[37] PL, p.136.

[38] TJ, p.508.

[39] Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” p.591.

[40] Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” p.592.

[41] Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” p.593.

[42] PL, p.112. See also the discussion in Samuel Freeman, “The Burdens of Public Justification: Constructivism, Contractualism, and Publicity,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics v.6 (2007).

[43] Jon Mandle, “The Reasonable in Justice as Fairness,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, v.29 (1999).

[44] Compare Josh Cohen’s recent argument that Rawls is also committed to a minimal conception of truth for political purposes in “Truth and Public Reason,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, v.37 (2009), and David Estlund, “The Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth,” Ethics, v.108 (1998).

[45] “On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution,”

[46] “Republicans, Democrats Differ on Creationism,”

[47] Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p.268.

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