Abstract

John Dewey characterizes his philosophy as fulfilling the Socratic aspiration for a reflective morality. Dewey also regards reflective morality as tantamount to the democratic ideal, for democracy signifies the working union of individual and communal interests. This dissertation investigates Dewey's adjudication of the personal and social factors in the moral transaction, and his fidelity to the Socratic search for a reflective basis for conduct. ;Dewey argues that the moral life is the very process of adjudicating personal and social interests. Ethical deliberation is occasioned by a problematic social context which includes an indeterminate self that is cognitively and affectively uncertain. Reflection, by clarifying the meaning or consequences of actions, furnishes the vehicle for transporting individual preferences into the domain of objectively valid and publically approved interests. For Dewey, the ethical judgment is a social prescription, an experimental recommendation intending to harmonize or coordinate desires. Dewey interprets objectivity or reasonableness in terms of sociability. ;Dewey develops his ethical theory within the context of the history of philosophy. He views Greek and Modern ethics as pre-scientific and as having betrayed the idea of a free, reflective, morality by searching for a singular and fixed moral good and motive in order to obtain objectivity. Underlying the transcendental or formal universality of traditional ethics is the failure to accommodate change and process; nature is believed to be incapable of self-regulation. Consequently, the universality necessarily remains ideal. ;Dewey's ethics is animated by a concern to empower intelligence, and this is achieved by naturalizing and socializing intelligence. By this maneuver, Dewey avoids positivism and transcendentalism, but falls short of the Socratic idea of a reflective morality in overlooking the possibility of reflectivity itself serving as a norm within nature.