Contentions

• The most common “moral system” practiced in Western societies is moral pragmatism.
• Fans say it is fast and dirty, easy and personal, and suited to a materialist society; all this is true, but pragmatism’s liabilities make it a very poor substitute for morality.
• Pragmatism began as a truth theory in the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century.
• Its premise was that immediate, personalized utility must be the test of a truth claim.
• As a truth theory, it fails abjectly to establish an act of severance between determinations of truth and goodness, biasing both by a preliminary deference to desire.
• It also fails to consider consequences beyond immediate ones, which will doom any quest for integrity.
• Its pseudo-scientific warrant attempts to make ordinary experience a kind of experiment in violation of the strict limitations on experiences actually imposed by empirical practice.
• In deriving from utilitarianism, pragmatism utterly fails to resolve conflict between persons, cultures, or even a single individual’s desires.
• For all its opposition to religious authority, pragmatism suffers from the same emulsion of truth and goodness calculations, so it similarly disallows dispassionate judgment.
• Pragmatists are unclear about whether pragmatism is a psychological necessity or a desirable moral guide, but if they assume the former contention, they have no need of the latter one, and if they assume the latter one, they are mistaken.
• Pragmatism makes no concession to equity or justice, favoring expedience in all preferences, but in disregarding true moral ends, it produces an infinite regress of intention, a flaw it must be blind to since it only considers consequences as worthy of examination.
• Its ease and simplistic valuations disguise its insufficiencies in Western cultures overflowing with available options to individual preference.

A number of people I know are proud to consider themselves moral pragmatists. They seem to think their outlook superior to either a rigid ideology or religious orthodoxy. I get the impression they view themselves as more ethically agile in this very busy world than those burdened with rules and systems. It is all too easy to see the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of those who profess to follow creeds and movements. After all, the great moral crusades of our age have largely ended in either disappointment or relapse, and the air is thick with the odor of irony and cynical detachment. And pragmatism offers the indubitable advantage of all subjectivist ethics: it is contextual, personalized, and therefore according to its adherents closed to outside appraisals. “You do what you have to do.” This lazy aphorism, with its concession to force and action, sees the moral agent responding to circumstance with all the reasoning of an orange pip squeezed between two fingers. While this image captures the trajectory of pragmatic thinking perfectly, it surely fails to indicate a moral arc. Pragmatism, though awfully easy to do, is impossible to do well.

It is a challenge even to conceptualize. Is it an epistemic theory or a moral one? If it seeks to prescribe how we might come to knowledge, does it therefore consider knowledge so tied to context that it becomes literally disposable once an experience concludes and so derived from that experience that it literally ought not be shared? And if morally prescriptive as well, does it advise responding to unique experience in any particular way other than what we desire in the moment? Or is it not prescriptive of finding truth and goodness at all and merely a theory describing one way of interacting with the world neither better nor worse than another? Perhaps it posits itself as the only way?

We can first dispose of pragmatism as a truth theory. We may use William James’ words as suggestive of pragmatism as epistemology. “Ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience…. Any idea upon which we can ride, any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.” We can easily see the roots of the coherentist virtual circle in this vision, for it sets up private usefulness as the sole criterion for truth (see “What is the Virtual Circle?). If anything it is even more lax, for it does not even require that truth claims be non-contradictory but instead allows one to base reflection on the intensity of momentary desire. James seems to advise that we see experience so as to profit from it. In thus alloying our knowledge with our desires, pragmatism shares qualities with another term now enjoying very high approval ratings: belief (see “Knowledge, Trust, and Belief“). But if used as a knowledge finding mechanism, pragmatism must prove impermissible to reason because it approaches all experience as believers wish to approach their faith.  Allow me to explain why.

I find pragmatic truth theory both too expansive and too restrictive.

It is expansive in that it allows for immediate utility to determine personalized truth, a charge Bertrand Russell  called “the Santa Clause effect.” Whatever serves our interests in the moment becomes true for that moment, but since experience is private, only true for ourselves. This alloy of truth determination combined with a simultaneous search for utility utterly demolishes the ability to engage the dispassionate ratiocinative process commonly called “thinking” and biases judgments of truth with the desire for goods that should follow finding truth rather than direct it. This violates a necessary separation clause, the act of severance, that presents preference only after one determines truth in a moment of experience (see “The Act of Severance“). But because pragmatism pictures us entering an experience seeking to find some means to exploit it, we will quite naturally structure our comprehension of our situation to procure what we think it will offer us. It is just this kind of distortive relationship that empirical science finally banished from its practice after a centuries-long process of restrictive standardization. To structure one’s comprehension of the true by a simultaneous employment of one’s desires is, as mentioned, the very definition of “belief” ( see “Can Religious Belief Be Knowledge?“) which might be possible for questions not open to our knowledge but disastrous for those that are. Distortions of reality are not conducive to the utility that pragmatism values, much less to a clear-eyed framing of preference that morality requires.

Pragmatic truth theory is also too restrictive in that in equating truth with use, it cuts off from our concern any question not currently instrumental and pits the immediate value of a judgment against our means of determining that value. It has frequently been charged that pragmatism values scientific methodology but would spurn the pure science that directs so much of scientific research. Or perhaps it would stimulate that research but for reasons divorced from the dispassionate curiosity that should frame investigations, a practice so common to the human sciences as to be a defining trait.

I have previously commented on the opposite problem, so clearly illustrated by John Dewey’s emphasis on treating ordinary experience as a kind of empirical experiment (please see “The Calamity of the Human Sciences“). It is a task both impossible to implement and certain to lead to all the errors of scientism (see “The Limits of Empirical Science”). We are still enduring the results of an era in which only scientific outcomes were considered valid, one consequence being that all moral issues — those seeking truths about ultimate goodness rather than the data of experience — are reduced to the very subjectivist and experiential valuation that pragmatists accord to their moral theory.

What I am saying here is that we cannot divorce pragmatism as a truth theory from its moral implications for the very simple reason that the two-step process of determining truth and utilizing that determination are fused into a single and immediate preference in pragmatist practice. It is the very reason pragmatism is so quick and convenient in the welter of decisions we face in every moment of consciousness, and not coincidently the reason it is so ineffectual to guide them. The culture draws a bright line between truth and goodness for the very simple reason that even the most cynical postmodernist or the most devout religionist cannot deny the truth-finding powers of empirical science. But that very power is drawn from the act of severance that pragmatism denies in favor of a premature closure that distorts the truth of an experience from its potential goods.

Should we accord pragmatists’ makeshift morality the dignity of analysis, we can place their arguments in the tradition of Bentham’s utilitarianism (see “Three Moral Systems“) and see the impact on later twentieth century movements like relativism and subjectivism. William James, the man who gave pragmatism its name, dedicated his highly influential 1890 work The Principles of Psychology to utilitarianism’s most famous theorist, John Stuart Mill. The essence of all these arguments is that moral theory either must be or ought to be guided by instrumentalism. Pragmatists are blind to the difference, even though it measures the field of moral thinking from what is to what ought to be. So is pragmatism a description of what we do or a prescription for what we ought to do? How convenient for its adherents that the distance between our inclinations and our duties has been reduced to zero!

It is important that we define “instrumentalism” clearly because much depends on our understanding of the term. We use the term “good” in an instrumental sense when we actually mean “useful” (What Do we Mean by ‘Good’?“). So a hammer is a good tool to drive a nail. A bridge is a good bridge if it carries the traffic it was built to carry. Such appraisals are prosaic, provided we can judge the final cause of a thing by the formal cause, the effect of its performance against the purpose for which it is performed. In some cases, we can see a problem in limiting moral judgment to the instrumental. As Dostoevsky noted, an axe is a good weapon with which to murder a pawnbroker. So clearly, instrumentalism and morality are not always synonymous. But while some instrumental judgments are clearly not moral, it is still an open question whether all moral questions are instrumental. Pragmatists base their moral theory on an affirmative reply. Are they right?

We may assume that religious morality would reply that they aren’t. Faith’s absolute morality stipulates the divinity’s will as determinative rather than the moral agent’s (see “What Do We Mean by ‘Morality’?“). Religions command. They do not hypothesize or find their justifications in experience. Utility frames its deliberations in terms of hypotheticality. If I want x, then I must do y. During the long reign of authority, such practical deliberation was considered a threat to trust and a violation of the divine command that powered religious adherence, and so morality was defined in an oppositional sense to hypotheticality. Religion defined it in categorical terms founded upon divine will. “Thou shalt” is divine command’s preferred grammatical structure. The distinction between hypotheticality and categoricality was regarded as so fundamental as to build a wall between what persons find useful and what they find morally good, and so “utility” was cleaved from “morality.”  Believers seek to isolate their moral judgments from those governing utility or quality, drawing a clear distinction between hypothetical, prudential reasoning, and moral commandments.

Now there are powerful counterarguments to this position, most notably those raised by Plato and Kant who object to a divine command morality (see “Authority, Trust, and Knowledge”) . Even if congregants find those arguments convincing, I think divine command adherents would still find obedience to God’s will more than hypothetical or contextual. They find a solid connection between the categoricality of God’s word as true and God’s will as good, so their commitment to religion’s distinctive understanding of “morality” is unlikely to be shaken. But pragmatists, who share a similar emulsion of the true and the good but one ordered on their own sense of hypotheticality, wish to challenge religious categoricality. They charge congregants with self-delusion, accusing them of acting out of self-interest in their desire to avoid God’s wrath and hellfire and be granted a heavenly reward. If I want to be saved, I should accept Jesus. What could be more self-interested, more hypothetical, more pragmatic? For all their mutual admiration of belief, pragmatists want to expose religionists’ own hypothetical position by saying that the faithful are equally self-interested and guided by undistilled experience, that their vaunted certainty in God’s commands is merely cover for the same pragmatic calculations built upon the same circumstantial uncertainties that power pragmatism’s own position. Implicit in their accusation is the charge that “morality” itself is a hypocritical and futile effort to veneer utility, obscure uncertainty, and deny the force of self- interest.