Erfaringens etik: Dewey som moderne arvtager til Aristoteles

This thesis explores how moral reflection and ethical formation can be rearticulated through John Dewey’s pragmatism, in contrast to dominant neo-Aristotelian approaches found in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. Grounded in a modern reinterpretation of Aristotelian ethics, the project investigates how morality may be understood not as the recovery of lost traditions or adherence to abstract norms, but as a practice-based, dynamic, and socially embedded process rooted in experience, inquiry, and democratic life.
Throughout the thesis, key Aristotelian concepts such as telos, phronēsis, and habituation are critically explored and reinterpreted. Rather than treating these ideas as fixed doctrines, the project examines how they are taken up, transformed, or challenged by MacIntyre, Taylor, and Dewey in response to the conditions of modernity.
MacIntyre’s emphasis on virtue, tradition, and narrative unity is interpreted as a powerful critique of liberal individualism, yet also as a historically static model that limits the possibility for ethical transformation in pluralistic societies. Taylor, by contrast, opens space for ethical agency through his notion of strong evaluations and moral frameworks. However, his reliance on historical “moral sources” can obscure the ongoing, reflective nature of moral development.
Dewey’s pragmatism is presented as a flexible and forward-looking alternative. His ethics builds on Aristotelian concerns with practical wisdom and character but reinterprets them through a democratic and experimental lens. Dewey’s central concepts - experience, inquiry, and social intelligence - are shown to integrate moral growth with social action. While rejecting both abstract universalism and relativism, Dewey grounds ethical validity in shared experience and intelligent adaptation. Norms are not subjective preferences but emerge from reflective engagement with real consequences and common problems. Ethics becomes not a matter of applying fixed principles, but a process of participatory meaning-making, where the universal is approached through the particular.
The thesis then explores how Dewey rethinks telos. Unlike Hegel and Marx, who interpret historical development through ideal or material necessity, Dewey rejects deterministic frameworks. While drawing methodological inspiration from Hegel’s dialectic as a model for conceptual transformation, the thesis emphasizes Dewey’s critical stance toward historical inevitability. For Dewey, history is shaped by human intelligence and institutional flexibility, not by abstract necessity.
This leads to an extended discussion of Dewey’s understanding of democracy and education. Here, democracy is not merely a political structure but a way of life, continually remade through shared inquiry and mutual learning. Education becomes a central ethical arena - both as a medium for cultivating judgment and as a model for democratic participation. The thesis highlights Dewey’s vision of schools and public institutions as sites for collective ethical formation, contrasting this with authoritarian models of control and with Habermas’s procedural rationality.
In the final chapters, Dewey’s ethics is examined in dialogue with moral language theories, particularly those of R.M. Hare and Charles L. Stevenson. While Stevenson, influenced by Dewey, emphasizes the emotive and persuasive function of moral language, the thesis argues that his emotivism overlooks Dewey’s commitment to moral continuity and the transformative power of shared experience. Moral expressions, from a Deweyan perspective, are not rhetorical tools, but participatory acts embedded in concrete contexts. In this light, the thesis affirms Habermas’s principle that all affected must be involved in norm justification - but argues against procedural abstraction - that such involvement must be grounded in lived practice.
In conclusion, the thesis shows that Dewey offers a compelling modern continuation of Aristotelian ethics - one that avoids both the idealism and historicism of neo-Aristotelian models and the rationalism of discourse ethics. His ethics emerges as a method of intelligent, democratic inquiry into the good life: experimental, experience-based, and open to continual transformation - yet always aiming at shared meaning, moral learning, and concrete universality.