Pearce, T. (2017). American pragmatism, evolution, and ethics. The Cambridge Handbook Of Evolutionary Ethics. https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/9781316459409.004
This chapter provides an overview of pragmatist evolutionary ethics—specifically that of John Dewey and Jane Addams—and its intellectual context. To make things manageable, I will focus on pragmatist texts from 1890 to 1910, a period that includes Dewey’s clearest statements of the relation between ethics and evolution as well as Addams’ major works on social ethics. The beginning of the chapter will provide some necessary background, discussing earlier works to which Dewey and Addams were reacting: Spencer’s Data of Ethics and Thomas Henry Huxley’s account of the relationship between ethics and the struggle for existence. I will then analyze Dewey’s “evolutionary method” in ethics and Addams’s related account of social ethics.
