This chapter explores how biblical law is treated in the gospels, in Paul, and in other New Testament texts. It shows how recent scholarship has demonstrated that Jesus and Paul treat the law in more positive fashion than they are usually given credit for.

In this chapter, I defend the thesis that there may be pragmatic reasons to be agnostic. Given that agnosticism is one of the possible outcomes of doxastic deliberation – that is deliberation about whether to believe P – it follows that pragmatic considerations may determine the outcome of doxastic deliberation. However, while I hold that pragmatic considerations may be reasons to refrain from belief, I deny that they may be reason to believe.

This chapter explores the intersection of normative theory, pragmatism, and education. Philosophers have long argued that ethics and moral development are the central aims of good education. But this vision has been eclipsed by economic instrumentalism and workforce demands. Ethics education provides a potent reason-based alternative, one that promises to promote pluralism through the application of universal principles, foster democratic processes, and advance the common good. But if we hope to realize the moral purposes of education, we must begin by offering courses in normative ethics for educators in education programs and schools. And in doing so, we will promote the moral growth of individual educators, their students, and the institutions and communities in which they live, work, and study.

This chapter provides an introduction to American pragmatism as an ethical tradition with educational ramifications. The chapter first explains the origins of pragmatism and accounts for the primary features of pragmatist ethics. It then profiles the ethical views and educational bearings of two classical pragmatists: William James and John Dewey, and the most prominent neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. The chapter shows how pragmatism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary iterations, approaches education as integral to the ethical and political cultivation of a vibrant, pluralistic, democratic culture. Its philosophical orientation – away from the fixed and timeless and toward the contingent and contextualized – conceives of humans as active but fallible agents pursuing knowledge to address the concrete problems of their communities. Despite their differences, James, Dewey, and Rorty recognized the need to foster individual habits and collective sensibilities that center our moral imaginations, sympathetic attachments to others, and our situatedness in concrete social and natural environments.

This chapter provides a rationale for, and outlines of, a democratic ethical framework for defining the moral responsibilities of school leaders working within political conditions of growing inequality, authoritarian state governments, and populist parental-rights movements. Facing these conditions, many leaders are tempted toward a position of liberal neutrality, a (false) removal of politics designed to minimize anger or retribution by parents and legislatures. A democratic, communal ethic orients the responsibilities of the school leader around democratic values, and the educational interests of the students. Moral responsibility requires leaders to embrace liberalism’s pluralism but also its strong egalitarianism, by educating students in both the hopeful and the tragic forms of knowledge and shared social existence that constitute the national democratic project.

This chapter introduces pragmatism as a process philosophy that is grounded in human activity. Pragmatism reconceptualizes the subject–object dichotomy and provide a transdisciplinary framework for creating useful knowledge. Eight pragmatist propositions for methodology are outlined: (1) Truth is in its consequences; (2) theories are tools for action; (3) research is as much about creating questions as answering questions; (4) data as a process; (5) qualitative and quantitative methods are synergistic; (6) recursively restructure big qualitative data to enable both qualitative and quantitative analyses; (7) social research creates both power and responsibility; and (8) social research should aim to expand human possibilities.

This chapter centers on early American Pragmatist philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, and the abundance of essays they produced, outlining the fundamental tenets of pragmatism. From the beginning, the Pragmatists showed a special affinity for the essay. This genre of writing proved to be the perfect vehicle not simply to fashion and explore provisional truths but to drive home the case that truth is inherently provisional. James and other pragmatists saw thinking as a mode of action in the world, quite different from the standard dualism that separates “mind” from “matter.” Just as the noun essay calls to mind the verb form – to essay, attempt, or try – so pragmatism was for James less a philosophical position or ideology than a method or practice. For James and Dewey in particular, pragmatism helped explain how we use ideas and beliefs to achieve our aims and how we modify and adapt those ideas and beliefs as we test them in the contexts of our daily living and engagement with others. The chapter dwells on the most important pragmatist essays and shows the many ways these influenced later pragmatist-oriented philosophers, even up to today.

The relationship between the law and the essay, this chapter shows, is visible in the etymology of the latter. Derived from assayer, to try, and essai, or trial, the etymology connotes action, endeavor, and experiment aimed at proof leading to judgment. However, the essay as literary genre is often marked not by the finality of judgment but by levity, incompletion, indigestion, distraction, and exploratory attempts. The apparently antithetical senses of the essay – as comedic and judicial, frivolous and veridical, theatrical and juristic, popular and esoteric – are key to understanding its later development and certain specifically distinctive features of the “American” genre of legal exploratory discourse. This chapter shows the influence of pragmatism and egalitarian realism on American legal writing, offers examples of the legal polemics that unfolded in the pages of important American law journals, and argues that the importance of the essay form is to clear a space, to act out in ideas what practice has not yet tested, and so to become the theater that stages in advance the future of law.

The Romans had to cope with uncertainty and, in part, did so through a shared set of knowledge and practices, which this chapter calls a risk culture. These ways of coping contained a lower level of individuality, consciousness or reflexivity than Beck’s modern Risk Society. There was also no simple divide between lay and expert knowledge. The Roman world exposed its inhabitants to a variety of risks but the accumulated experience of coping with these represented a mutual way of mitigating the dangers.

This chapter shifts the focus from principle to pragmatic concerns. It starts by considering a number of pragmatic maxims that apply to the enforcement of morality. These maxims limit the relevance of the more abstract principles discussed in this book and will suggest to some that a better approach would start first with the maxims and consider principles only when necessary. This chapter indirectly defends the principles-first approach adopted in this book by outlining what would be lost if this rival maxims-first approach were pursued. The chapter then turns to the problem of overcriminalization, to which the ethical environmentalism defended in this book may seem to be especially vulnerable. This problem points to the importance of identifying alternative enforcement methods to the criminal law, and the importance of comparative assessments of legal and social enforcement mechanisms. The chapter concludes by discussing the social fact of intractable disagreement over the content of morality in modern societies, and the limits, as well as the benefits, this fact presents to the project of ethical environmentalism.

By integrating the fragmented research on emergency services, armed forces, and humanitarian organizations, this book identifies the components of a new theory on frontline crisis response. To begin with, the work of responders is characterized by persistent operational dilemmas. Since there are no universal solutions, they need to adapt their approaches and decisions to the situational contingencies of a crisis. These adaptations continue throughout the crisis response process as the situation evolves. Responders usually pragmatically act their way through operational dilemmas in the crisis response process. These experiences nevertheless have an existential effect on their identities and lives. Thus, the new theory comprises operational dilemmas, situational contingencies, response processes, pragmatic principles, and existentialist ideas. This theory offers a basis for crisis response improvements and contributes to the literature on strategic crisis management, frontline work in organizations, reliable organizing in risky contexts, and post-crisis operations. The chapter ends with a research agenda and a call for more academic engagement with frontline crisis response.

When Weber insists that scholars must choose between Stories, he is promoting what he calls an ethics of responsibility. Nowadays, liberal scholars are hard pressed to make such choices, because they do not share Stories of their own. They are humanists but, unlike the Founders, they are not united by commitment to, for example, a framework of natural law principles. In these circumstances, Judith Shklar proposed that instead of favoring a particular Story, liberals should make common cause by opposing instances of cruelty and tyranny. In this sense, they should be “philosophes” rather than philosophers.

This chapter explores the relationship between political moderation and realism and shows that moderation properly understood and practiced is compatible with pragmatic partisanship. It shows that at the core of moderation lies a certain propensity to self-subversion (the term borrowed from A. O. Hirschman).

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on the Realist critique of classical Pragmatism. This insists that political interests corrupt processes of social learning and argues that power determines how best practice (and the public good) is defined. This criticism was levelled directly at Dewey by his contemporaries, especially Morgenthau and Niebuhr, and it continues to inform neorealism. Inspired by Dewey’s response, the chapter argues Pragmatism is not blind to power or self-interest, it simply emphasizes, like contemporary IR constructivists, that understandings of the self (its identity and its interests) are not fixed; they are instead contingent on the self’s experience of interacting with its material and social environment. The normative implication for Pragmatists is that theorists should render that process intelligent by subjecting it to ‘conscientious reflection’. That process is a political one to the extent access to a community of inquiry is contingent on power. Part of the Pragmatist ‘vocation’ is a commitment to balancing political power by supporting Deweyan ‘publics’: those who are indirectly affected by practice but excluded from the relevant communities of practice. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the implication for key concepts in Realist and Pragmatist thought, including tragedy, prudence and learning.

This chapter draws conclusions based on the impacts of exclusionary and hierarchical practices, the relative value of ‘top-down’ reform and ‘bottom-up’ activism, and the place of global learning in a gradualist approach to progressive change. Beyond that, the chapter considers how an approach inspired by American Pragmatism informs Global International Relations, which seeks to construct a discipline that is more inclusive of non-Western perspectives. The chapter draws parallels between the book’s reading of classical Pragmatism and non-Western ‘cosmologies’ like Confucianism. This has been introduced to contemporary Western IR mainly through the works of Yaqing Qin. The chapter does, however, build on other works identifying resonances across Deweyan Pragmatism and Confucian philosophy. The chapter argues that if the Pragmatist turn in Western IR continues, then it can be more easily harmonized with non-Western approaches. This at least signposts a path ‘towards’ Global IR, even if it does not fix the path’s end point. Indeed, the chapter argues that we should follow such signs because they do not fix the destination. Those points are for practitioners and global publics to construct and reconstruct as they work collectively to mitigate lived problems through communities of practice that are inclusive, reflexive, creative and deliberative.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on what classical Pragmatism can tell us about the ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. It assesses the value – both descriptive and normative – of defining practice as pre-reflexive or habitual. Dewey was clear: habits can be useful, but only if those subject to their hold can improvise when practice produces unwanted consequences. Applying this to International Relations, the chapter shows how a failure to adequately reflect on the situational value of an ideological commitment to ‘democracy promotion’ – what Bourdieusian-informed Practice theory might call a Western ‘habitus’ – contributed to the maladapted response to the humanitarian crises in Syria and Myanmar. This again points to the centrality of reflection, deliberation, judgement and learning to the Pragmatist approach. The chapter develops that argument by examining how Dewey’s ‘pedagogic creed’ aimed to put individuals and societies in control of their habits and how his critique of the unhelpful hierarchies in formal education was extrapolated to form a theory of social learning, which included an emphasis on the role democracy plays in facilitating the reflexivity and deliberation.