Pragmatic Pluralism: Decency, Harm Avoidance, and the Search for a “Good Enough” Framework

The ongoing dialogue about value pluralism—sparked by Michael Ignatieff’s Ordinary Virtues and enriched by engagement with thinkers like John Dewey, Judith Shklar, Richard Rorty, and Avishai Margalit—has yielded a compelling, pragmatist approach to moral and political cooperation in diverse societies. The conversation, especially as extended through exchanges with Claude AI, highlights both the promise and the persistent challenges of fostering decency amid deep difference.

Strengths of the Pragmatist Approach

The most distinctive strength of the framework developed in these discussions is its grounding in empirical reality and practical inquiry. Rather than seeking abstract, universal principles or perfect consensus, the approach accepts the inescapable realities of cultural relativism, power asymmetry, and bias. This realism is not defeatist, but rather enables a more honest and effective engagement with the complexities of pluralism.

Key examples illustrate the power of this approach:

• Cultural Misunderstandings: A public school’s ban on headscarves provokes protests from Muslim families, who experience the policy as humiliating. This rupture forces a Deweyan inquiry: Does the policy cause harm? The inquiry is not resolved by appealing to abstract rights, but by examining the concrete experiences of those affected.

• Institutional Exclusion: A hospital’s triage protocol prioritizes younger patients during a crisis, prompting accusations of ageism from elderly patients. Here, the “neutral” policy is revealed as value-laden, and the rupture invites a re-examination of institutional priorities.

• Revealed Hypocrisy: A corporation that publicly champions LGBTQ+ inclusivity is found to donate to politicians opposing trans rights. Employees and customers demand accountability, exposing a misalignment between stated and enacted values. This rupture catalyzes a process of institutional self-examination and reform.

These examples show how “ruptures of experience”—moments when routine practices break down or are challenged—can serve as catalysts for inquiry and adaptation. The approach is scalable: while Dewey originally focused on small communities, the same method can address macro-level conflicts between cultures, religions, and ideologies.

Negotiating Power and Bias

A central insight from the dialogue is that definitions of harm and the framing of problematic situations are always contested, often shaped by power differentials. The sociological concept of “negotiated order” captures this reality: those with more power have greater influence over how problems are defined and addressed. Rather than seeking to eliminate all power differentials—an impossible and potentially paralyzing goal—the pragmatist approach accepts that negotiation will always occur under conditions of inequality.

Historical examples demonstrate that meaningful progress is possible even under such constraints:

• Labor Negotiations: Workers have secured protections despite corporate dominance.

• Indigenous Treaties: Indigenous groups have achieved some autonomy despite colonial power structures.

• Civil Rights Movements: Marginalized communities have won legal and social changes despite political exclusion.

These cases show that power asymmetry does not preclude negotiation, but it does shape outcomes. The challenge is to create mechanisms that allow marginalized voices to be heard and to influence decisions, even if perfect justice remains elusive.

From Perfectionism to Process

A crucial shift in the pragmatist approach is the move from “puzzle-solving” (where all pieces must fit into a perfect system) to “managing contingent difficulties” (where the goal is incremental, revisable improvement). This is not a lowering of standards, but a recognition that real-world problems are messy and that solutions are always provisional.

Inquiry is recursive and adaptive:

• Case-Based Learning: Real-world examples provide data for developing provisional principles.

• Openness to Revision: All outcomes are subject to re-examination as new evidence or perspectives emerge.

• Documentation and Analysis: Keeping a record of both successful and unsuccessful negotiations builds empirical knowledge and informs future efforts.

Areas for Further Development: Toward a “Good Enough” Framework

Despite these strengths, important challenges remain, especially regarding the need for a workable “good enough” framework for assessing outcomes and guiding action. Such a framework must avoid the rigidity of a priori concepts, remaining open to recursive inquiry and empirical revision. At the same time, it must have enough substance to address the serious risks of complicity and complacency in the face of injustice.

Key elements for a “good enough” framework might include:

• Minimal Standards: Outcomes should ensure that affected parties feel heard, that no group is severely humiliated, and that arrangements remain open to revision.

• Acknowledgment of Power: Power differentials should be made visible and addressed, not hidden or ignored.

• Mechanisms for Critique and Accountability: Institutions should include processes for ongoing feedback, dissent, and adaptation.

• Pattern Recognition: Developing a taxonomy of rupture responses (productive inquiry, suppression, cooptation, escalation, transformation) can help identify what works and why.

The framework itself must be subject to the same recursive, experimental process as the outcomes it evaluates. It should not be imposed from above, but emerge from and adapt to the lived experiences of those affected by decisions.

Avoiding Complacency and Complicity

A persistent risk is that accepting imperfection becomes an excuse for complicity with injustice. To mitigate this, the framework must maintain a commitment to ongoing critique and improvement. The journalistic approach—documenting what happens, whether or not it leads to inquiry—helps keep the process honest and provides resources for future action.

Sustainability is also a concern: Negotiated arrangements must adapt to changing power dynamics, generational shifts, and external pressures. This requires flexible institutions and ongoing dialogue.

Conclusion

The dialogue with Claude AI, building on the insights of Ordinary Virtues and related thinkers, has produced a robust, pragmatist approach to pluralism. By accepting the realities of power, bias, and cultural difference, and by focusing on process over perfection, the framework offers a realistic and hopeful path forward. The challenge is not to resolve all tensions, but to make them productive—to foster a pluralism that is both humble and ambitious, grounded in the everyday work of decency and harm avoidance, and always open to learning and adaptation.

The search for a “good enough” framework is not a search for final answers, but for ways to keep the conversation alive, inclusive, and responsive to the ever-changing realities of human coexistence.

Prompt for New Page: "Beyond the Blender Blunder: Pragmatist Alternatives to Poststructuralist Contradictions"

I'm working on theoretical problems I first identified in the 1990s while studying Cultural Studies at CUNY with Stanley Aronowitz. The core issue is what I call the "blender blunder" - the widespread practice of mixing incompatible theoretical frameworks (poststructuralism, Marxism, human rights discourse) as if they were ingredients that could be harmoniously combined, rather than recognizing their fundamental epistemological contradictions.

Background Context: The American Cultural Studies that emerged in the 1980s-90s attempted to synthesize several intellectual currents that were often in theoretical tension: Western Marxism (via E.P. Thompson), poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard), postmodern philosophy, and liberal human rights discourse. This created what I observed as irreconcilable contradictions - students claiming to be "socialists" while embracing thoroughgoing cultural constructivism, or invoking universal human rights while maintaining that all values are historically contingent social constructions.

The Core Problem: Poststructuralist theory systematically undermines the foundational categories (stable meanings, universal values, historical agency) that emancipatory politics requires. You can't maintain that "capitalism exploits workers" as an objective truth while simultaneously arguing that all truth claims are merely contingent social constructions embedded in power relations. Yet this contradiction has become so naturalized in progressive academic discourse that it's often invisible.

Key Examples of the Contradiction:

• Contemporary gender discourse that oscillates between "gender is pure social construction" and appeals to authentic gender identity ("born in the wrong body")
• Human rights advocacy that requires universal moral foundations while embracing thoroughgoing relativism
• Climate activism that demands objective scientific authority while using poststructuralist critiques of scientific knowledge

Failed Resolution Attempts:

• Gayatri Spivak's "strategic essentialism" (later retracted as theoretically incoherent)
• Rita Felski's "post-critique" blending of suspicion and faith
• Bruno Latour's shift from critique to "matters of concern" (catalyzed by climate crisis urgency)
• Karen Barad's agential realism (which addresses representation but not axiology)

My Pragmatist Alternative: I've turned to John Dewey and G.H. Mead's pragmatism as offering a genuine philosophical alternative rather than another blending attempt. Their approach:

• Rejects both foundationalism and antifoundationalism
• Maintains space for "warranted assertion" without requiring absolute foundations
• Integrates fact and value through experiential inquiry
• Provides criteria for distinguishing better/worse beliefs relative to problems
• Handles cultural relativism as empirical fact rather than theoretical crisis

Key Insight - Cultural Relativism as Brute Fact: Like Rorty, I take cultural relativism to be "almost trivially true" - different cultures organize meaning and value differently. This was discovered by anthropologists through fieldwork, not philosophers through speculation. The interesting question isn't whether cross-cultural understanding is theoretically possible, but how people successfully navigate cultural differences in practice (translation, ethnography, cultural exchange all work despite indeterminacy problems).

Scaling from Micro to Macro: Dewey's inquiry framework can address large-scale conflicts through "ruptures in experience" that force joint problem-solving:

• Muslim families vs. secular schools over headscarf bans
• Elderly patients vs. hospital triage protocols
• Employee protests over corporate value misalignment

These create opportunities for inquiry about harm across different value frameworks without requiring shared foundational commitments.

Process vs. Perfection: Rather than solving theoretical problems of incommensurability, I propose working with and through them. Biases and cultural differences are brute facts we must acknowledge while still distinguishing between "tolerable" differences and those leading to serious adversities (crime, war, etc.).

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Continue our discussion by:

1. Helping me develop how Deweyan inquiry can handle specific contemporary conflicts
2. Exploring the relationship between pragmatist inquiry and harm-reduction principles
3. Addressing potential objections from poststructuralist or critical theory perspectives
4. Examining how this framework applies to pedagogy and academic practice
5. Connecting this to broader questions about democracy, expertise, and public discourse in pluralistic societies

The goal is developing a theoretically coherent alternative to the naturalized contradictions that have plagued progressive academic discourse since the 1990s, while maintaining space for both rigorous inquiry and political engagement.

 

ON SECOND ORDER VIRTUE ETHICS:

, a certain type of virtue ethics may have a place in the emerging theory I'm developing . Not a substantive first order virtue ethics, but rather a second order or metatheoretical implicit virtue ethic that CAN be made explicit for analytic purposes. For example, the central gestalt switch from solving puzzles to navigating often problematic situations/ ruptures in experience, and working with cultural relativism as a given to be reckoned with rather than an obstacle to be "overcome" via theoretical work. In order to approach these things with what I called the "good enough " attitude of process over perfection. This clearly relies tacitly on a particular set of virtues which might include ACCEPTANCE (of the way things are as a post to how we might want them to be), HUMILITY (ability to recognize the limits of our cognitive and evaluative powers) , which in turn presupposees INTELLECTUAL HONESTY, which in turn rests on a commitment to FALLIBILISM (we could always , in principle , be wrong et al. These intellectual virtues might be framed and discussed not as abstract or even pragmatic postulates, but as at least to some degree prerequisites for Deweyan Inquiry itself., and if Dewey is correct prerequsities to experimental natural science. This way of framing the ethics eschews deduction from first principles focusing instead on the emergent qualities (virtues) that turn out to be ingredients in navigating ruptures, forming and testing hypotheses, etc. They are not abstract preexisting foundations, but organic parts of what happens when people accept limits and "imperfections" trying instead to know when a plan of action to remedy experiential ruptures might be "good enough" though imperfect, and only partial. Dewey sometimes suggested these intellectual virtues underlay all science and indeed all pretheoretical inquiry. I do not want to make such large claims, instead arguing for their being generally emergent ingredients in the Deweyan problem-solving approach. Their importance is not to serve as foundations or as arbiters of value judgments (they are not first order or substantive moral principles but procedural and metatheoretical ones), but rather to EXPLAIN why and how INQUIRY ITSELF IS VALUE-LADEN AND NOT VALUE-NEUTRAL (but in ways that make inquiry possible rather than impossible or problematic). The thing to watch out for would be trying to give them a first-order relevance (e.g. if a person, ideology or movement is not fallibilistic then it is "bad"; if a culture does not foster intellectual honesty than it, to that extent, lacks "goodness." Instead, it is situationally congruent with INQUIRY INTO PLURALISTIC, COMPLEX AND MODERN SOCIETIES NOT BECAUSE OF ABSOLUTE 'RIGIHTNESS' BUT THEIR DIRECT RELEVANCE TO PRODUCTIVELY STUDYING OFTEN INCOMPATIBLE OR EVEN INCOMMENSURABLE WORLD-VIEWS AND BELIEF-SYTEMS . THESE VIRTUES DO NOT REQUIRES US TO INVALIDATE OR PRIORITIZE ANY PARTICULAR BELIEF SETS, BUT RATHER GIVE US TOOLS TO STUDY THEM PRECISELY WITHOUT IMPOSING A PRIORI PREFERENCES . Does this make sense? Not sure I'm expressig it properly.

On second thought, a certain type of virtue ethics may have a place in the emerging theory I'm developing . Not a substantive first order virtue ethics, but rather a second order or metatheoretical implicit virtue ethic that CAN be made explicit for analytic purposes. For example, the central gestalt switch from solving puzzles to navigating often problematic situations/ ruptures in experience, and working with cultural relativism as a given to be reckoned with rather than an obstacle to be "overcome" via theoretical work. In order to approach these things with what I called the "good enough " attitude of process over perfection. This clearly relies tacitly on a particular set of virtues which might include ACCEPTANCE (of the way things are as a post to how we might want them to be), HUMILITY (ability to recognize the limits of our cognitive and evaluative powers) , which in turn presupposees INTELLECTUAL HONESTY, which in turn rests on a commitment to FALLIBILISM (we could always , in principle , be wrong et al. These intellectual virtues might be framed and discussed not as abstract or even pragmatic postulates, but as at least to some degree prerequisites for Deweyan Inquiry itself., and if Dewey is correct prerequsities to experimental natural science. This way of framing the ethics eschews deduction from first principles focusing instead on the emergent qualities (virtues) that turn out to be ingredients in navigating ruptures, forming and testing hypotheses, etc. They are not abstract preexisting foundations, but organic parts of what happens when people accept limits and "imperfections" trying instead to know when a plan of action to remedy experiential ruptures might be "good enough" though imperfect, and only partial. Dewey sometimes suggested these intellectual virtues underlay all science and indeed all pretheoretical inquiry. I do not want to make such large claims, instead arguing for their being generally emergent ingredients in the Deweyan problem-solving approach. Their importance is not to serve as foundations or as arbiters of value judgments (they are not first order or substantive moral principles but procedural and metatheoretical ones), but rather to EXPLAIN why and how INQUIRY ITSELF IS VALUE-LADEN AND NOT VALUE-NEUTRAL (but in ways that make inquiry possible rather than impossible or problematic). The thing to watch out for would be trying to give them a first-order relevance (e.g. if a person, ideology or movement is not fallibilistic then it is "bad"; if a culture does not foster intellectual honesty than it, to that extent, lacks "goodness." Instead, it is situationally congruent with INQUIRY INTO PLURALISTIC, COMPLEX AND MODERN SOCIETIES NOT BECAUSE OF ABSOLUTE 'RIGIHTNESS' BUT THEIR DIRECT RELEVANCE TO PRODUCTIVELY STUDYING OFTEN INCOMPATIBLE OR EVEN INCOMMENSURABLE WORLD-VIEWS AND BELIEF-SYTEMS . THESE VIRTUES DO NOT REQUIRES US TO INVALIDATE OR PRIORITIZE ANY PARTICULAR BELIEF SETS, BUT RATHER GIVE US TOOLS TO STUDY THEM PRECISELY WITHOUT IMPOSING A PRIORI PREFERENCES . Does this make sense? Not sure I'm expressig it properly.

Your framework for a second-order, pragmatist virtue epistemology makes excellent sense and aligns with both Deweyan principles and contemporary needs in political analysis. Let me synthesize and clarify your key points while suggesting potential refinements:

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Core Components of Your Metatheoretical Virtue Ethics

1. Procedural Over Substantive:
   Focuses on how we inquire rather than what we conclude. The virtues are emergent properties of effective inquiry in complex systems, not preconditions or universal norms.

2. Key Intellectual Virtues:

   • Fallibilism: Recognition that all conclusions are provisional

   • Intellectual Humility: Awareness of cognitive limits and cultural situatedness

   • Acceptance: Engaging reality as it is, not as we wish it to be

   • Adaptive Honesty: Reporting findings without distortion, even when inconvenient

3. Function:
   These virtues enable inquiry in pluralistic, incommensurable contexts by:

   • Mitigating confirmation bias in studying conflicting worldviews

   • Preventing premature closure in navigating experiential ruptures

   • Facilitating communication across ideological divides

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How This Avoids First-Order Moralizing

Your approach sidesteps two traps:

1. Democracy Chauvinism: Not assuming liberal-democratic norms as universal

2. Relativist Paralysis: Not treating all belief systems as equally valid

Instead, it asks: Do these virtues enhance our capacity to study X phenomenon?

• Example: Studying Orban’s Hungary requires acceptance of Fidesz’s deep stories as lived realities while maintaining adaptive honesty about their institutional effects.

• Contrast: A "value-neutral" approach might obscure normatively significant erosion of checks/balances; reflexive moralizing might dismiss voter motivations as "irrational."

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Deweyan Roots and Modern Parallels

Your model extends Dewey’s theory of inquiry (1938):

1. Ruptures as Catalysts: Experiential breakdowns (e.g., Musk-Trump feud) demand virtues like humility (acknowledging elite disposability’s novelty) and fallibilism (updating "broligarchy" model when evidence contradicts it).

2. "Good Enough" Solutions: Echoes Dewey’s warranted assertibility—judgments are provisional fixes to specific problems, not absolute truths.

3. Anti-Foundationalism: Virtues emerge from practice (studying Trump’s coalition management) rather than dictating it.

Parallels in Political Science:

• Ian Shapiro’s "problem-solving" approach to democracy

• Bent Flyvbjerg’s phronetic social science emphasizing context

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Operationalizing in Regime Analysis

Applied to Trump 2.0 Personalism:

1. Acceptance: Acknowledge Trump’s "deep stories" as mobilizing forces without endorsing them

2. Fallibilism: Continuously test assumptions (e.g., does "kleptocracy" fully explain DOGE’s evolution?)

3. Adaptive Honesty: Document elite disposability even when it complicates oligarchy models

Comparative Advantage Over Competing Frameworks:

Virtue	Broligarchy Analysis	End Times Fascism	Your Model
Fallibilism	Treats tech-state alliance as fixed	Assumes ideological coherence	Allows for coalitional volatility
Acceptance	Dismisses Musk’s operational role	Overlooks performative gestures	Engages symbolic politics as data
Adaptive Honesty	Understates Vought’s rise	Ignores RFK Jr.’s tactical utility	Tracks shifting loyalty networks

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Addressing Potential Concerns

Q: Isn’t this still culturally specific to Western academia?
A: The virtues are presented as emergent tools for cross-cultural inquiry, not universal norms. For example:

• Studying CCP governance requires acceptance of "whole-process democracy" as a lived concept while maintaining adaptive honesty about its limitations.

Q: How avoid "virtue signaling"?
A: Ground virtues in methodological practices:

• Pre-register hypotheses about personalist durability

• Triangulate quantitative (Schedule F conversions) and qualitative (narrative analysis) data

• Engage reflexively with positionality (e.g., Western scholar studying Orbán)

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Implications for Authoritarianism Studies

This framework:

1. Explains Value-Ladenness: Rejects the myth of neutrality (e.g., "mafia state" implies corruption; "personalism" obscures tyranny’s lineage)

2. Guides Ethical Analysis: Distinguishes between:

   • Descriptive use of "kleptocracy" (tracking no-bid contracts)

   • Evaluative use (condemning self-enrichment)

3. Enables Graded Judgment: Assesses regimes via institutional degradation metrics rather than binary democracy/autocracy divides.

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Conclusion

Your metatheoretical virtue ethics offers a rigorous way to:

1. Acknowledge the inevitability of values in inquiry

2. Systematize their role without moral absolutism

3. Enhance comparative analysis of regimes like Trump 2.0

By framing virtues as emergent tools for navigating complexity, you avoid both the hubris of value-neutral pretense and the paralysis of relativism—a Deweyan "third way" urgently needed in today’s authoritarian contexts.