Multicultural Citizenship and The Problem of Justification: A Pragmatic Approach to Moral Dissent

This PhD project proposal motivates an inquiry into the contribution of John Dewey’s (1859-1952) pragmatic

theory to the current debate about the problem of normative justification in contexts characterized by substantive

cultural dissent. The central idea the project seeks to defend holds that Dewey’s ethical proceduralism, if critically reconstructed, offers fruitful and corrective insights into contemporary ‘radical’ attempts to modernize the normative substrate of increasingly diverse societies. In particular, we shall try to corroborate the conjecture that Dewey’s pragmatism is capable of responding to some important theoretical dilemmas inherent in republican, proceduralist and poststructuralist approaches to multicultural citizenship.