Advancement of American Philosophy. He edited The Oxford Handbook of Dewey (2019), and his books John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (2003) and Dewey (2015) won Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” awards. A 2009 Fulbright Scholar in Japan, Fesmire has previously taught at Middlebury College, Green Mountain College, Siena College, and East Tennessee State University. His public philosophy work has appeared in places such as Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The Humanist.
Fesmire applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Beyond Moral Fundamentalism: Toward a Pragmatic Pluralism, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Beyond Moral Fundamentalism at the Oxford University Press website.Especially under current social, economic, and political conditions, non-market-driven values warrant a compensatory emphasis. ...Unfortunately, those socialized to the industrial model [of education] tend to be oblivious to its shrunken framework and its distorting effects.Page 99 falls in the middle of the third chapter, “Educating for Democracy,” in a section headed by the book’s longest subtitle: “What Do We Lose When We Reduce Education to an Industrial Sector? Cultures of Inquiry, Imagination, Growth, and Fulfillment.” The chapter argues that, by channeling energies toward narrow workforce training, the increasingly dominant industrial model of education conceives service to the private sector as the overriding goal. The chapter explains, updates, and illustrates John Dewey’s alternative, which was to engage occupational callings in a way that contributes to a more humane culture.
Although page 99 doesn’t directly engage the title themes of the book--moral fundamentalism and pragmatic pluralism--it does offer a glimpse of what philosopher Hilary Putnam would have called the book’s “moral image of the world.” The industrial model of formal schooling takes the educative capacity of experience and uses it to reinscribe conventional practices. Yet this capacity is our best hope for growing beyond the reactivity of my-way-or-the-highway moral fundamentalism. In the face of circumstances that overwhelm them, people tend to be reactive—like pinballs ricocheting around a machine. Even at its best, educating worker bees does little to help curb this reactive tendency. But when schooling speaks to living by cultivating moral, intellectual, and aesthetic growth, students can learn to guide changes through inquiry and communication instead of being tossed around or swept away. Educators can simultaneously contribute to wider public comprehension of what is at stake, and to habits that support the public in acting intelligently on that comprehension. So yes, the Page 99 Test works fine to convey the spirit of this book.
More than a synonym for moral absolutism, a moral fundamentalist may be defined, minimally, as someone who acts as if they have access to: (1) the exclusively right way to diagnose moral or political problems and (2) the single approvable practical solution to any particular problem. For a moral fundamentalist, the main moral, social, or political problem is presumed to be that others don’t get the problem, as though events carry their own transparent meanings. We too readily assume that, unlike their concerns, ours are free of interest-driven rationalizations and biases. Moral fundamentalism is a vice because it obstructs communication, constricts deliberation about what’s possible, and underwrites bad decisions. Social inquiry is more honest, collaborative, rigorous, and productive when youths learn to be patient with the suspense of reflection, open to discomfort and dissent, resolute yet distrustful of tunnel-vision, aware of the fallibility and incompleteness of any decision or policy, practiced in listening, and imaginative in pursuing creative leads.
--Marshal Zeringue
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