The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

My paper attempts to exhibit the consistency of John Dewey’s non-individualistic individualism. It details Dewey’s claim that the traditional dualism opposing the individual to the social is politically debilitating. We find Dewey in the 20’s and 30’s, for example, arguing that the creation of a genuine public arena, one capable of precluding the rise of an artificial chasm between sociality and individuality—or, rather, one capable of precluding the rise of an artificial chasm between notions of sociality and individuality—had itself been forestalled by an inherited, outdated, but nonetheless dominant custom called individualism. By blocking public investigation itself, by enervating what Dewey called social inquiry, and thus by misguiding historically sensitive assessments of slippery social phenomena, our contingently strapped individualism drifts aimlessly and destructively through the present era. Insofar as it fails to realize how publicity and individuality can be a congruous, inextricable, and mutually conditioning pair, individualism leeches many of today’s individuals of their situated and situating historical potential.

I criticize Amartya K. Sen’s solution to his well-known paradox and advance a new one, also consisting of a conditional version of the Pareto principle, to which a weakness of the liberal condition is added. Unlike Sen’s solution, the principle presented here is not based on metapreferences but on first level individual preferences themselves. To that purpose, I define criteria based exclusively on the internal structure of the individual preferences to identify motivation and to compare preference intensities. I distinguish between conditional and unconditional preferences, and show that Sen’s paradox can appear even when individual preferences are completely unconditional. Then, I extend the distinction between conditional and unconditional preferences to complex states of the world that can include elements belonging to personal spheres of different individuals. The main idea is that the Pareto principle should prevail upon the liberal condition when it serves preferences of the individuals concerned that are more intense than their prefrences over the pairs of alternatives assigned to them by the liberal condition.