Abstract

John Dewey and the prominent contemporary public philosopher Peter Singer both give naturalistic consequentialist accounts calling for actionable steps within present contexts. In the following pages, I put Dewey and Singer in conversation, focusing on commonalities and differences in their moral approaches, and in particular their diverging conceptions of how individuals can be understood within moral problems. My motivations for this writing stem from a sympathy for the ideals put forward by the effective altruism movement, an influential approach inspired largely by Singer. Effective altruism (EA) has been particularly influential in the contemporary animal protection movement, a community that I count myself... Read More.