Methods and moral inquiry

Abstract

Despite a consistent and pervasive concern with analytic method, geography and the social sciences in general lack an adequately developed method of moral inquiry. When researchers working across a variety of political and ideological perspectives, for example, equally embraced the analytical turn in mid-twentieth century geography, the considerable disagreements among them rested not on methodological but on political and moral grounds. But while all the protagonists in this debate presented themselves as moral actors, their moral judgments were exogenous to their analytical methods, and none of those methods provide a usable way to evaluate their respective moral claims. The legacy of positivism and its debates is to make us believe that the challenge we face is to become better methodologists, leaving unresolved the problem of how to become better moral agents, a question raised by John Dewey nearly a century ago. Rephrasing the question in this way encourages us to stop thinking of the moral question as a search for means to achieving desired outcomes, instead elevating moral inquiry as an end in itself. Such a shift changes the problem from knowing and representing the world so as to point toward moral outcomes and instead expands our ability to produce moral knowledge. If our challenge is not about making moral judgments but rather about pursuing moral inquiry, what is needed is a method of moral inquiry, one that Dewey located in science understood not as an analytic method but as democratic practice.

Keywords:

• positivism
• methodology
• pragmatism
• moral geography

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Wilson for organizing the panel at the 2012 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers where this article was first presented. Bob Beauregard, Kathe Newman, Juan Rivero, David Wilson, Elvin Wyly and Andrew Zitcer provided extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts but are not in any way responsible for shortcomings remaining in the article. Thanks to Marvin Taylor for pointing me to Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy.