ABSTRACT
Democracy may, as Winston Churchill said, be "better than all the other systems which have actually been tried," but it by no means provides full opportunity for the use of "social intelligence" in John Dewey's sense. Although Dewey's arguments are largely ignored in contemporary moral and political philosophy, his enterprise—the enterprise of justifying democracy—is alive and well. What the defenders of the Noble Savage and the defenders of the Golden Age have in common is that their doctrines tend to immunize institutionalized oppression from criticism. At the other extreme, at least politically, from the "Noble Savage" argument against attempting to justify democratic institutions is an argument found in the recent writings of Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre might reply that reliance on experimentation is only rational "relative to" the contemporary scientific paradigm. But if that were his reply, then this is just where MacIntyre and pragmatism decisively part company.
