ABSTRACT
Edel and the pragmatists are not the first either to have felt the reality of social change or to have pinned their hopes of managing it for the best to the advance of science. Marxists, also, have expected the necessity of progress to be exhibited through science; in the name of scientific socialism they have diagnosed the class interest in moral principles and derogated ethical analysis as ideology or, pejoratively, as “philosophy.” It is not trivial that Edel’s vision of science redeemed through ethics and ethics redeemed through science—unlike the dreams of the Enlightenment or of orthodox Marxists—presupposes no obvious optimism. In this chapter, the author emphasizes that the limits of reasoning from the instrumentalities follows principally from the fact that preference worlds, being worlds and not heaps, have particular structures. From this follows the inevitability of a possible collapse, as circumstances change, of warranted agreement of individuals and groups either with themselves or with others.
