Moral Progress : Conversation or Conflict? On Kenneth Arrow, Philip Kitcher, and John Dewey

The economist Kenneth Arrow, in Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), famously proved that a society of diverse preferences can only be ordered by dictatorship. Unless diverse preferences can adjust, electoral democracy cannot govern. Philip Kitcher, in Moral Progress (2021), emphasizes the importance for moral progress of sympathetic understanding of others through “ideal” conversation. This paper contends that conversation alone is inadequate for resolution of conflicts in a democracy. Conflict is accompanied by discourse, but preferences are grounded in habits. Social habits, and shared patterns of conduct, resist adjustment in response to discourse alone. Yet habits and preferences demonstrably adjust in the process of conflict resolution, potentially resolving Arrow’s impossibility problem. The paper advances a pragmatic theory of preference conflict distinct from the Marxist model of power-oriented class or group conflict. Pragmatic conflict is not strictly constituted of group power struggles, but of aggregated preferences, a more common, indeed endemic, formation and interaction of opposing opinions and beliefs in response to multiple shared problems. Preference conflict theory illuminates the boundary between inquiry and violence in the polarization of aggregated opposing interests. It is open to a fluid Deweyan transformation, in the continuum of inquiry, through which specific problems can be democratically recognized, defined, and resolved by incremental group preference adjustment, as discrete problems are identified and remedial practices are adopted through stakeholder input, enforceable through law