Orwell’s Ethical Pragmatism

Abstract George Orwell was a paradigmatic English thinker who had sympathies with a decidedly American strain of philosophy, or at least with its ethical dimensions. In particular, he often implicitly expressed sympathy with at least three ethical theses popular among the founding fathers of pragmatism and its contemporary adherents: first, he endorsed a decidedly anthropocentric conception of moral goodness; second, he advocated meliorism in a sense that requires explanation; third, he offered a uniquely pragmatic conception of moral progress developed in detail by Philip Kitcher, a self-identified pragmatist. I close by making the case that reading Orwell as an ethical pragmatist helps to clarify his relationship with American thought and contemporary pragmatists like Richard Rorty.