This chapter offers a real-world engagement with a pragmatist approach to moral education. In this, the work of this chapter proceeds across multiple subsections. First, the intellectual tradition of pragmatism is described in a historical and conceptual context. Having established the tradition’s bedrock commitments and relationships, the chapter turns its focus to morality. By tracing the general contours of morality for the pragmatist, the chapter connects pragmatist morality to more general pragmatist concerns, indicating how these relate to notions of education and growth. The chapter then focuses on pragmatist moral education, demonstrating ways it might engage with present-day concerns and frustrations. The chapter asserts that pragmatism provides a useful approach to addressing moral education in the contemporary time. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering and responding to potential hesitations regarding its offered analyses.

How can we include the affected interests of future generations and non-humans in deliberations about global justice given that they cannot exercise formative agency themselves? Starting from the role moral imagination plays in moral reasoning, and hence in formative agency concerning the meaning of justice as well, this chapter looks at ways in which deliberations can be enhanced so as to promote inclusion of these neglected interests. Visual and experiential prompts should complement talk-centric deliberative processes. This would expand the deliberators’ moral imagination, enabling them to internalize the interests of future generations, animals, ecosystems, and the Earth system, and reach decisions reflecting all affected interests, even those bound to be silent – though that seeming silence itself may reveal an incapacity to listen. These kinds of considerations can be reflected in institutional design. Currently these frontiers of justice are only weakly present in the Sustainable Development Goals, which look ahead only to 2030, turned down the chance to incorporate planetary boundaries, and say little or nothing about non-humans.

Chapter 5 explores the question: ‘Which experiences and reflections could help young people to become more ethically aware and motivated within the context of public education?’ It addresses four important societal worries. First, the rise of relativism as different worldview positions meet and confront each other in a super-diverse society. Second, the existence of populist hermeneutical bubbles, in which people only get information that confirms their own views. Third, a general attitude of apathy and uncaring in an economy-driven society that only believes in market values. Fourth, a hardening of traditional moral positions of minorities who feel threatened in their group identity. It argues that the ethical should be understood in a broad sense, and that the crisis is not only about norms and values in a strict moral sense of what is right or wrong behaviour; it is also about an existential search for identity and belonging, and about sources of inspiration for living a ‘good life’ that transcends the particular needs of a person. It thus proposes ethical, existential and spiritual re-orientation which encompasses personal and societal explorations and evaluations with regard to diverging views on the ‘good life’ as found in late-modern societies.

Chapter 6, The Visual Jurisprudence of Transition, theorises the Constitutional Court of South Africa’s art collection as a new kind of visual jurisprudence—the philosophy of the visual in law.I analyse the ways in which people, especially judges, talk about the art collection in order to show how artworks at the Court become central to the bodies of aesthetic knowledge that shape the appearance of justice and that shape how justice is understood. I argue that the artworks at the Court engage the moral imagination—a position which intersects with the debate in human rights scholarship over whether moral discourse or sentimental education is more effective in promoting respect for rights. In such close proximity to the Court, the art collection inhabits a unique position in which the assumptions of justice (and Justices) and what it means to uphold the Constitution can be probed.This creates a visual jurisprudence that reflects both the values which underpin the Court as well as the ways of practicing justice in post-apartheid South Africa.