 In keeping with this pragmatic naturalism, Dewey’s ethical writings approach moral theory in a distinctive way. Moral theories are generated in contingent historical circumstances, are responsive to the particular needs and conflicts of those circumstances, and reflect their prejudices and assumption. Ideas that were functional for a particular social order can cease to make sense or become dysfunctional as that order changes. Mistaking contingent social products for unchangeable features of human nature or psychology is one of the core occupational hazards of moral philosophers. Famously, for example, he thinks that the philosophical preference for “intrinsic” goods of contemplation and related values such as aesthetic purity originally reflect a form of Greek society structured around a slave class and a leisured class but is reproduced (with increasing difficulty) in other class-divided societies.