Studies in Logical Theory

by John Dewey

II

Let us then define the problem of the objective reference of the valuational judgments by stating, as distinctly as may be, the conditions by which ethical and economic deliberation, respectively, are prompted. A study of these conditions will make it easier to see in what way the judgments reached in dealing with them can be objective.

When will an end, presenting itself in consciousness in the manner indicated in our brief analysis of the judgment-process, become the center of attention, thereby checking the advance, through investigation of the possible means, to final overt action? This is the general statement of the problem of the typical ethical situation. Manifestly there will be no ethical deliberation if the imaged end at once turns the attention toward the environment of possible means, instead of first of all itself becoming the object instead of the director of attention; there will be no suspension of progress toward final action, excepting such as may later come through difficulty in the discovery and co-ordination of the means. However, there are cases in which the emergence of the end forthwith is followed by a check to the reflective process, and the agent shrinks from the end presented in imagination as being, let us say, one forbidden by authority or one repugnant to his own established standards. The end may in such a case disappear at once; very often it will insistently remain. On this latter supposition, the simplest possibility will be the development of a mere mechanical tension, a "pull and haul" between the end, or properly the impulses which it represents, and the agent's habit of suppressing impulses of the class to which the present one is, perhaps intuitively, recognized as belonging. The case is the common one of "temptation" on the one side and "principle" or "conscience" on the other, and so long as the two forces remain thus in hard-and-fast opposition to each other there can be no ethical deliberation or judgment in a proper sense. The standard or habit may gain the day by sheer mechanical excess of power, or the new impulse, the temptation, may prevail because its onset can break down the mechanical resistance.

Out of such a situation as this, however, genuine ethical deliberation may arise on condition that standard and "temptation" can lose something of their abstractness and their hard-and-fast opposition, and develop into terms of concrete meaning. The agent may come to see that the end is in some definite way of really vital interest and too important to be put aside without consideration. He may, of course, in this fall into gross self-sophistication, like the drunkard in the classical instance who takes another glass to test his self-control and thereby gain assurance, or he may act with wisdom and with full sincerity, like Dorothea Casaubon when she renounced the impossible task imposed by her departed husband. In the moral life one can ask or hope for complete exemption from the risk of self-deception with as little reason as in scientific research. But however this may be, our present interest is in the method, not in particular results of ethical reflection. Whether properly so in a particular case or not, the imaged end may come to seem at least plausibly defensible on grounds of principle which serve to sanction certain other modes of conduct to which a place is given in the accepted scheme of life; or the end may simply press for a relatively independent recognition on the very general ground that its emergence represents an enlargement and new development of the personality.[109] The end may thus cease to stand in the character of blind self-assertive impulse, and press its claim as a positive means of future moral growth, as bringing freedom from repressive and enfeebling restraints and as tending to the reinforcement of other already valued modes of conduct. On the other hand, the standard will cease to stand as mere resistance and negation, and may discover something of its hidden meaning as a product of long experience and slow growth, and as perhaps a vital part of the organization of one's present life, not to be touched without grave risk.

Now, on whichever side the development may first commence, a like development must soon follow on the other, and it is the action and reaction of standard and prospective or problematic end upon each other that constitutes the process of ethical deliberation or judgment. Just as in the typical judgment-process, as sketched above, so also here predicate and subject develop each other, when once they have given over their first antagonism and come to the attitude of reasoning together. The predicate explains itself that the subject or new end may be searchingly and fairly tested; and under this scrutiny the subject develops its full meaning as a course of conduct, thereby prompting further analysis and reinterpretation of the standard. But this is not the place for detailed analysis of the process;[110] here we are concerned only to define the type of situation, and this we may now do in the following terms: The indispensable condition of ethical judgment is the presence in the agent's mind of at least two rival interesting ends or systems of such ends. In the foregoing, the subject of the judgment is the new end that has arisen; the predicate or "standard" is the symbol for the old ends or values which in the tension of the judgment-process must be brought to more or less explicit enumeration—and, we must add, reconstruction also. Indeed, it is important, even at this stage of our discussion, to observe that Predicate and Standard are not equivalent in meaning. The predicate, or predicative side, of judgment is the imagery of control in the process, which, as we have seen, develops with the subject side; while the term "Standard" connotes the rigid fixity which belongs to the inhibiting concept or ideal in the stage before the judgment-process proper can begin. The ethical judgment-process is, in a word, just the process of reconstructing standards—as in its other and corresponding aspect it is the process of interpreting new ends. Those who oppose measures of social reform or new modes of conduct or belief on alleged grounds of "immorality" instinctively feel in doing so that the change may make its way more easily against a resistance that will candidly explain itself; and, on the other side of the social judgment-process, the more fanatical know how to turn to good advantage for their propaganda the bitterness or contempt of those who represent the established order. On both sides there are those who trust more in mechanical "pull and haul" than in the intrinsic merits of their cause.

Thus it is by encountering some rival end or entire system of ends, as symbolized by an ideal, that a new end emerging out of impulse comes to stand for an agent, as the center of a problem of conduct, and so to occupy the center of attention. And it thereby becomes an Object, as we shall hold, which must be more fully defined in order that it may be valued, and accordingly be held to warrant a determinate attitude toward itself on the agent's part. We have now to define in the same general terms the typical economic situation.

In economic theory as in common thought it is not the contemplated act of applying certain means to the attainment of an end regarded as desirable that functions as the logical subject of valuation. The thing or object valued in the economic situation is one's present wealth, whether material or immaterial, one's services or labor—whatever one gives in exchange or otherwise sets apart for the attainment of a desired end or, proximately, to secure possession of the necessary and sufficient means to the attainment of a desired end. The object of attention in the valuing process is here not itself an end of action. In this respect the economic type of judgment is like the physical, for in both the object to be valued is a certain means which one is seeking to adapt to some more or less definitely imaged purpose; or a condition of which one wishes, likewise for some special purpose, to take advantage. The ultimate goal of all judgment is the determination of a course of conduct looking toward an end, and our present problem may accordingly be stated in the following terms: Under what circumstances in the judgment-process does it become necessary to the definition and attainment of an end as yet vague and indeterminate that the requisite means, as in part already physically determined, should be further scrutinized in attention and determined from the economic point of view? Or, in a word: What is the "jurisdiction" of the economic point of view?

For ordinary judgements of sense-perception the presence in consciousness of a single unquestioned end is the adequate occasion, as our analysis (assuming its validity) has shown. For ethical judgment we have seen that the presence of conflicting ends is necessary; and we shall now hold that this condition is necessary, though not, without a certain qualification, adequate, for the economic type as well. If an imaged end can hold its place in consciousness without a rival, and the physical means of attaining it have been found and co-ordinated, then the use or consumption of the means must inevitably follow, without either ethical or economic judgement; for, to paraphrase the saying of Professor James, nothing but an end can displace or inhibit effort toward another end. The economic situation differs, then, from the ethical in this, that the end or system of ends entering into competition with the one for the time being of chief and primary interest has been brought to consciousness through reference to those "physical" means which already have been determined as necessary to this latter end. The conflict of ends in the economic situation, that is to say, is not due to a direct and intrinsic incompatibility between them. Where there manifestly is such incompatibility, judgment will be of the ethical type—as when building the house involves the foreclosure of a mortgage, and so, in working an injury to the holder of the site, may do violence to one's ideal of friendship or of more special obligation; or when an impulse to intemperate self-indulgence is met by one's ideal of social usefulness. In cases such as these one clearly sees, or can on reflection come to see, in what way an evil result to personal character will follow upon the imminent misdeed, and in what way suppression of the momentary impulse will conserve the entire approved and established way of life. Very often, however, the conflicting ends are related in no such mutually exclusive way. Each may be in itself permissible and compatible with the other, and, so far as any possible ethical discrimination can determine, there is no ground for choice between them. Thus it is only through the fact that both ends are dependent upon a limited supply of means that one would, for example, ever bring together and deliberately oppose in judgment the purpose of making additions to his library and the necessity of providing a store of fuel for the winter. Both ends in such a case are in themselves indeed permissible in a general way, but they may very well not both of them be economically possible, and hence, for the person in question and in the presence of the economic conditions which confront him, not, in the last analysis, both ethically possible. When there is a conflict between two ends that stand in close organic relation in the sense explained above, the problem is an ethical one; when the conflict is, in the sense explained, one of competition between ends ethically permissible—not at variance, either one, that is, with other ends directly—for the whole or for a share of one's supply of means, the problem is of the economic type.[111]

There are three typical cases in which economic judgment or valuation of the means is necessary, and the enumeration of these will make clear the relation between the ethical and the economic types of judgment: (1) First may be mentioned the case in which ethical deliberation has apparently reached its end in the formation of a plan of action which, so far as one can see, on ethical grounds is unobjectionable. A definite "temptation" may have been overcome, or out of a more complex situation a satisfactory ethical compromise or readjustment may have been developed with much difficulty. Now, there are very often cases in which such a course of action still may not be entered on without further hesitation; for, if the plan be one requiring for its working out the use of material means, the fact of an existing limitation of one's supply of means must bring hitherto unthought of ends into conflict with it. There are doubtless many situations in which one's moral choice may be carried into practice without consideration of ways and means, as when one forgives an injury or holds his instinctive nature under discipline in the effort to attain an ascetic or a genuinely social ideal of character. But more often than the moral rigorist cares to see, questions of an economic nature must be raised after the ethical "evidence is all in"—questions which are probably more trying to a sensitive moral nature than those more dramatic situations in which the real perils of self-sophistication are vastly less, and the simpler, sharper definition of the issue makes possible a less difficult, though a more decisive and edifying, victory. (2) In the second place are those cases in which the end that has emerged is without conspicuous moral quality, because, although it may represent some worthy impulse, it has not been obliged to make its way to acceptance against the resistance of desires less worthy than itself. This is the ideal case of economic theory in which "moral distinctions are irrelevant," and the economic man is free, according to the myth, to perform his hedonistic calculations without thought of moral scruple. The end ethically acceptable in itself, like the enriching of one's library, must, when the means are limited, divert a portion of the means from other uses, and will thus, through reference to the indispensable means, engage in conflict with other ends quite remotely, if in the agent's knowledge at all, related with itself. (3) Finally we reach the limit of apparent freedom from ethical considerations in the operations of business institutions, and perhaps especially in those of large business corporations. Apart from the routine operations of a business which involve no present exercise of the valuing judgment, there are constantly in such institutions new projects which must be considered, and which commonly must involve revaluation of the means. In this revaluation the principle of greatest revenue is supposed to be the sole criterion, regardless of other personal or social points of view from which confessedly the measure might be considered. But such a supposition, however true to the facts of current business practice it may be, we must hold to be an abstraction when viewed from the standpoint of the social life at large, and hence no real exception to our general principle. The economic and the ethical situations differ, as types, only in the closeness of relation between the ends that are in conflict and in the manner in which the ends are first brought into conflict—not in respect of the intrinsic nature of the ends which are involved in them.[112] It is this difference which, as we shall see, explains why ethical valuation must be of ends, and economic valuation, on the other hand, of means.

We have yet to see in what way valuation of the means of action can serve to resolve a difficulty of the type which has thus been designated as Economic. The question must be deferred until a more detailed analysis of the economic judgment-process can be undertaken. It is enough for our present purpose to note that the subject of valuation in this process is the means, and to see that under the typical conditions which have been described some further determination of the means than the merely physical one of their factual availability for the competing ends is needed.[113] Physically and mechanically the means are available for each one of the ends or groups of ends in question; the pressing problem is to determine for which one of the ends, if any, or to what compromise or readjustment of certain of the ends or all of them, the means at hand are in an economic sense most properly available.[114]

From this preliminary discussion of the ethical and economic situations we must now pass to discuss the objectivity of the judgments by which the agent meets the difficulties which such situations as these present. We shall seek to show that these judgments are constructive of an objective order of reality. It will be necessary in the first place to determine the psychological conditions of the more commonly recognized experience of Objectivity in the restricted sphere of sense-perception. There might otherwise remain a certain antecedent presumption against the thesis which we wish to establish even after the direct argument had been presented.[115]