Moral philosophers are generally disposed to keep their carefully constructed systems of ethics under a glass bell jar rather than risk the hard knocks they must receive if taken into the street and marketplace. But Dewey as a professed experimentalist could not consistently adopt this cautious method. His is no cloistered morality but a doctrine reduced from practical life and referable to the same authority for the validification of its influences. An interesting instance of the practical application of his principles is found in his essay on "Force and Coercion."[7] Here he discusses chiefly the question of the allowability of the use of force by a government as in war or by a class as in a strike and repudiates the Tolstoyan view that all use of force is wrong. On such a delicate question it would be improper for me to paraphrase his argument, so I quote instead his own summary of his conclusions:
First, since the attainment of ends requires the use of means, law is essentially a formulation of the use of force. Secondly, the only question which can be raised about the justification of force is that of comparative efficiency and economy in its use. Thirdly, what is justly objected to as violence or undue coercion is a reliance upon wasteful and destructive means of accomplishing results. Fourthly, there is always a possibility that what passes as a legitimate use of force may be so wasteful as to be really a use of violence; and per contra that measures condemned as recourse to mere violence may, under the given circumstances, represent an intelligent utilization of energy. In no case, can antecedents or a priori principles be appealed to as more than presumptive: The point at issue is concrete utilization of means for ends.
In this essay Dewey inclines to the view that "all political questions are simply questions of the extension and restriction of exercise of power on the part of specific groups in the community", and says further that: "With a few notable exceptions, the doctrine that the state rests upon or is common will seems to turn out but a piece of phraseology to justify the uses actually made of force. Practices of coercion and constraint which would become intolerable if frankly labelled Force seem to become laudable when baptized with the name of Will, although they otherwise remain the same."
I trust that Dewey is one of "the few notable exceptions", for the quotations from his paper on the "Ethics of Democracy" which I have given on a previous page show that Dewey in his earlier years went as far as Fichte in his later years toward identifying government—and a bare majority at that—with the common will of the social organism. Such a Germanic doctrine of the power of the State could be used to justify worse things than the German Government has ever done, and it is perhaps a realization of this that has led Dewey latterly to look with more favor upon the use of force by the minority.
The proper use of force is, in Dewey's opinion, "the acute question of social philosophy in the world to-day", and "a generation which has beheld the most stupendous manifestation of force in all history is not going to be content unless it has found some answer to the question." In an article on "Force, Violence and Law"[8] he discusses the possibilities of the peace movement in the following fashion:
At various times of my life I have, with other wearied souls, assisted at discussions between those who were Tolstoyans and—well, those who weren't. In reply to the agitated protests of the former against war and the police and penal measures, I have listened to the time-honored queries about what you should do when the criminal attacked your friend or child. I have rarely heard it stated that since one cannot even walk the street without using force, the only question which persons can discuss with one another concerns the most effective use of force in gaining ends in specific situations. If one's end is the saving of one's soul immaculate, or maintaining a certain emotion unimpaired, doubtless force should be used to inhibit natural muscular reactions. If the end is something else, a hearty fisticuff may be the means of realizing it. What is intolerable is that men should condemn or eulogize force at large, irrespective of its use as a means of getting results. To be interested in ends and to have contempt for the means which alone secure them is the last stage of intellectual demoralization.
It is hostility to force as force, to force intrinsically, which has rendered the peace movement so largely an anti-movement, with all the weaknesses which appertain to everything that is primarily anti-anything. Unable to conceive the task of organizing the existing forces so they may achieve their greatest efficiency, pacifists have had little recourse save to decry evil emotions and evil-minded men as the causes of war.... And no league to enforce peace will fare prosperously save as it is the natural accompaniment of a constructive adjustment of the concrete interests which are already at work.... The passage of force under law occurs only when all the cards are on the table, when the objective facts which bring conflicts in their train are acknowledged, and when intelligence is used to devise mechanisms which will afford to the forces at work all the satisfaction that conditions permit.
Dewey's primary purpose has always been the development of a type of ethical thinking and a method of school training suited to the democratic and industrial society of modern America. Speaking of the mental revolution that has been effected by the advance of science he says:
Whether the consequent revolution in moral philosophy be termed pragmatism or be given the happier title of the applied and experimental habit of mind is of little account. What is of moment is that intelligence has descended from its lonely isolation at the remote edge of things, whence it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good, to take its seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory may therefore become responsible to the practices that have generated it; the good be connected with nature, but with nature naturally, not metaphysically conceived, and social life be cherished in behalf of its own immediate possibilities, not on the ground of its remote connections with a cosmic reason and absolute end.—"Influence of Darwin", p. 55.
In the preface to the "Influence of Darwin" he quotes a German definition of pragmatism:[9]
Epistemologically, nominalism; psychologically, voluntarism; cosmologically, energism; metaphysically, agnosticism; ethically, meliorism on the basis of the Bentham-Mill-utilitarianism.