Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude

by John Dewey; Boyd Henry Bode; Harold Chapman Brown; Horace Meyer Kallen; George H. Mead; Addison Webster Moore; Henry Waldgrave Stuart; James Hayden Tu

JAMES HAYDEN TUFTS

Writing about ethics has tended to take one of two directions. On the one hand we have description of conduct in terms of psychology, or anthropology. On the other a study of the concepts right and wrong, good and bad, duty and freedom. If we follow the first line we may attempt to explain conduct psychologically by showing the simple ideas or feelings and the causal connections or laws of habit and association out of which actions arise. Or anthropologically we may show the successive stages of custom and taboo, or the family, religious, political, legal, and social institutions from which morality has emerged. But we meet at once a difficulty if we ask what is the bearing of this description and analysis. Will it aid me in the practical judgment "What shall I do?" In physics there is no corresponding difficulty. To analyze gravity enables us to compute an orbit, or aim a gun; to analyze electric action is to have the basis for lighting streets and carrying messages. It assumes the uniformity of nature and takes no responsibility as to whether we shall aim guns or whether our messages shall be of war or of peace. Whereas in ethics it is claimed that the elements are so changed by their combination—that the process is so essential a factor—that no prediction is certain. And it is also claimed that the ends themselves are perhaps to be changed as well as the means. Stated otherwise, suppose that mankind has passed through various stages, can mere observation of these tell me what next? Perhaps I don't care to repeat the past; how can I plan for a better future? Or grant that I may discover instinct and emotion, habit and association in my thinking and willing, how will this guide me to direct my thinking and willing to right ends?

The second method has tended to examine concepts. Good is an eternal, changeless pattern; it is to be discovered by a vision; or right and good are but other terms for nature's or reason's universal laws which are timeless and wholly unaffected by human desires or passions; moral nature is soul, and soul is created not built up of elements,—such were some of the older absolutisms. Right and good are unique concepts not to be resolved or explained in terms of anything else,—this is a more modern thesis which on the face of it may appear to discourage analysis. The ethical world is a world of "eternal values." Philosophy "by taking part in empirical questions sinks both itself and them." These doctrines bring high claims, but are they more valuable for human guidance than the empirical method?[65]

"The knowledge that is superhuman only is ridiculous in man." No man can ever find his way home with the pure circle unless he has also the art of the impure. It is the conviction of this paper that in ethics, as in knowledge, thoughts without contents are empty; percepts without concepts are blind. Description of what has been—empiricism—is futile in itself to project and criticize. Intuitions and deductions a priori are empty. The "thoughts" of ethics are of course the terms right, good, ought, worth, and their kin. The "percepts" are the instincts and emotions, the desires and aspirations, the conditions of time and place, of nature, and institutions.

Yet it is misleading to say that in studying the history of morals we are merely empiricists, and can hope to find no criterion. This would be the case if we were studying non-moral beings. But moral beings have to some degree guided life by judgments and not merely followed impulse or habit. Early judgments as to taboos, customs, and conduct may be crude and in need of correction; they are none the less judgments. Over and over we find them reshaped to meet change from hunting to agriculture, from want to plenty, from war to peace, from small to large groupings. Much more clearly when we consider civilized peoples, the interaction between reflection and impulse becomes patent. To study this interaction can be regarded as futile for the future only if we discredit all past moral achievement.

Those writers who have based their ethics upon concepts have frequently expressed the conviction that the security of morality depends upon the question whether good and right are absolute and eternal essences independent of human opinion or volition. A different source of standards which to some offers more promise for the future is the fact of the moral life as a constant process of forming and reshaping ideals and of bringing these to bear upon conditions of existence. To construct a right and good is at least a process tending to responsibility, if this construction is to be for the real world in which we must live and not merely for a world of fancy or caprice. It is not the aim of this paper to give a comprehensive outline of ethical method. Four factors in the moral life will be pointed out and this analysis will be used to emphasize especially certain social and constructive aspects of our concepts of right and good.

I

The four factors which it is proposed to emphasize are these:

(1) Life as a biological process involving relation to nature, with all that this signifies in the equipment of instincts, emotions, and selective activity by which life maintains itself.

(2) Interrelation with other human beings, including on the one hand associating, grouping, mating, communicating, coöperating, commanding, obeying, worshiping, adjudicating, and on the psychological side the various instincts, emotions, susceptibilities to personal stimulation and appropriate responses in language and behavior which underlie or are evoked by the life in common.