Ethics

by John Dewey; James Hayden Tufts

Deliberation as Dramatic Rehearsal.—We, indeed, estimate the import or significance of any present desire or impulse by forecasting what it would come or amount to if carried out; literally its consequences define its consequence, its meaning and importance. But if these consequences were conceived merely as remote, if their picturing did not at once arouse a present sense of peace, of fulfillment, or of dissatisfaction, of incompletion and irritation, the process of thinking out consequences would remain purely intellectual. It would be as barren of influence upon behavior as the mathematical speculations of a disembodied angel. Any actual experience of reflection upon conduct will show that every foreseen result at once stirs our present affections, our likes and dislikes, our desires and aversions. There is developed a running commentary which stamps values at once as good or evil. It is this direct sense of value, not the consciousness of general rules or ultimate goals, which finally determines the worth of the act to the agent. Here is the inexpugnable element of truth in the intuitional theory. Its error lies in conceiving this immediate response of appreciation as if it excluded reflection instead of following directly upon its heels. Deliberation is actually an imaginative rehearsal of various courses of conduct. We give way, in our mind, to some impulse; we try, in our mind, some plan. Following its career through various steps, we find ourselves in imagination in the presence of the consequences that would follow: and as we then like and approve, or dislike and disapprove, these consequences, we find the original impulse or plan good or bad. Deliberation is dramatic and active, not mathematical and impersonal; and hence it has the intuitive, the direct factor in it. The advantage of a mental trial, prior to the overt trial (for the act after all is itself also a trial, a proving of the idea that lies back of it), is that it is retrievable, whereas overt consequences remain. They cannot be recalled. Moreover, many trials may mentally be made in a short time. The imagining of various plans carried out furnishes an opportunity for many impulses which at first are not in evidence at all, to get under way. Many and varied direct sensings, appreciations, take place. When many tendencies are brought into play, there is clearly much greater probability that the capacity of self which is really needed and appropriate will be brought into action, and thus a truly reasonable happiness result. The tendency of deliberation to "polarize" the various lines of activity into opposed alternatives, into incompatible "either this or that," is a way of forcing into clear recognition the importance of the issue.

The Good Man's Judgments as Standard.—This explains the idea of Aristotle that only the good man is a good judge of what is really good. Such an one will take satisfaction in the thought of noble ends and will recoil at the idea of base results. Because of his formed capacities, his organized habits and tendencies, he will respond to a suggested end with an emotion which confers its appropriate kind and shade of value. The brave man is sensitive to all acts and plans so far as they involve energy and endurance in overcoming painful obstacles; the kindly man responds at once to the elements that affect the well-being of others. The moral sense or direct appreciations of the good man may thus be said to furnish the standard of right and wrong. There are few persons who, when in doubt regarding a difficult matter of conduct, do not think of some other person in whose goodness they believe, and endeavor to direct and clinch their own judgment by imagining how such an one would react in a similar situation—what he would find congenial and what disagreeable. Or else they imagine what that other person would think of them if he knew of their doing such and such an act. And while this method cannot supply the standard of their own judgment, cannot determine the right or wrong for their own situations, it helps emancipate judgment from selfish partialities, and it facilitates a freer and more flexible play of imagination in construing and appreciating the situation.

§ 4. THE PLACE OF GENERAL RULES

Between such a highly generalized and formal principle as that of Kant, and the judgment of particular cases, we have intermediate generalizations; rules which are broad as compared with individual deeds, but narrow as compared with some one final principle. What are their rational origin, place, and function? We have here again both the empirical and the intuitional theories of knowledge, having to deal with the same fundamental difficulty: What is the relation of the special rule to the general principle on one side and to the special case on the other? The more general, the more abstractly rational the rule, the vaguer and less applicable it is. The more definite and fixed it is, the greater the danger that it will be a Procrustean bed, mutilating the rich fullness of the individual act, or destroying its grace and freedom by making it conform servilely to a hard and fast rule. Our analysis will accordingly be devoted to bringing to light the conditions under which a rule may be rational and yet be of specific help.

I. Intuitionalism and Casuistry.—Utilitarianism at least holds that rules are derived from actual cases of conduct; hence there must be points of likeness between the cases to be judged and the rules for judging them. But rules which do not originate from a consideration of special cases, which simply descend out of the blue sky, have only the most mechanical and external relation to the individual acts to be judged. Suppose one is convinced that the rule of honesty was made known just in and of itself by a special faculty, and had absolutely nothing to do with the recollection of past cases or the forecast of possible future circumstances. How would such a rule apply itself to any particular case which needed to be judged? What bell would ring, what signal would be given, to indicate that just this case is the appropriate case for the application of the rule of honest dealing? And if by some miracle this question were answered so one knows that here is a case for the rule of honesty, how would we know just what course in detail the rule calls for? For the rule, to be applicable to all cases, must omit the conditions which differentiate one case from another; it must contain only the very few similar elements which are to be found in all honest deeds. Reduced to this skeleton, not much would be left save the bare injunction to be honest whatever happens, leaving it to chance, the ordinary judgment of the individual, or to external authority to find out just what honesty specifically means in the given case.

This difficulty is so serious that all systems which have committed themselves to belief in a number of hard and fast rules having their origin in conscience, or in the word of God impressed upon the human soul or externally revealed, always have had to resort to a more and more complicated procedure to cover, if possible, all the cases. The moral life is finally reduced by them to an elaborate formalism and legalism.

Illustration in Casuistry.—Suppose, for example, we take the Ten Commandments as a starting-point. They are only ten, and naturally confine themselves to general ideas, and ideas stated mainly in negative form. Moreover, the same act may be brought under more than one rule. In order to resolve the practical perplexities and uncertainties which inevitably arise under such circumstances, Casuistry is built up (from the Latin casus, case). The attempt is made to foresee all the different cases of action which may conceivably occur, and provide in advance the exact rule for each case. For example, with reference to the rule "do not kill," a list will be made of all the different situations in which killing might occur:—accident, war, fulfillment of command of political superior (as by a hangman), self-defense (defense of one's own life, of others, of property), deliberate or premeditated killing with its different motives (jealousy, avarice, revenge, etc.), killing with slight premeditation, from sudden impulse, from different sorts and degrees of provocation. To each one of these possible cases is assigned its exact moral quality, its exact degree of turpitude and innocency. Nor can this process end with overt acts; all the inner springs of action which affect regard for life must be similarly classified: envy, animosity, sudden rage, sullenness, cherishing of sense of injury, love of tyrannical power, hardness or hostility, callousness—all these must be specified into their different kinds and the exact moral worth of each determined. What is done for this one kind of case must be done for every part and phase of the entire moral life until it is all inventoried, catalogued, and distributed into pigeon-holes definitely labelled.

Dangers of Casuistry.—Now dangers and evils attend this way of conceiving the moral life, (a) It tends to magnify the letter of morality at the expense of its spirit. It fixes attention not upon the positive good in an act, not upon the underlying agent's disposition which forms its spirit, nor upon the unique occasion and context which form its atmosphere, but upon its literal conformity with Rule A, Class I., Species 1, sub-head (1), etc. The effect of this is inevitably to narrow the scope and lessen the depth of conduct. (i.) It tempts some to hunt for that classification of their act which will make it the most convenient or profitable for themselves. In popular speech, "casuistical" has come to mean a way of judging acts which splits hairs in the effort to find a way of acting that conduces to personal interest and profit, and which yet may be justified by some moral principle. (ii.) With others, this regard for the letter makes conduct formal and pedantic. It gives rise to a rigid and hard type of character illustrated among the Pharisees of olden and the Puritans of modern time—the moral schemes of both classes being strongly impregnated with the notion of fixed moral rules.

(b) This ethical system also tends in practice to a legal view of conduct.—Historically it always has sprung from carrying over legal ideas into morality. In the legal view, liability to blame and to punishment inflicted from without by some superior authority, is necessarily prominent. Conduct is regulated through specific injunctions and prohibitions: Do this, Do not do that. Exactly the sort of analysis of which we have spoken above (p. 327) in the case of killing is necessary, so that there may be definite and regular methods of measuring guilt and assigning blame. Now the ideas of liability and punishment and reward are, as we shall see in our further discussion (chs. xvii. and xxi.), important factors in the conduct of life, but any scheme of morals is defective which puts the question of avoiding punishment in the foreground of attention, and which tends to create a Pharisaical complacency in the mere fact of having conformed to command or rule.

(c) Probably the worst evil of this moral system is that it tends to deprive moral life of freedom and spontaneity and to reduce it (especially for the conscientious who take it seriously) to a more or less anxious and servile conformity to externally imposed rules. Obedience as loyalty to principle is a good, but this scheme practically makes it the only good and conceives it not as loyalty to ideals, but as conformity to commands. Moral rules exist just as independent deliverances on their own account, and the right thing is merely to follow them. This puts the center of moral gravity outside the concrete processes of living. All systems which emphasize the letter more than the spirit, legal consequences more than vital motives, put the individual under the weight of external authority. They lead to the kind of conduct described by St. Paul as under the law, not in the spirit, with its constant attendant weight of anxiety, uncertain struggle, and impending doom.