Ethics

by John Dewey; James Hayden Tufts

Ordinary language sets before us some main facts: duty suggests what is due, a debt to be paid; ought is connected with owe; obligation implies being bound to something—as we speak of "bounden duty." We speak naturally of "meeting obligations"; of duties being "imposed," "laid upon" one. The person who is habitually careless about his duties is "unruly" or "lawless"; one who evades or refuses them is "unprincipled." These ideas suggest there is something required, exacted, having the sanction of law, or a regular and regulative principle; and imply natural aversion to the requirements exacted, a preference for something else. Hence duty as a conscious factor means constraint of inclination; an unwillingness or reluctance which should be overcome but which it is difficult to surmount, requiring an effort which only adequate recognition of the rightful supremacy of the dutiful end will enable one to put forth. Thus we speak of interest conflicting with principle, and desire with duty. While they are inevitably bound together, it will be convenient to discuss separately (1) Inclination and impulse as averse to duty, and (2) Duty as having authority, as expressing law.

1. Inclination Averse to Duty.—Directly and indirectly, all desires root in certain fundamental organic wants and appetites. Conduct, behavior, implies a living organism. If this organism were not equipped with an intense instinctive tendency to keep itself going, to sustain itself, it would soon cease to be amid the menaces, difficulties, rebuffs, and failures of life. Life means appetites, like hunger, thirst, sex; instincts like anger, fear, and hope, which are almost imperious in their struggles for satisfaction. They do not arise from reflection, but antedate it; their existence does not depend upon consideration of consequences, but their existence it is which tends to call out reflection. Their very presence in a healthy organism means a certain reservoir of energy which overflows almost spontaneously. They are impulsive. Such tendencies, then, constitute an essential and fundamental part of the capacities of a person; their realization is involved in one's happiness. In all this there is nothing abnormal nor immoral. But a human being is something more than a mere demand for the satisfaction of instincts of food, sex, and protection. If we admit (as the theory of organic evolution requires) that all other desires and purposes are ultimately derived from these tendencies of the organism, still it is true that the refined and highly developed forms exist side by side with crude, organic forms, and that the simultaneous satisfaction of the two types, just as they stand, is impossible.

Organic and Reflectively Formed Tendencies Conflict.—Even if it be true, as it may well be, that the desires and purposes connected with property were developed out of instincts having to do with food for self and offspring, it is still true that the developed desires do not wholly displace those out of which they developed. The presence of the purposes elaborated by thought side by side with the more organic demands causes strife and the need of resolution. The accumulation of property may involve subordinating the immediate urgency of hunger; property as an institution implies that one is not free to satisfy his appetite just as he pleases, but may have to postpone or forego satisfaction, because the food supply belongs to another; or that he can satisfy hunger only through some labor which in itself is disagreeable to him. Similarly the family springs originally out of the instinct of reproduction. But the purposes and plans which go with family life are totally inconsistent with the mere gratification of sexual desire in its casual and spontaneous appearance. The refined, highly developed, and complex purposes exact a checking, a regulation and subordination of inclinations as they first spring up—a control to which the inclinations are not of themselves prone and against which they may rebelliously assert themselves.

Duty May Reside on the More Impulsive Side.—It would be a great mistake, however, to limit the need of subordination simply to the unruly agencies of appetite. Habits which have been consciously or reflectively formed, even when in their original formation these habits had the sanction and approval of reason, require control. The habits of a professional man, of an investigator, or a lawyer, for example, have been formed through careful and persistent reflection directed upon ends adjudged right. Virtues of painstaking industry, of perseverance, have been formed; untimely and unseemly desires have been checked. But as an outcome these habits, and the desires and purposes that express them, have perhaps become all-engrossing. Occupation is preoccupation. It encroaches upon the attention needed for other concerns. The skill gained tends to shut the individual up to narrow matters and to shut out other "universes" of good which should be desired. Domestic and civic responsibilities are perhaps felt to be insignificant details or irritating burdens unworthy of attention. Thus a reflective habit, legitimate in itself, right in its right place, may give rise to desires and ends which involve a corrosive selfishness.

Moreover, that the insubordination does not reside in appetites or impulses just as appetites and impulses, is seen in the fact that duty may lie on the side of a purpose connected with them, and be asserted against the force of a habit formed under the supervision of thought. The student or artist may find his pursuit makes him averse to satisfying the needful claims of hunger and healthy exercise. The prudent business man may find himself undutifully cold to the prompting of an impulse of pity; the student of books or special intellectual or artistic ends may find duty on the side of some direct human impulse.

Statement of Problem.—Such considerations show that we cannot attribute the conflict of duty and inclination simply to the existence of appetites and unreflective impulses, as if these were in and of themselves opposed to regulation by any principle. We must seek for an explanation which will apply equally to appetites and to habits of thought. What is there common to the situations of him who feels it his duty to check the satisfaction of strong hunger until others have been properly served, and of the scientific investigator who finds it his duty to check the exercise of his habit of thinking in order that he may satisfy the demands of his body?

Statement of Explanation.—Any habit, like any appetite or instinct, represents something formed, set; whether this has occurred in the history of the race or of the individual makes little difference to its established urgency. Habit is second, if not first, nature. (1) Habit represents facilities; what is set, organized, is relatively easy. It marks the line of least resistance. A habit of reflection, so far as it is a specialized habit, is as easy and natural to follow as an organic appetite. (2) Moreover, the exercise of any easy, frictionless habit is pleasurable. It is a commonplace that use and wont deprive situations of originally disagreeable features. (3) Finally, a formed habit is an active tendency. It only needs an appropriate stimulus to set it going; frequently the mere absence of any strong obstacle serves to release its pent-up energy. It is a propensity to act in a certain way whenever opportunity presents. Failure to function is uncomfortable and arouses feelings of irritation or lack.

Reluctance to the right end, an aversion requiring to be overcome, if at all, by recognition of the superior value of the right end, is then to be accounted for on the ground of the inertia or momentum of any organized, established tendency. This momentum gives the common ground to instinctive impulses and deliberately formed habits. The momentum represents the old, an adaptation to familiar, customary conditions. So far as similar conditions recur, the formed power functions economically and effectively, supplying ease, promptness, certainty, and agreeableness to the execution of an act.

But if new, changed conditions require a serious readjustment of the old habit or appetite, the natural tendency will be to resist this demand. Thus we have precisely the traits of reluctance and constraint which mark the consciousness of duty. A self without habits, one loose and fluid, in which change in one direction is just as easy as in another, would not have the sense of duty. A self with no new possibilities, rigidly set in conditions and perfectly accommodated to them, would not have it. But definite, persistent, urgent tendencies to act in a given way, occurring at the same time with other incompatible tendencies which represent the self more adequately and yet are not organized into habits, afford the conditions of the sense of restraint. If for any reason the unorganized tendency is judged to be the truer expression of self, we have also the sense of lawful constraint. The constraint of appetite and desire is a phenomenon of practical readjustment, within the structure of character, due to conflict of tendencies so irreconcilable in their existing forms as to demand radical redirection.

When an appetite is in accord with those habits of an individual which enable him to perform his social functions, or which naturally accrue from his social relations, it is legitimate and good; when it conflicts, it is illicit, it is lust; we call it by hard names and we demand that it be curbed; we regard its force as a menace to the integrity of the agent and a threat to social order. When the reflective habits of an individual come into conflict with natural appetites and impulses, the manifestation of which would enlarge or make more certain the powers of the individual in his full relations to others, it is the reflective habits which have to be held in and redirected at the cost of whatever disagreeableness.