Ethics

by John Dewey; James Hayden Tufts

A child in a good home (and a citizen in a good state) soon adds other associations. The command is uttered, the penalty threatened, by those whom he admires, respects, and loves. This element brings in a new dread—the fear of giving pain to the beloved object. Such dread is more disinterested. It centers rather about the point of view from which the act is held wrong than about the thought of harm to self. As intelligence develops, the person apprehends the positive ends, the goods, which are protected by the command put on him; he sees the use and reason of the prohibition to which he is subject, and approving of what it safeguards, approves the restriction itself. "A new motive is added on and begirds the action with a threefold fear.... If the duty prescribed has been approved of by the mind as protective of the general interests of persons engaging our sympathies, the violation of this on our part affects us with all the pain that we feel from inflicting an injury upon those interests."

Transformation into an Internal Power.—When the child appreciates "the reasons for the command, the character of conscience is entirely transformed." The fear which began as fear of the penalty that a superior power may inflict, adds to itself the fear of displeasing a beloved person; and is finally transformed into the dread of injuring interests the worth of which the individual appreciates and in which he shares. The sense of duty now "stands upon an independent foundation." It is an internal "ideal resemblance of public authority," "an imitation (or facsimile) within ourselves of the government without us." "Regard is now had to the intent and meaning of the law and not to the mere fact of its being prescribed by some power." Thus there is developed a sense of obligation in general, which may be detached from the particular deeds which were originally imposed under the sanction of penalty, and transferred to new ends which have never even been socially imposed, which the individual has perhaps for the first time conceived within himself. "The feeling and habit of obligation" which was generated from social pressure remains, but as a distinct individually cherished thing (Bain, Emotions and Will, p. 319 n.). This view of the final sense of obligation thus approximates Kant's view of the autonomous character of duty.

(c) Spencer's Account.—Herbert Spencer (like Bentham) lays emphasis upon the restraining influence of various social influences, but lays stress, as Bentham does not, upon the internal changes effected by long-continued, unremitting pressure exercised through the entire period of human evolution. Taken in itself, the consciousness of duty—the distinctively moral consciousness—is the control of proximate ends by remote ones, of simple by complex aims, of the sensory or presentative by the ideal or representative. An undeveloped individual or race lives and acts in the present; the mature is controlled by foresight of an indefinitely distant future. The thief who steals is actuated by a simple feeling, the mere impulse of acquisition; the business man conducts his acquisition in view of highly complex considerations of property and ownership. A low-grade intelligence acts only upon sensory stimulus, immediately present; a developed mind is moved by elaborate intellectual constructions, by imaginations and ideas which far outrun the observed or observable scene. Each step of the development of intelligence, of culture, whether in the individual or the race, is dependent upon ability to subordinate the immediate simple, physically present tendency and aim to the remote, compound, and only ideally present intention (Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. I., Part I, ch. vii.).

Subordination of Near to Remote Good Dependent on Social Influences.—"The conscious relinquishment of immediate and special good to gain distant and general good ... is a cardinal trait of the self-restraint called moral." But this develops out of forms of restraint which are not moral; where the "relinquishment" and subordination of the present and temporary good is not consciously willed by the individual in view of a conscious appreciation of a distant and inclusive good; but where action in view of the latter is forced upon the individual by outside authority, operating by menace, and having the sanction of fear. These outside controls are three in number: political or legal; supernatural, priestly, or religious; and popular. All these external controls, working through dread of pain and promise of reward, bring about, however, in the individual a habit of looking to the remote, rather than to the proximate, end. At first the thought of these extrinsic consequences, those which do not flow from the act but from the reaction of others to it, is mixed up with the thought of its own proper consequences. But this association causes attention at least to be fixed upon intrinsic consequences that, because of their remoteness and complexity, might otherwise escape attention. Gradually the thought of them grows in clearness and efficacy and dissociates itself as a motive from the externally imposed consequences, and there is a control which alone is truly moral.

The Internal Sanction.—

"The truly moral deterrent from murder, is not constituted by a representation of hanging as a consequence, or by a representation of tortures in hell as a consequence, or by a representation of the horror and hatred excited in fellow-men; but by a representation of the necessary natural results—the infliction of death agony on the victim, the destruction of all his possibilities of happiness, the entailed sufferings to his belongings" (Spencer, Ibid., p. 120).

The external constraints thus serve as a schoolmaster to bring the race and the individual to internal restraint. Gradually the abstract sense of coerciveness, authoritativeness, the need of controlling the present by the future good is disentangled, and there arises the sense of duty in general. But even this "is transitory and will diminish as fast as moralization increases" (Ibid., p. 127). Persistence in performance of a duty makes it a pleasure; an habitually exercised obligation is naturally agreeable.

In the present state of evolutionary development, obligation, or the demands made by the external environment, and spontaneous inclination, or the demand of the organism, cannot coincide. But at the goal of evolution, the organism and environment will be in perfect adjustment. Actions congenial to the former and appropriate to the latter will completely coincide. "In their proper times and places, and proportions, the moral sentiments will guide men just as spontaneously and adequately as now do the sensations" (Ibid., p. 129).

Criticism of Utilitarianism.—The utilitarian account of the development of the consciousness of duty or its emphasis upon concrete facts of social arrangements and education affords a much-needed supplement to the empty and abstract formalism of Kant. (i.) The individual is certainly brought to his actual recognition of specific duties and to his consciousness of obligation or moral law in general through social influences. Bain insists more upon the family training and discipline of its immature members; Bentham and Spencer more upon the general institutional conditions, or the organization of government, law, judicial procedure, crystallized custom, and public opinion. In reality, these two conditions imply and reënforce each other. It is through the school of the family, for the most part, that the meaning of the requirements of the larger and more permanent institutions are brought home to the individual; while, on the other hand, the family derives the aims and values which it enforces upon the attention of its individual members mainly from the larger society in which it finds its own setting. (ii.) The later utilitarianism, in its insistence upon an "internal sanction," upon the ideal personal, or free facsimile of public authority, upon regard for "intrinsic consequences," corrects the weak point in Bentham (who relies so unduly upon mere threat of punishment and mere fear of pain) and approximates in practical effect, though not in theory, Kant's doctrine of the connection of duty with the rational or "larger" self which is social, even if individual. Even in its revised version utilitarianism did not wholly escape from the rigid unreal separation between the selfhood of the agent and his social surroundings forced upon it by its hedonistic psychology.

Fictitious Theory of Nature of Self.—The supposition that the individual starts with mere love of private pleasure, and that, if he ever gets beyond to consideration of the good of others, it is because others have forced their good upon him by interfering with his private pleasures, is pure fiction. The requirements, encouragements, and approbations of others react not primarily upon the pleasures and calculations of the individual, but upon his activities, upon his inclinations, desires, habits. There is a common defect in the utilitarian and Kantian psychology. Both neglect the importance of the active, the organically spontaneous and direct tendencies which enter into the individual. Both assume unreal "states of consciousness," passive sensations, and feelings. Active tendencies may be internally modified and redirected by the very conditions and consequences of their own exercise. Family discipline, jural influences, public opinion, may do little, or they may do much. But their educative influence is as far from the mere association of feelings of pleasure and pain as it is from Kant's purely abstract law. Social influences enable an individual to realize the weight and import of the socially available and helpful manifestations of the tendencies of his own nature and to discriminate them from those which are socially harmful or useless. When the two conflict, the perception of the former is the recognition of duties as distinct from mere inclinations.