Ethics

by John Dewey; James Hayden Tufts

At some periods, this view has led to a monastic retreat from all social affairs for the sake of cultivating personal goodness. At other times, it has led to the political indifference of the Cynic and Stoic. For ages, it led to a morality of "other worldliness"; to the belief that true goodness can be attained only in another kind of life and world—a belief which carried with it relative contempt and neglect of concrete social conditions in this life. Social affairs at best were only "secular" and temporal, and, in contrast with the eternal and spiritual salvation of the individual's own soul, of little account. After the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, this kind of moral individualism persisted in different forms. Among the hedonists, it took the form of assuming that while social arrangements are of very great importance, their importance lies in the fact that they hinder or help individuals in the attainment of their own private pleasures. The transcendentalists (such as Kant) asserted that, since morality is wholly a matter of the inner motive, of the personal attitude towards the moral law, social conditions are wholly external. Good or evil lies wholly inside the individual's own will. Social institutions may help or hinder the outward execution of moral purpose; they may be favorable or hostile to the successful outward display of virtue. But they have nothing to do with originating or developing the moral purpose, the Good Will, and hence, in themselves, are lacking in moral significance. Thus Kant made a sharp and fast distinction between morality, appertaining solely to the individual's own inner consciousness, and legality, appertaining to the social and political conditions of outward behavior. Social institutions and laws may indeed regulate men's outer acts. So far as men externally conform, their conduct is legal. But laws cannot regulate or touch men's motives, which alone determine the morality of their behavior.

We shall not repeat here our prior criticisms of hedonism and utilitarianism in order to point out the falsity of this division of moral action into unrelated inner (or private) and outer (or social) factors. We may recall to memory, however, that Kant himself virtually passed beyond his own theory of moral individualism in insisting upon the promotion of a "Kingdom of Ends," in which every person is to be treated as an end in himself. We may recall that the later utilitarians (such as Mill, Leslie Stephen, Bain, and Spencer) insisted upon the educative value of social institutions, upon their importance in forming certain interests and habits in the individual. Thus social arrangements were taken out of the category of mere means to private good, and made the necessary factors and conditions of the development of an individuality which should have a reasonable and just conception of its own nature and of its own good. We may also enumerate some of the more fundamental ways in which social institutions determine individual morality.

1. Apart from the social medium, the individual would never "know himself"; he would never become acquainted with his own needs and capacities. He would live the life of a brute animal, satisfying as best he could his most urgent appetites of hunger, thirst, and sex, but being, as regards even that, handicapped in comparison with other animals. And, as we have already seen, the wider and the richer the social relationships into which an individual enters, the more fully are his powers evoked, and the more fully is he brought to recognize the possibilities latent in them. It is from seeing noble architecture and hearing harmonious music that the individual learns to know to what his own constructive and rhythmic tendencies, otherwise blind and inchoate, may come. It is from achievement in industrial, national, and family life that he is initiated into perception of his own energy, loyalty, and affection.

2. Social conditions not only evoke what is latent, and bring to conscious recognition what is blind, but they select, encourage, and confirm certain tendencies at the expense of others. They enable the individual to discriminate the better and the worse among his tendencies and achievements. There is no limit in the power of society to awaken and strengthen this habit of discrimination, of choice after comparison, in its individual members. A small social group with fixed habits, a clan, a gang, a narrow sect, a dogmatic party, will restrict the formation of critical powers—i.e., of conscientiousness or moral thoughtfulness. But an individual who really becomes a member of modern society, with its multiple occupations, its easy intercourse, its free mobility, its rich resources of art and science, will have only too many opportunities for reflective judgment and personal valuation and preference. The very habits of individual moral initiative, of personal criticism of the existent order, and of private projection of a better order, to which moral individualists point as proofs of the purely "inner" nature of morality, are themselves effects of a variable and complex social order.

The Moral Value of the State.—If then we take modern social life in its broadest extent, as including not only what has become institutionalized and more or less fossilized, but also what is still growing (forming and re-forming), we may justly say that it is as true of progressive as of stationary society, that the moral and the social are one. The virtues of the individual in a progressive society are more reflective, more critical, involve more exercise of comparison and selection, than in customary society. But they are just as socially conditioned in their origin and as socially directed in their manifestation.

In rudimentary societies, customs furnish the highest ends of achievement; they supply the principles of social organization and combination; and they form binding laws whose breach is punished. The moral, political, and legal are not differentiated. But village communities and city-states, to say nothing of kingdoms and empires and modern national States, have developed special organs and special regulations for maintaining social unity and public order. Small groups are usually firmly welded together and are exclusive. They have a narrow but intense social code:—like a patriarchal family, a gang, a social set, they are clannish. But when a large number of such groups come together within a more inclusive social unity, some institution grows up to represent the interests and activities of the whole as against the narrow and centrifugal tendencies of the constituent factors. A society is then politically organized; and a true public order with its comprehensive laws is brought into existence. The moral importance of the development of this public point of view, with its extensive common purposes and with a general will for maintaining them, can hardly be overestimated. Without such organization, society and hence morality would remain sectional, jealous, suspicious, unfraternal. Sentiments of intense cohesion within would have been conjoined with equally strong sentiments of indifference, intolerance, and hostility to those without. In the wake of the formation of States have followed more widely co-operative activities, more comprehensive and hence more reasonable principles of judgment and outlook. The individual has been emancipated from his relative submergence in the local and fixed group, and set upon his own feet, with varied fields of activity open to him in which to try his powers, and furnished with principles of judging conduct and projecting ideals which in theory, at least, are as broad as the possibilities of humanity itself.

§ 2. RESPONSIBILITY AND FREEDOM

The more comprehensive and diversified the social order, the greater the responsibility and the freedom of the individual. His freedom is the greater, because the more numerous are the effective stimuli to action, and the more varied and the more certain the ways in which he may fulfill his powers. His responsibility is greater because there are more demands for considering the consequences of his acts; and more agencies for bringing home to him the recognition of consequences which affect not merely more persons individually, but which also influence the more remote and hidden social ties.

Liability.—Freedom and responsibility have a relatively superficial and negative meaning and a relatively positive central meaning. In its external aspect, responsibility is liability. An agent is free to act; yes, but—. He must stand the consequences, the disagreeable as well as the pleasant, the social as well as the physical. He may do a given act, but if so, let him look out. His act is a matter that concerns others as well as himself, and they will prove their concern by calling him to account; and if he cannot give a satisfactory and credible account of his intention, subject him to correction. Each community and organization informs its members what it regards as obnoxious, and serves notice upon them that they have to answer if they offend. The individual then is (1) likely or liable to have to explain and justify his behavior, and is (2) liable or open to suffering consequent upon inability to make his explanation acceptable.

Positive Responsibility.—In this way the individual is made aware of the stake the community has in his behavior; and is afforded an opportunity to take that interest into account in directing his desires and making his plans. If he does so, he is a responsible person. The agent who does not take to heart the concern which others show that they have in his conduct, will note his liability only as an evil to which he is exposed, and will take it into consideration only to see how to escape or evade it. But one whose point of view is sympathetic and reasonable will recognize the justice of the community interest in his performances; and will recognize the value to him of the instruction contained in its assertions of its interest. Such an one responds, answers, to the social demands made; he is not merely called to answer. He holds himself responsible for the consequences of his acts; he does not wait to be held liable by others. When society looks for responsible workmen, teachers, doctors, it does not mean merely those whom it may call to account; it can do that in any case. It wants men and women who habitually form their purposes after consideration of the social consequences of their execution. Dislike of disapprobation, fear of penalty, play a part in generating this responsive habit; but fear, operating directly, occasions only cunning or servility. Fused, through reflection, with other motives which prompt to action, it helps bring about that apprehensiveness, or susceptibility to the rights of others, which is the essence of responsibility, which in turn is the sole ultimate guarantee of social order.