Ethics

by John Dewey; James Hayden Tufts

The Corresponding Problems of Theory.—Theory will then have similar problems to deal with. (1) What is the Good, the end in any voluntary act? (2) How is this good known? Is it directly perceived, and if so, how? Or is it worked out through inquiry and reflection? And if so, how? (3) When the good is known, how is it acknowledged; how does it acquire authority? What is the place of law, of control, in the moral life? Why is it that some ends are attractive of themselves, while others present themselves as duties, as involving subordination of what is naturally attractive? (4) What is the place of selfhood in the moral process? And this question assumes two forms: (a) What is the relation of the good of the self to the good of others? (b) What is the difference between the morally good and the morally bad in the self? What are virtues and vices as dispositions of the self? These abstract and formal questions will become more concrete if we consider them briefly in the order of their development in the history of the moral theory.

Problem of Knowledge of Good Comes First in Theory.—The clash and overlapping of customs once so local as to be isolated, brought to Athenian moral philosophers the problem of discovering the underlying and final good to which all the conflicting values of customs might be referred for judgment. The movement initiated by Socrates was precisely the effort to find out what is the real good, the true end, of all the various institutions, customs, and procedures current among men. The explanation of conflict among men's interests, and of lack of consistency and unity in any given person's behavior, of the division of classes in the state, of the diverse recommendations of different would-be moral teachers, was that they were ignorant of their own ends. Hence the fundamental precept is "Know thyself," one's own end, one's good and one's proper function. Different followers of Socrates gave very different accounts of knowledge, and hence proposed very different final aims. But they all agreed that the problem of knowing the good was the central problem, and that if this were settled, action in accord with good would follow of itself. Could it be imagined that man could know his own good and yet not seek it? Ignorance of good is evil and the source of evil; insight into the real good will clear up the confusion and partiality which makes men pursue false ends and thus straighten out and put in order conduct. Control would follow as a matter of course from knowledge of the end. Such control would be no matter of coercion or external restriction, but of subordination and organization of minor ends with reference to the final end.

Problem of Motive Force.[107]—The problem of attaining this knowledge was seen to be attended, however, by peculiar obstructions and difficulties, the growing recognition of which led to a shifting of the problem itself. The dilemma, in brief, was this: The man who is already good will have no difficulty in knowing the good both in general and in the specific clothing under which it presents itself in particular cases. But the one who does not yet know the good, does not know how to know it. His ignorance, moreover, puts positive obstacles in his way, for it leads him to delight in superficial and transitory ends. This delight increases the hold of these ends upon the agent; and thus it builds up an habitual interest in them which renders it impossible for the individual to get a glimpse of the final end, to say nothing of a clear and persisting view. Only if the individual is habituated, exercised, practiced in good ends so as to take delight in them, while he is still so immature as to be incapable of really knowing how and why they are good, will he be capable of knowing the good when he is mature. Pleasure in right ends and pain in wrong must operate as a motive force in order to give experience of the good, before knowledge can be attained and operate as the motor force.

Division of Problem.—But the exercise and training requisite to form the habits which make the individual rejoice in right activity before he knows how and why it is right, presuppose adults who already have knowledge of the good. They presuppose a social order capable not merely of giving theoretic instruction, but of habituating the young to right practices. But where shall such adults be found, and where is the social order so good that it is capable of right training of its own immature members? Hence the problem again shifts, breaking up into two parts. On the one hand, attention is fixed upon the irrational appetites, desires, and impulses, which hinder apprehension of the good; on the other, it is directed to the political laws and institutions which are capable of training the members of the State into a right manner of living. For the most part, these two problems went their own way independently of each other, a fact which resulted in the momentous breach between the inner and "spiritual," and the outer and "physical" aspects of behavior.

Problem of Control of Affections and Desires.—If it is the lively movements of natural appetites and desires which make the individual apprehend false goods as true ones, and which present obstacles to knowledge of the true good, the serious problem is evidently to check and so far as possible to abolish the power of desire to move the mind. Since it is anger, fear, hope, despair, sexual desire which make men regard particular things instead of the final end as good, the great thing is wholly to free attention and judgment from the influence of such passions. It may be impossible to prevent the passions; they are natural perturbations. But man can at least prevent his judgment of what is good or bad from being modified by them. The Stoic moral philosophers most emphasized the misleading influence of desire and passion, and set up the ideal of apathy (lack of passion) and "ataraxy" (absence of being stirred up). The other moral schools, the Sceptics and Epicureans, also made independence of mind from influence of passion the immediate and working end; the Sceptics because they emphasized the condition of mental detachment and non-committal, which is the state appropriate to doubt and uncertainty; the Epicureans because the pleasures of the mind are the only ones not at the mercy of external circumstances. Mental pleasures are equable, and hence are the only ones which do not bring reactions of depression, exhaustion, and subsequent pain. The problem of moral theory is now in effect, if not in name, that of control, of authority and subordination, of checking and restraining desire and passion.

Problem of Control of Private Interests by Law.—Such views could at the best, however, affect only a comparatively small number, the philosophers. For the great masses of men in the Roman Empire, the problem existed on the other line: by what laws and what administration of laws to direct the outward acts of men into right courses, courses at least sufficiently right so as to maintain outward peace and unity through the vast empire. In the Greek city-state, with its small number of free citizens all directly participating in public affairs, it was possible to conceive an ideal of a common good which should bind all together. But in an Empire covering many languages, religions, local customs, varied and isolated occupations, a single system of administration and law exercised from a single central source could alone maintain the requisite harmony. The problems of legislations, codification, and administration were congenial to the Latin mind, and were forced by the actual circumstances. From the external side, then, as well as from the internal, the problem of control became dominant over that of value and the good.

Problem of Unification.—It was the province of the moral philosophers, of the theologians, of the church to attempt a fusion of these elements of inner and outer control. It was their aim to connect, to synthesize these factors into one commanding and comprehensive view of life. But the characteristic of their method was to suppose that the combination could be brought about, whether intellectually or practically, only upon a supernatural basis, and by supernatural resources. From the side of the natural constitution of both man and the State, the various elements of behavior are so hopelessly at war with one another that there is no health in them nor help from them. The appetites and desires are directed only upon carnal goods and form the dominant element in the person. Even when reason gets glimpses of the good, the good seen is narrow in scope and temporal in duration; and even then reason is powerless as an adequate motive. "We perceive the better and we follow the worse." Moreover, it is useless to seek aid from the habituation, the education, the discipline and restraint of human institutions. They themselves are corrupt. The product of man's lower nature cannot be capable of enlightening and improving that nature; at most it can only restrain outer action by appealing to fear. Only a divine revelation can make known man's true end; and only divine assistance, embodied in the ordinances and sacraments of the supernaturally founded and directed church, can bring this knowledge home to erring individuals so as to make it effectual. In theory the conception of the end, the good, was supreme; but man's true good is supernatural and hence can be achieved only by supernatural assistance and in the next world. In practice, therefore, the important thing for man in his present condition is implicit reliance upon and obedience to the requirements of the church. This represents on earth the divine sovereign, ultimate source of all moral law. In effect, the moral law became a net-work of ordinances, prescriptions, commands, rewards, penalties, penances, and remissions. The jural point of view was completely enthroned.[108] There was no problem; there was a final, because a supernatural solution.

The Problems of Individuality and Citizenship.—With the Renaissance began the revolt against the jural view of life. A sense of the joys and delights which attend the free and varied exercise of human capacities in this world was reborn. The first results were a demand for natural satisfaction; the next a profound reawakening of the antique civic and political consciousness. The first in its reaction against the Middle Ages was more individualistic than the Greek ideal, to which it was in some respects allied. The Greek had emphasized the notion of value, but had conceived this as generic, as the fulfillment of the essential nature of man as man. But with the moderns, satisfaction, the good, meant something direct, specific, personal; something the individual as an individual could lay hold of and possess. It was an individual right; it was final and inalienable. Nothing had a right to intervene or deprive the individual of it.

This extreme individualistic tendency was contemporaneous with a transfer of interest from the supernatural church-state over to the commercial, social, and political bodies with which the modern man found himself identified. The rise of the free cities, and more especially the development of national states, with the growth of commerce and exchange, opened to the individual a natural social whole. With this his connections were direct, in this he gained new outlets and joys, and yet it imposed upon him definite responsibilities and exacted of him specific burdens. If the individual had gained a new sense of himself as an individual, he also found himself enmeshed in national states of a power constantly increasing in range and intensity. The problem of the moral theorists was to reconcile these two tendencies, the individualistic and that of political centralization. For a time, the individual felt the social organization in which he was set to be, with whatever incidental inconveniences, upon the whole an outlet and reënforcement of prized personal powers. Hence in observing its conditions, he was securing the conditions of his own peace and tranquillity or even of his own freedom and achievement. But the balance was easily upset, and the problem of the relation of the individual and the social, the private and the public, was soon forced into prominence; a problem which in one form or other has been the central problem of modern ethical theory.

Individualistic Problem.—Only for a short time, during the first flush of new achievement and of hopeful adventure, did extreme individualism and social interests remain naïvely combined. The individualistic tendency found a convenient intellectual tool in a psychology which resolved the individual into an association or series of particular states of feeling and sensations; and the good into a like collection of pleasures also regarded as particular mental states. This psychological atomism made individuals as separate and disconnected as the sensations which constituted their selves were isolated and mutually exclusive. Social arrangements and institutions were, in theory, justifiable only as they could be shown to augment the sum of pleasurable states of feeling of individuals. And as, quite independent of any such precarious theory, the demand for reform of institutions became more and more imperative, the situation was packed by Rousseau into a formula that man was naturally both free and good, and that institutional life had enslaved and thereby depraved him. At the same time, there grew up an enthusiastic and optimistic faith in "Nature," in her kindly intentions for the happiness of humanity, and in her potency to draw it to perfection when artificial restrictions were once out of the way. Individuals, separate in themselves and in their respective goods, were thereby brought into a complete coincidence and harmony of interests. Nature's laws were such that if the individual obeyed them in seeking his own good he could not fail to further the happiness of others. While there developed in France (with original initiative from England) this view of the internal isolation and external harmony of men, a counterpart movement took place in Germany.