Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics

by John Dewey

An institution is, as we have seen the expression of unity of desires and ideas; it is general intelligence in action, or common will. As such common will, it is, as respects the merely private or exclusive wants and aims of its members, absolutely sovereign. It must aim to control them. It must set before them the common end or ideal and insist upon this as the only real end of individual conduct. The ends so imposed by the public reason are laws. But these laws are for the sake of realizing the common end, of securing that organized unity of action in which alone the individual can find freedom and fullness of action, or his own satisfaction. Thus the activity of the common will gives freedom, or rights, to the various members of the institution.

Every institution, then, has its sovereignty, or authority, and its laws and rights. It is only a false abstraction which makes us conceive of sovereignty, or authority, and of law and of rights as inhering only in some supreme organization, as the national state. The family, the school, the neighborhood group, has its authority as respects its members, imposes its ideals of action, or laws, and confers its respective satisfactions in way of enlarged freedom, or rights. It is true that no one of these institutions is isolated; that each stands in relation with other like and unlike institutions. Each minor institution is a member of some more comprehensive whole, to which it bears the same relation that the individual bears to it. That is to say, its sovereignty gives way to the authority of the more comprehensive organization; its laws must be in harmony with the laws which flow from the larger activity; its rights must become aspects of a fuller satisfaction. Only humanity or the organized activity of all the wants, powers and interests common to men, can have absolute sovereignty, law and rights.

But the narrower group has its relations, none the less, although, in ultimate analysis, they flow from and manifest the wider good, which, as wider, must be controlling. Without such minor local authorities, rights and laws, humanity would be a meaningless abstraction, and its activity wholly empty. There is an authority in the family, and the moral growth of the child consists in identifying the law of his own conduct with the ends aimed at by the institution, and in growing into maturity and freedom of manhood through the rights which are bestowed upon him as such a member. Within its own range this institution is ultimate. But its range is not ultimate; the family, valuable and sacred as it is, does not exist for itself. It is not a larger selfishness. It exists as one mode of realizing that comprehensive common good to which all institutions must contribute, if they are not to decay. It is the same with property, the school, the local church, and with the national state.

We can now translate into more concrete terms what was said, in Part I, regarding the good, obligation and freedom. That performance of function which is 'the good', is now seen to consist in vital union with, and reproduction of, the practical institutions of which one is a member. The maintenance of such institutions by the free participation therein of individual wills, is, of itself, the common good. Freedom also gets concreteness; it is the assured rights, or powers of action which one gets as such a member:—powers which are not mere claims, nor simply claims recognized as valid by others, but claims re-inforced by the will of the whole community. Freedom becomes real in the ethical world; it becomes force and efficiency of action, because it does not mean some private possession of the individual, but means the whole coöperating and organized action of an institution in securing to an individual some power of self expression.

LVI.

Moral Law and the Ethical World.

Without the idea of the ethical world, as the unified activity of diverse functions exercised by different individuals, the idea of the good, and of freedom, would be undefined. But probably no one has ever attempted to conceive of the good and of freedom in total abstraction from the normal activity of man. Such has not been the lot of duty, or of the element of law. Often by implication, sometimes in so many words, it is stated that while a physical law may be accounted for, since it is simply an abstract from observed facts, a moral law stands wholly above and apart from actual facts; it expresses solely what 'ought to be' and not what is; that, indeed, whether anything in accordance with it ever has existed or not, is a matter of no essential moral importance theoretically, however it may be practically. Now it is evident that a law of something which has not existed, does not and perhaps never will exist, is essentially inexplicable and mysterious. It is as against such a notion of moral law that the idea of a real ethical world has perhaps its greatest service.

A moral law, e. g., the law of justice, is no more merely a law of what ought to be than is the law of gravitation. As the latter states a certain relation of moving masses to one another, so the law of justice states a certain relation of active wills to one another. For a given individual, at a given time and circumstances, the law of justice may appear as the law of something which ought to be, but is not:—is not for him in this respect, that is to say. But the very fact that it ought to be for him implies that it already is for others. It is a law of the society of which he is a member. And it is because he is a member of a society having this law, that is a law of what should be for him.

Would then justice cease to be a law for him if it were not observed at all in the society of which he is a member? Such a question is as contradictory as asking what would happen to a planet if the solar system went out of existence. It is the law of justice (with other such laws) that makes society; that is, it is those active relations which find expression in these laws that unify individuals so that they have a common end, and thus mutual duties. To imagine the abolition of these laws is to imagine the abolition of society; and to ask for the law of individual conduct apart from all relationship, actual or ideal, to society, is to ask in what morality consists when moral conditions are destroyed. A society in which the social bond we call justice does not obtain to some degree in the relations of man to man, is not society; and, on the other hand, wherever some law of justice actually obtains, there the law is for every individual who is a member of the society.

This does not mean that the 'is', the actual status of the moral world, is identical with the 'ought', or the ideal relations of man to man. But it does mean that there is no obligation, either in general or as any specific duty, which does not grow out of the 'is', the actual relations now obtaining.[1] The ethical world at any given time is undoubtedly imperfect, and, therefore, it demands a certain act to meet the situation. The very imperfection, the very badness in the present condition of things, is a part of the environment with reference to which we must act; it is, thus, an element in the law of future action that it shall not exactly repeat the existing condition. In other words, the 'is' gives the law of the 'ought', but it is a part of this law that the 'ought' shall not be as the 'is'. It is because the relation of justice does hold in members of a stratum of society, having a certain position, power or wealth, but does not hold between this section and another class, that the law of what should be is equal justice for all. In holding that actual social relations afford the law of what should be, we must not forget that these actual relations have a negative as well as a positive side, and that the new law must be framed in view of the negatives, the deficiencies, the wrongs, the contradictions, as well as of the positive attainments. A moral law, to sum up, is the principle of action, which, acted upon, will meet the needs of the existing situation as respects the wants, powers, and circumstances of the individuals concerned. It is no far-away abstraction, but expresses the movement of the ethical world.