John Dewey

“ 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. ”

“ Separating, as far as we can, his theory of the good from that of duty, we get the following results:
1. Goodness belongs to the will, and to that alone. [79] "Nothing can possibly be conceived, in the world or out of it, which can be called good without qualification except a good will." The will is not good because of what it brings about, or what it is fitted to bring about; that is, it is not good on account of its adaptation to any end outside of itself. It is good in itself. "It is like a jewel which shines by its own light, having its whole value in itself." ”

“ The moral life is left a series of shreds and patches, where each act is torn off, as to its moral value, from every other. Each act is right or wrong, according as it gives pleasure or pain, and independently of any whole of life. There is, indeed, no whole of moral life at all, but only a series of isolated, disconnected acts. Possession, passivity, mere feeling, by its very nature cannot unite—each feeling is itself and that is the end of it. It is action which reduces multiplicity to unity. We cannot say, in the hedonistic theory, that pleasure is the end, but pleasures. ”

“ Does duty itself disappear when its constraint disappears? On the contrary, so far as an act is done unwillingly, under constraint, so far the act is impure, and undutiful. The very fact that there is need of constraint shows that the self is divided; that there is a two-fold interest and purpose—one [156] in the law of the activity according to function, the other in the special end of the particular desire. Let the act be done wholly as duty, and it is done wholly for its own sake; love, passion take the place of constraint. ”

“ Moreover, by placing morality in activity and not in some thing, or in conformity to an external law, Christianity changed the nature of the struggle. While the old struggle had been an effort to get away from evil to a good beyond, Christianity made the struggle itself a good. It, then, was no longer the effort to escape to some fixed, unchanging state; the constant onward movement was itself the goal. Virtue, as Hegel says, is the battle, the struggle, carried to its full. ”

“ The real distinction is not between the consciousness of an action with, and without, the recognition of duty, but between a consciousness which is and one which is not capable of conduct. Any being who is capable of putting before himself ideas as motives of conduct, who is capable of forming a conception of something which he would realize, is, by that very fact, capable of a sense of obligation. The consciousness of an end to be realized, the idea of something to be done, is, in and of itself, the consciousness of duty. ”

“ It is a "sense of dignity" belonging to man which makes his judgment of pleasure better than that of animals; it is the human being against the pig, Socrates against the fool, the good man against the rascal. This is the complete surrender of hedonism, and the all but explicit assertion that human character, goodness, wisdom, are the criteria of pleasure, instead of pleasure the criterion of character and goodness. Mill's "sense of dignity," which is to be considered in all estimates of pleasures, is just the sense of a moral (or active) capacity and destiny belonging to man. ”

“ Institutions, then, are organized modes of action, on the basis of the wants and interests which unite men. They differ as the family from the town, the church from the state, according to the scope and character of the wants from which they spring. They are not bare facts like objects of knowledge; they are practical, existing for the sake of, and by means of the will—as execution of ideas which have interest. Because they are expressions of common purposes and ideas, they are not merely private will and intelligence, but, in the literal sense, public will and reason. ”

“ A rule is a tool of analysis. The moral situation, or capacity in its relation to environment, is often an extremely complicated affair. How shall the individual resolve it? How shall he pick it to pieces, so as to see its real nature and the act demanded by it? It is evident that the analysis will be the more truly and speedily performed if the agent has a method by which to attack it, certain principles in the light of which he may view it, instruments for cross-questioning it and making it render up its meaning. ”

“ Pleasure, as conceived by the hedonist, is passive, merely agreeable sensations, without any objective and qualitative (active) character. This being so, there is no permanent, fixed basis to which we may refer acts and by which we may judge them. A standard implies a single comprehensive end which unifies all acts and through connection with which each gets its moral value fixed. Only action can be a standard for acts. To reduce all acts to means to getting a mere state of feeling is the inevitable consequence of hedonism. So reducing them is to deprive them of any standard of value. ”

“ The capacity of freedom lies in the power to form an ideal or conception of an end. Actual freedom lies in the realization of that end which actually satisfies. An end may be freely adopted, and yet its actual working out may result not in freedom, but in slavery. It may result in rendering the agent more subject to his passions, less able to direct his own conduct, and more cramped and feeble in powers. Only that end which executed really effects greater energy and comprehensiveness of character makes for actual freedom. ”

“ The mere conception of an end is purely intellectual; there is nothing in it to move to action. It must be felt as valuable, as worth having, and as more valuable than the present condition before it can induce to action. It must interest, in a word, and thus excite desire. But if feeling is, as Kant declares, to be excluded from the motive to action, because it is pathological or related to pleasure as the object of desire, how can there be any force moving to action? The mind seems to be set over against a purely theoretical idea of an end, with nothing to connect the mind with the end. ”

“ It is not the business of any theory, however correct as a theory, to lay down rules for conduct. The theory has simply to discover what the end is, and it is the end in view which determines specific acts. It is no more the business of ethics to tell what in particular a man ought to do, than it is of trigonometry to survey land. But trigonometry must state the principles by which land is surveyed, and so ethics must state the end by which conduct is governed. The objection to hedonism and Kantianism is that the end they give does not itself stand in any practical relation to conduct. ”

“ No one doubts that a good father or a good citizen is a good man, in so far forth. Are we ready to say that a good chemist or good carpenter, or good musician is, in so far, a good man? In a word, is there not a reference to the good of persons present in one case and absent in another, and does not its absence preclude the scientific and artistic activities from any share, as such, in the moral end? ”

“ To judge otherwise, is, on hedonistic principles, to be careless, perhaps criminally careless as to one's conduct. The more convinced a man is of the truth of hedonism and the more conscientious he is, the more he is bound not to be guided by previous circumstances, but to form his judgment anew concerning the new case. This result flows out of the very nature of the hedonistic ideal. Pleasure is not an activity, but simply a particular feeling, enduring only while it is felt. ”

“ Yet the moment a man begins to live on the plane of past satisfaction as such, he has begun to live on the plane of 'sense', or for pleasure. The refusal to recognize the ideal good, to acknowledge activity as good, throws the agent back into a life of dwelling upon his own sensible good, and thus he falls more and more into a life of dwelling upon mere sensations. What made the past good a good at all was the spirit, the activity, in it, and when it is no longer an activity, but a mere keeping, the life is gone out of it. ”

“ When desire and duty, that is, when desires based on past having and on future acting, conflict, the bad man lets duty go. He virtually denies that it is a good at all—it may be a good in the abstract but not a good for him. He denies that obligation as such has any value; that any end is to be consulted save his own state of mind. He denies that there is law for conduct—at least any law beyond the inclination which he happens to have at the time of action. ”

“ It is contended that hedonism fails to satisfy these needs. According to it, the end for each man is his own pleasure. Pleasure is nothing objective in which men may equally participate. It is purely individual in the most exclusive sense of that term. It is a state of feeling and can be enjoyed only while felt, and only by the one who feels it. To set it up for the ideal of conduct is to turn life into an exclusive and excluding struggle for possession of the means of personal enjoyment; it is to erect into a principle the idea of the war of all against all. ”

“ What kind of an interest is our interest in persons, our distinctively social interest? Suppose we attempt to separate our interests in truth, beauty, and use from our interest in persons: What remains in the persons to be interested in? Is not a necessary part of out interest in persons, an interest in them as beings fulfilling their respective intellectual and artistic capacities; and if we cut this out of our social interest, have we not maimed and stunted our interest in persons? We wish the fullest life possible to ourselves and to others. ”

“ So far is it from true that the only moral sentiment is reverence for law, that men must have been moved toward action for centuries by motives of love and hate and social regard, before they became capable of such an abstract feeling as reverence. And it may be questioned whether this feeling, as Kant treats it, is even the highest or ultimate form of moral sentiment—whether it is not transitional to love, in which there is complete union of the individual interest on one hand, and the objective end on the other. ”

“ It is not pretended that there is in the very order of things any necessary and intrinsic connection between the happiness of one and of another. Such identity as exists, therefore, must be a mere external result of the action of certain forces. It is accidental. This being the case, how can it constitute the universal ideal of action? Why is it not open for an agent, under exceptional circumstances, to act for his own pleasure, to the exclusion of that of others? ”

“ But aside from some moral system into connection with which a proposed end may be brought, for purposes of comparison, lying is just as capable as truth-telling of generalization. There is no more contradiction in the motive of universal stealing than there is in that of universal honesty—unless there is as standard some order or system of things into which the proposed action is to fit as a member. And this makes not the bare universality of the act, but the system, the real criterion for determining the morality of the act. ”

“ To desire pleasure instead of an activity of self, is to substitute symbol for fact, and a symbol cut off from fact ceases to be a symbol. Pleasure, as the hedonist treats it, mere agreeable feeling without active and thus objective relationships, is wholly an abstraction. Since an abstraction, to make it the end of desire results in self-contradiction; while to make it the standard of conduct is to deprive life of all unity, all system, in a word—of all standard. ”

“ Morality properly so-called—the science of right conduct—has for its object to determine how and why certain rules of conduct are detrimental, and certain other rules beneficial. Those good and bad results cannot be accidental, but must be necessary consequences of the constitution of things; and I conceive it to be the business of moral science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness. ”

“ To complete their scientific and artistic character is to set these facts in motion; to hurl them against the world of physical forces till new instruments of man's activity are formed, and to set them in circulation so that others may also participate in their truth and rejoice in their beauty. So far as scientific or artistic attainments are treasured as individual possessions, so far it is true that they are not social—but so far it is also true that they are immoral: indeed that they are not fully scientific or artistic, being subordinated to having certain sensations. ”

“ The System of Individual Conduct. We must be careful not to interpret the idea of specific function too rigidly or abstractly. It does not mean that each one has some supreme mission in life to which everything else must be sacrificed—that a man is to be an artist, or a soldier, or a student, or a day-laborer and nothing else. On the contrary, the idea of function is that which comprehends all the various sides of life, and it cannot be narrowed below the meaning we have already given: the due adjustment of capacity and surroundings. ”

“ We do not measure conduct by pleasure, but we compare and sum up pleasures on the basis of the objects which occasion them. To add feelings, mere transitory consequences, without first reducing those feelings to a common denominator by their relation to one objective standard, is an impossibility. Pleasure is a sort of sign or symbol of the object which satisfies, and we may carry on our judgment, if we will, in terms of the sign, without reference to the standard, but to argue as if the sign were the thing, as if the sum of pleasure were the activity, is suicidal. ”

“ Wherever there is any capacity or any circumstance, no matter how trivial, there is something included in the exercise of function, and, therefore to be satisfied—according to its place, of course, in the whole of life. Amusements and all the minor details of life are included within the scope of morality. They are elements in the exercise of function, and their insignificance and triviality does not exclude them from the grasp of duty and of the good. ”