Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
If we are dissatisfied with custom and habit and seek to take philosophy
for the guide of life we have two possibilities: (1) we may look for the
good, and treat right and duty as subordinate concepts which indicate
the way to the good, that is, consider them as good as a means, or (2)
we may seek first to do right irrespective of consequences, in the
belief that in willing to do right we are already in possession of the
highest good. In either case we may consider our standards and values
either as in some sense fixed or as in the making.[68] We may suppose
that good is objective and absolute, that right is discovered by a
rational faculty, or we may consider that in regarding good as objective
we have not made it independent of the valuing process and that in
treating right as a standard we have not thereby made it a fixed concept
to be discovered by the pure intellect. The position of this paper will
be (1) that good while objective is yet objective as a value and not as
an essence or physical fact; (2) that a social factor in value throws
light upon the relation between moral and other values; (3) that right
is not merely a means to the good but has an independent place in the
moral consciousness; (4) that right while signifying order does not
necessarily involve a timeless, eternal order since it refers to an
order of personal relations; (5) that the conception of right instead of
being a matter for pure reason or even the "cognitive faculty" shows an
intimate blending of the emotional and intellectual and that this
appears particularly in the conception of the reasonable.
(1) We begin with the question of the synthetic and objective character
of the good. With G. E. Moore as with the utilitarians the good is the
ultimate concept. Right and duty are means to the good. Moore and
Rashdall also follow Sidgwick in regarding good as unique, that is, as
"synthetic." Sidgwick emphasized in this especially the point that moral
value cannot be decided by physical existence or the course of
evolution, nor can the good be regarded as meaning the pleasant. Moore
and Russell reinforce this. However true it may be that pleasure is one
among other good things or that life is one among other good things,
good does not mean either pleasure or survival. Good means just "good."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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