Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychologyDewey, John
Philosophy
Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
Dewey, John
Habit; Social psychology
But among these diversities there is agreement about one fundamental.
There must be a separate non-natural faculty of moral knowledge because
the things to be known, the matters of right and wrong, good and evil,
obligation and responsibility, form a separate domain, separate that is
from that of ordinary action in its usual human and social significance.
The latter activities may be prudential, political, scientific,
economic. But, from the standpoint of these theories, they have no moral
meaning until they are brought under the purview of this separate unique
department of our nature. It thus turns out that the so-called
intuitional theories of moral knowledge concentrate in themselves all
the ideas which are subject to criticism in these pages: Namely, the
assertion that morality is distinct in origin, working and destiny from
the natural structure and career of human nature. This fact is the
excuse, if excuse be desired, for a seemingly technical excursion that
links intellectual activity with the conjoint operation of habit and
impulse.
III
So far the discussion has ignored the fact that there is an influential
school of moralists (best represented in contemporary thought by the
utilitarians) which also insists upon the natural, empirical character
of moral judgments and beliefs. But unfortunately this school has
followed a false psychology; and has tended, by calling out a reaction,
actually to strengthen the hands of those who persist in assigning to
morals a separate domain of action and in demanding a separate agent of
moral knowledge. The essentials of this false psychology consist in two
traits. The first, that knowledge originates from sensations (instead of
from habits and impulses); and the second, that judgment about good and
evil in action consists in calculation of agreeable and disagreeable
consequences, of profit and loss. It is not surprising that this view
seems to many to degrade morals, as well as to be false to facts. If the
logical outcome of an empirical view of moral knowledge is that all
morality is concerned with calculating what is expedient, politic,
prudent, measured by consequences in the ways of pleasurable and painful
sensations, then, say moralists of the orthodox school, we will have
naught to do with such a sordid view: It is a reduction to the absurd of
its premisses. We will have a separate department for morals and a
separate organ of moral knowledge.
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