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
One is the fact that we are inclined to take the notions of goodness in
character and goodness in results in too fixed a way. Persistent
disparity between virtuous disposition and actual outcome shows that we
have misjudged either the nature of virtue or of success. Judgments of
both motive and consequences are still, in the absence of methods of
scientific analysis and continuous registration and reporting,
rudimentary and conventional. We are inclined to wholesale judgments of
character, dividing men into goats and sheep, instead of recognizing
that all character is speckled, and that the problem of moral judgment
is one of discriminating the complex of acts and habits into tendencies
which are to be _specifically_ cultivated and condemned. We need to
study consequences more thoroughly and keep track of them more
continuously before we shall be in a position where we can pass with
reasonable assurance upon the good and evil in either disposition or
results. But even when proper allowances are made, we are forcing the
pace when we assume that there is or ever can be an exact equation of
disposition and outcome. We have to admit the rôle of accident.
We cannot get beyond tendencies, and must perforce content ourselves
with judgments of tendency. The honest man, we are told, acts upon
"principle" and not from considerations of expediency, that is, of
particular consequences. The truth in this saying is that it is not safe
to judge the worth of a proposed act by its probable consequences in an
isolated case. The word "principle" is a eulogistic cover for the fact
of _tendency_. The word "tendency" is an attempt to combine two facts,
one that habits have a certain causal efficacy, the other that their
outworking in any particular case is subject to contingencies, to
circumstances which are unforeseeable and which carry an act one side of
its usual effect. In cases of doubt, there is no recourse save to stick
to "tendency," that is, to the probable effect of a habit in the long
run, or as we say upon the whole. Otherwise we are on the lookout for
exceptions which favor our immediate desire. The trouble is that we are
not content with modest probabilities. So when we find that a good
disposition may work out badly, we say, as Kant did, that the
working-out, the consequence, has nothing to do with the moral quality
of an act, or we strain for the impossible, and aim at some infallible
calculus of consequences by which to measure moral worth in each
specific case.
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