Outlines of a Critical Theory of EthicsDewey, John
Philosophy
Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics
Dewey, John
Ethics
Virtues, then, are cardinal, and character is integral, just in the
degree in which every want is a want of the whole man. So far as this
occurs, the burden of the moral struggle is transformed into freedom of
movement. There is no longer effort to bring the particular desire into
conformity with a law, or a universal, outside itself. The fitting
in of each special desire, as it arises, to the organism of character
takes place without friction, as a natural re-adjustment. There is not
constraint, but growth. On the other side, the attained character does
not tend to petrify into a fixed possession which resists the response
to needs that grow out of the enlarged environment. It is plastic to
new wants and demands; it does not require to be wrenched and wracked
into agreement with the required act, but moves into it, of itself. The
law is not an external ideal, but the principle of the movement. There
is the identity of freedom and law in the good.
This union of inclination and duty in act is the practical end. All the
world's great reformers have set as their goal this ideal, which may be
termed either the freeing of wants, or the humanizing of the moral law.
It will help summarize our whole discussion, if we see how the theories
of hedonism and of Kant have endeavored to express this same goal.
Hedonism, indeed, has this identity for its fundamental principle.
It holds strongly to the idea of moral law immanent in human wants
themselves. But its error lies in taking this identity of desire and
the good, as a direct or immediate unity, while, in reality, it exists
only in and through activity; it is a unity which can be attained only
as the result of a process. It mistakes an ideal which is realized only
in action for bare fact which exists of itself.
Hedonism, as represented by Spencer, recognizes, it is true, that
the unity of desire and duty is not an immediate or natural one; but
only to fall into the error of holding that the separation is due to
some external causes, and that when these are removed we shall have a
fixed millenium. As against this doctrine, we must recognize that the
difference between want and duty is always removed so far as conduct
is moral; that it is not an ideal in the sense of something to be
attained at some remote period, but an ideal in the sense of being
the very meaning of moral activity whenever and wherever it occurs.
The realizing of this ideal is not something to be sometime reached
once for all, but progress is itself the ideal. Wants are ever growing
larger, and thus freedom ever comes to have a wider scope (Sec. LXV).
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