Outlines of a Critical Theory of EthicsDewey, John
Philosophy
Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics
Dewey, John
Ethics
Thus far our examination of the hedonistic criterion has been devoted
to showing that it will not make a system out of individual conduct.
We have now to recognize the fact that pleasure is not a common good,
and therefore fails to give a social unity to conduct--that is, it does
not offer an end for which men may coöperate, or a good which reached
by one must be shared by another. No argument is needed to show,
theoretically, that any proposed moral criterion must, in order to be
valid, harmonize the interests and activities of different men, or to
show, practically, that the whole tendency of the modern democratic
and philanthropic movement has been to discover and realize a good
in which men shall share on the basis of an equal principle. 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. No end more thoroughly disintegrating than individual agreeable
sensation could well be imagined.
Says Kant, (page 116 of Abbott's Trans., entitled Kant's
Theory of Ethics) on the basis of the desire of happiness
"there results a harmony like that which a certain
satirical poem depicts as existing between a married couple
bent on going to ruin: O, marvellous harmony, what he
wishes, she wishes also; or like what is said of the pledge
of Francis I to the emperor Charles V, what my brother
Charles wishes that I wish also (_viz._, Milan)."
Almost all modern moralists who take pleasure as the end conceive it
to be not individual pleasure, but the happiness of all men or even
of all sentient creatures. Thus we are brought to the consideration of
Utilitarianism.
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