Ethics · John Dewey
CHAPTER XVII
THE PLACE OF DUTY IN THE MORAL LIFE: SUBJECTION TO AUTHORITY =Conflict of Ends as Attractive and as Reasonable.=--The previous discussion has brought out the contrast between a Good or Satisfaction which is such _directly_, immediately, by appealing attractively to desire; and one which is such indirectly, through considerations which reflection brings up. As we have seen, the latter must, if entertained at all, arouse some direct emotional response, must be felt to be in some way satisfactory. But the _way_ may be quite unlike that of the end which attracts and holds a man irrespective of the principle brought to light by reflection. The one may be intense, vivid, absorbing, passing at once into overt action, unless checked by a contrary reason. The good whose claim to be good depends mainly on projection of remote considerations, may be theoretically recognized and yet the direct appeal to the particular agent at the particular time be feeble and pallid. The "law of the mind" may assert itself less urgently than the "law of the members" which wars against it.
Sec. 1. THE SUBJECTION OF DESIRE TO LAW Ordinary language sets before us some main facts: duty suggests what is due, a debt to be paid; ought is connected with owe; obligation implies being bound to something--as we speak of "bounden duty." We speak naturally of "meeting obligations"; of duties being "imposed," "laid upon" one. The person who is habitually careless about his duties is "unruly" or "lawless"; one who evades or refuses them is "unprincipled." These ideas suggest there is something required, exacted, having the sanction of law, or a regular and regulative principle; and imply natural aversion to the requirements exacted, a preference for something else. Hence duty as a conscious factor means constraint of inclination; an unwillingness or reluctance which _should_ be overcome but which it is difficult to surmount, requiring an effort which only adequate recognition of the rightful supremacy of the dutiful end will enable one to put forth. Thus we speak of interest conflicting with principle, and desire with duty. While they are inevitably bound together, it will be convenient to discuss separately (1) Inclination and impulse as averse to duty, and (2) Duty as having authority, as expressing law.
Reluctance to the right end, an aversion requiring to be overcome, if at all, by recognition of the superior value of the right end, is then to be accounted for _on the ground of the inertia or momentum of any organized, established tendency_. This momentum gives the common ground to instinctive impulses and deliberately formed habits. The momentum represents the _old_, an adaptation to familiar, customary conditions. So far as similar conditions recur, the formed power functions economically and effectively, supplying ease, promptness, certainty, and agreeableness to the execution of an act. But if new, changed conditions require a serious readjustment of the old habit or appetite, the natural tendency will be to resist this demand. Thus we have precisely the traits of reluctance and constraint which mark the consciousness of duty. A self without habits, one loose and fluid, in which change in one direction is just as easy as in another, would not have the sense of duty. A self with no new possibilities, rigidly set in conditions and perfectly accommodated to them, would not have it. But definite, persistent, urgent tendencies to act in a given way, occurring at the same time with other incompatible tendencies which represent the self more adequately and yet are not organized into habits, afford the conditions of the sense of restraint. If for any reason the unorganized tendency is judged to be the truer expression of self, we have also the sense of lawful constraint. _The constraint of appetite and desire is a phenomenon of practical readjustment, within the structure of character, due to conflict of tendencies so irreconcilable in their existing forms as to demand radical redirection._
When an appetite is in accord with those habits of an individual which enable him to perform his social functions, or which naturally accrue from his social relations, it is legitimate and good; when it conflicts, it is illicit, it is lust; we call it by hard names and we demand that it be curbed; we regard its force as a menace to the integrity of the agent and a threat to social order. When the reflective habits of an individual come into conflict with natural appetites and impulses, the manifestation of which would enlarge or make more certain the powers of the individual in his full relations to others, it is the reflective habits which have to be held in and redirected at the cost of whatever disagreeableness. =(2) The Authority of Duty.=--A duty, in Kant's words, is a _categorical_ imperative--it claims the absolute right of way as against immediate inclination. That which, on one side, is the constraint of natural desire, is, on the other, the authoritative claim of the right end to regulate. Over against the course of action most immediately urgent, most easy and comfortable, so congenial as at once to motivate action unless checked, stands another course, representing a wider and more far-reaching point of view, and hence furnishing the rational end of the situation. However lacking in intensity, however austere this end, it stands for the whole self, and is therefore felt to be rightly supreme over any partial tendency. But since it looks to realization in an uncertain future, rather than permission just to let go what is most urgent at the moment, it requires effort, hard work, work of attention more or less repulsive and uncongenial. Hence that sense of stress and strain, of being pulled one way by inclination and another by the claims of right, so characteristic of an experience of obligation.
Sec. 2. KANTIAN THEORY ="Accord with" Duty versus "from" Duty.=--Kant points out that acts may be "in accordance with duty" and yet not be done "from duty." "It is always, for example, a matter of duty that a dealer should not overcharge an inexperienced purchaser, and wherever there is much commerce the prudent tradesman does not overcharge.... Men are thus honestly served; but this is not enough to prove that the tradesman so acted from duty and from principles of honesty; his own advantage required it" (_Kant's Theory of Ethics_, Abbott's translation, p. 13). In such a case the act externally viewed is in _accordance_ with duty; morally viewed, it proceeds from selfish calculation of personal profit, not from duty. This is true in general of all acts which, though outwardly right, spring from considerations of expediency, and are based on the consideration that "honesty (or whatever) is the best policy." Persons are naturally inclined to take care of their health, their property, their children, or whatever belongs to them. Such acts, no matter how much they accord with duty, are not done _from duty_, but from inclination. If a man is suffering, unfortunate, desirous of death, and yet cherishes his life with no love for it, but from the duty to do so, his motive has truly moral value. So if a mother cares for her child, _because_ she recognizes that it is her duty, the act is truly moral.
"Willingly serve I my friends, but I do it, alas with affection. Hence I am plagued with this doubt, virtue I have not attained!" to which he received the reply: "This is your only resource, you must stubbornly seek to abhor them; Then you can do with disgust that which the law may enjoin." These verses are a caricature of Kant's position; he does not require that affections should be crushed, but that they should be stamped with acknowledgment of law before being accepted as motives. But the verses bring out the absurd element in the notion that the affections and inclinations may not of themselves be morally adequate springs to action,--as if a man could not eat his dinner simply because he was hungry, or be amiable to a companion because he wanted to be, or relieve distress because his compassionate nature urged him to it.
It is worth while noting that some moralists have gone to the opposite extreme and have held that an act is not right unless it expresses the overflowing spontaneity of the affections; that a man's act is only imperfectly right when he performs it not from affection, but from coercion by duty. Thus Emerson speaks of men who "do by knowledge what the stones do by structure." And again, "We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say, 'Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.'" The facts seem to be that while, in a good man, natural impulses and formed habits are adequate motive powers under ordinary conditions, there are times when an end, somewhat weak in its motive force because it does not express an habitually dominant power of the self, needs to be reenforced by associations which have gathered at all periods of his past around the experience of good. There is a certain reservoir of emotional force which, while far from fluid, is capable of transfer and application, especially in a conscientious person. Kant criticizes the moral sense theory on the ground that "in order to imagine the vicious man tormented with a sense of his transgressions, it must first represent him as morally good in the main trend of his character" (Abbott, p. 128). Well, a man who is capable of making appeal to the sense of duty in general, is the one in whom love of good is already dominant.
The latter alternative would be the one chosen by a truly Kantian agent because it is alone possible in practice. But the moral fanatic does about as much evil in the world as the man of no moral principle. Religious wars, persecutions, intolerance, harsh judgment of others, obstinate persistence in a course of action once entered upon in spite of the testimony of experience to the harm that results; blind devotion to narrow and one-sided aims; deliberate opposition to art, culture, social amenities, recreations, or whatever the "man of principle" happens to find obnoxious: pharisaical conviction of superiority, of being the peculiar, chosen instrument of the moral law;--these and the countless ills that follow in their wake, are inevitable effects of erecting the isolated conviction of duty into a sufficient motive of action. So far as these evils do not actually flow from an acceptance of the Kantian principle, it is because that has been promulgated and for the most part adopted, where reverence for authority and law is strong. In Germany the Kantian philosophy has, upon the whole, served as a help in criticizing law and procedure on the basis of their rationality, while it has also served as a convenient stamp of rational sanction upon a politically authoritative regime, already fairly reasonable, as such matters go, in the content of its legislation and administration.
In this way the natural inclination of an individual towards a certain pleasure, or his natural revulsion from a certain pain, may be checked and transformed by recognition that if he seeks the pleasure, others will inflict more than an equivalent pain, or if he bears the pain, others will reward him with more than compensating pleasures. In such cases, we have the fact of duty or obligation. There is constraint of first inclination through recognition of superior power, this power being asserted in its expressly declared intention of rewarding and penalizing according as its prescriptions are or are not followed. These are the factors: (1) demands, expectations, rules externally imposed; (2) consequences in the way of proffered reward of pleasure, and penalty of pain; (3) resulting constraint of the natural manifestation of desires. In the main, the theory is based on the analogy of legal obligations.[167] =(a) Bentham's Account.=--Bentham dislikes the very word duty; and speaks preferably of the "sanctions" of an act. The following quotations will serve to confirm the foregoing statements. "The happiness of the individuals of whom a community is composed is ... the sole standard, in conformity to which each individual _ought_ to be made to fashion his behavior. But whether it be this, or anything else that is to be done, there is nothing by which a man can ultimately be _made_ to do it, but either pain or pleasure."
A kind of pain or pleasure which tends to _make_ an individual find his own good in the good of the community is a _sanction_. Of these Bentham mentions four kinds, of which the first alone is not due to the will of others, but is _physical_. Thus the individual may check his inclination to drink by a thought of the ills that flow from drunkenness. Metaphorically, then, he may be said to have a duty not to drink; strictly speaking, however, this is his own obvious interest. The sanctions proper are (a) political, consequences in the way of pleasure and pain (especially pain) attached to injunctions and prohibitions by a legal superior; (b) popular, the consequences following from the more indefinite influence of public opinion--such as being "sent to Coventry," being shunned, rendered unpopular, losing reputation, or honor, etc.; and (3) religious, penalties of hell and rewards of heaven attached to action by a divine being, or similar penances and rewards by the representatives on earth (church, priests, etc.) of this divine being.[168]
The later development of utilitarianism tended to get away from this psychical and atomic individualism; and to conceive the good of an individual as including _within_ himself relations to others. So far as this was done, the demands of others, public opinion, laws, etc., became factors _in the development of the individual, and in arousing him to an adequate sense of what his good is, and of interest in effecting it_. Later utilitarianism dwells less than Bentham upon external sanctions, and more upon an unconscious shaping of the individual's character and motives through imitation, education, and all the agencies which mould the individual's desires into natural agreement with the social type. While it is John Stuart Mill who insists most upon the internal and qualitative change of disposition that thus takes place,[169] it is Bain and Spencer who give the most detailed account of the methods by which it is brought about.
A child in a good home (and a citizen in a good state) soon adds other associations. The command is uttered, the penalty threatened, by those whom he admires, respects, and loves. This element brings in a new dread--the fear of giving pain to the beloved object. Such dread is more disinterested. It centers rather about the point of view from which the act is held wrong than about the thought of harm to self. As intelligence develops, the person apprehends the positive ends, the goods, which are protected by the command put on him; he sees the use and reason of the prohibition to which he is subject, and approving of what it safeguards, approves the restriction itself. "A new motive is added on and begirds the action with a threefold fear.... If the duty prescribed has been approved of by the mind as _protective of the general interests of persons engaging our sympathies_, the violation of this on our part affects us with all the pain that we feel from inflicting _an injury upon those interests_."
Sec. 3. FINAL STATEMENT =Duty and a Growing Character.=--Duty is what is owed by a partial isolated self embodied in established, facile, and urgent tendencies, to that ideal self which is presented in aspirations which, since they are not yet formed into habits, have no organized hold upon the self and which can get organized into habitual tendencies and interests only by a more or less painful and difficult reconstruction of the habitual self. For Kant's fixed and absolute separation between the self of inclination and the self of reason, we substitute the relative and shifting distinction between those factors of self which have become so definitely organized into set habits that they take care of themselves, and those other factors which are more precarious, less crystallized, and which depend therefore upon conscious acknowledgment and intentionally directed affection. The consciousness of duty grows out of the complex character of the self; the fact that at any given time, it has tendencies relatively set, ingrained, and embodied in fixed habits, while it also has tendencies in process of making, looking to the future, taking account of unachieved possibilities. The former give the solid relatively formed elements of character; the latter, its ideal or unrealized possibilities. Each must play into the other; each must help the other out.
The conflict of duty and desire is thus an accompaniment of a _growing_ self. Spencer's complete disappearance of obligation would mean an exhausted and fossilized self; wherever there is progress, tension arises between what is already accomplished and what is possible. In a being whose "reach should exceed his grasp," a conflict within the self making for the readjustment of the direction of powers must always be found. The value of continually _having to meet the expectations and requirements of others is in keeping the agent from resting on his oars, from falling back on habits already formed as if they were final_. The phenomena of duty in all their forms are thus phenomena attendant upon the expansion of ends and the reconstruction of character. So far, accordingly, as the recognition of duty is capable of operating as a distinct reenforcing motive, it operates most effectively, not as an interest in duty, or law in the abstract, but as an interest in progress in the face of the obstacles found within character itself. The most important references on the subject of duty are given in the text. To these may be added: Ladd, _Philosophy of Conduct_, chs. v. and xv.; Mackenzie, _Manual_, Part I., ch. iv.; Green, _Prolegomena_, pp. 315-320, 353-354 and 381-388; Sharp, _International Journal of Ethics_, Vol. II., pp. 500-513; Muirhead, _Elements of Ethics_, Book II., ch. ii.; McGilvary, _Philosophical Review_, Vol. XI., pp. 333-352; Stephen, _Science of Ethics_, pp. 161-171; Sturt, _International Journal of Ethics_, Vol. VII., 334-345; Schurman, _Philosophical Review_, Vol. III., pp. 641-654; Guyau, _Sketch of Morals, without Obligation or Sanction_.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.