Ethics · John Dewey
CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE POLITICAL STATE
The formula of "_like_ freedom" artificially isolates some one power, takes that in the abstract, and then inquires whether _it_ is interfered with. The one truly moral question is what relation this particular power, say the power to do a certain work for a certain reward, sustains to all the other desires, purposes, and interests of the individual. How are _they_ affected by the way in which some one activity is exercised? It is in them that the concrete freedom of the man resides. We do not know whether the freedom of a man is interfered with or is assisted until we have taken into account his whole system of capacities and activities. The maximum freedom of one individual consistent with equal _concrete_ or _total_ freedom of others, would indeed represent a high moral ideal. But the individualistic formula is condemned by the fact that it has in mind only an abstract, mechanical, external, and hence formal freedom.
A true public or social good will accordingly not subordinate individual variations, but will encourage individual experimentation in new ideas and new projects, endeavoring only to see that they are put into execution under conditions which make for securing responsibility for their consequences. A just social order promotes in all its members habits of criticizing its attained goods and habits of projecting schemes of new goods. It does not aim at intellectual and moral subordination. Every form of social life contains survivals of the past which need to be reorganized. The struggle of some individuals _against_ the existing subordination of their good to the good of the whole is the method of the reorganization of the whole in the direction of a more generally distributed good. Not order, but orderly progress, represents the social ideal.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.