Ethics · John Dewey
PROBLEMS OF MORAL THEORY
We have identified in its framework and main outlines the sort of voluntary activity in which the problem of good and evil appears and in which the ideas of right and wrong are employed. This task, however, is only preliminary to theoretical analysis. For it throws no light upon just what we mean by good and bad; just what elements of complex voluntary behavior are termed right or wrong; or why they are so termed. It does not even indicate what must be discovered before such questions can be answered. It only sets forth the limits of the subject-matter within which such questions arise and in reference to which they must be answered. What are the distinctive problems which must be dealt with in the course of such a discussion?
Otherwise put, he has to face the problem of what is to be the place and role in his own conduct of ideals and principles generated not by custom but by deliberation and insight. (3) The individual must consider more consciously the relation between what is currently regarded as good by the social groups in which he is placed and in which he has to act, and that regarded as good by himself. The moment he ceases to accept conformity to custom as an adequate sanction of behavior, he is met by discrepancy between his personally conceived goods and those reigning in the customs about him. Now while this detachment makes possible the birth of higher and more ideal types of morality, and hence of systematic effort for social reform and advance; it also makes possible (as we have seen on the historical side, p. 189) a more generalized and deliberate selfishness; a less instinctive and more intentional pursuit of what the individual judges to be good _for himself_ against what society exacts as good for itself. The same reflective attitude which generates the conscientious moral reformer may generate also a more deliberate and resolute anti-social egoism. In any case, the individual who has acquired the habit of moral reflection, is conscious of a new problem--the relation of public good to individual good. In short, the individual who is thoughtfully serious and who aims to bring his habit of reflection to bear on his conduct, will have occasion (1) to search for the elements of good and bad, of positive and negative, value in the situations that confront him; (2) to consider the methods and principles by which he shall reach conclusions, and (3) to consider the relations between himself, his own capacities and satisfactions, and the ends and demands of the social situations in which he is placed.
Only a divine revelation can make known man's true end; and only divine assistance, embodied in the ordinances and sacraments of the supernaturally founded and directed church, can bring this knowledge home to erring individuals so as to make it effectual. In theory the conception of the end, the good, was supreme; but man's true good is supernatural and hence can be achieved only by supernatural assistance and in the next world. In practice, therefore, the important thing for man in his present condition is implicit reliance upon and obedience to the requirements of the church. This represents on earth the divine sovereign, ultimate source of all moral law. In effect, the moral law became a net-work of ordinances, prescriptions, commands, rewards, penalties, penances, and remissions. The jural point of view was completely enthroned.[108] There was no problem; there was a final, because a supernatural solution. =The Problems of Individuality and Citizenship.=--With the Renaissance began the revolt against the jural view of life. A sense of the joys and delights which attend the free and varied exercise of human capacities in this world was reborn. The first results were a demand for natural satisfaction; the next a profound reawakening of the antique civic and political consciousness. The first in its reaction against the Middle Ages was more individualistic than the Greek ideal, to which it was in some respects allied. The Greek had emphasized the notion of value, but had conceived this as generic, as the fulfillment of the essential nature of man as man. But with the moderns, satisfaction, the good, meant something direct, specific, personal; something the individual as an individual could lay hold of and possess. It was an individual right; it was final and inalienable. Nothing had a right to intervene or deprive the individual of it.
This extreme individualistic tendency was contemporaneous with a transfer of interest from the supernatural church-state over to the commercial, social, and political bodies with which the modern man found himself identified. The rise of the free cities, and more especially the development of national states, with the growth of commerce and exchange, opened to the individual a natural social whole. With this his connections were direct, in this he gained new outlets and joys, and yet it imposed upon him definite responsibilities and exacted of him specific burdens. If the individual had gained a new sense of himself as an individual, he also found himself enmeshed in national states of a power constantly increasing in range and intensity. The problem of the moral theorists was to reconcile these two tendencies, the individualistic and that of political centralization. For a time, the individual felt the social organization in which he was set to be, with whatever incidental inconveniences, upon the whole an outlet and reenforcement of prized personal powers. Hence in observing its conditions, he was securing the conditions of his own peace and tranquillity or even of his own freedom and achievement. But the balance was easily upset, and the problem of the relation of the individual and the social, the private and the public, was soon forced into prominence; a problem which in one form or other has been the central problem of modern ethical theory.
See the references on the scope and methods of ethics at the end of ch. i. of Part I., and also, Sorley, _Ethics of Naturalism_, ch. i., and his _Recent Tendencies in Ethics_; Fite, _An Introductory Study of Ethics_, ch. ii.; Bowne, _Principles of Ethics_, ch. i.; Seth, _Ethical Principles_, ch. i.; Martineau, _Types of Ethical Theory_, Vol. I., Introduction; Hensel, _Problems of Ethics_, in Vol. I. of St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science. [107] On the _practical_ side, this was always, as we have seen, the prominent problem of Hebrew thought. But we are concerned here with the statement of the problem by Plato and Aristotle from the theoretical side. [108] The Ten Commandments, divided and subdivided into all their conceivable applications, and brought home through the confessional, were the specific basis. [109] The idealistic philosophic movement beginning with Kant is in many important respects the outgrowth of the earlier _Naturrecht_ of the moral philosophers from Grotius on.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.