Ethics · John Dewey
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Sec. 1. GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS From one point of view, historic development represents the increasing liberation of individual powers from rigid social control. Sir John Lubbock remarks: "No savage is free. All over the world his daily life is regulated by a complicated and apparently most inconvenient set of customs (as forcible as laws), of quaint prohibitions and privileges." Looked at from another point of view, emancipation from one sort of social organization means initiation into some other social order; the individual is liberated from a small and fixed (customary) social group, to become a member of a larger and progressive society. The history of setting free individual power in desire, thought, and initiative is, upon the whole, the history of the formation of more complex and extensive social organizations. Movements that look like the disintegration of the order of society, when viewed with reference to what has preceded them, are factors in the construction of a new social order, which allows freer play to individuals, and yet increases the number of social groupings and the depth of social combinations. This fact of historical development is well summed up in the following words of Hobhouse, set forth as a summary of a comprehensive survey of the historic development of law and justice, of the family including the status of women and children, of the relations between communities, and between classes, the rich and the poor.
He says: "Amid all the variety of social institutions and the ebb and flow of historical change, it is possible in the end to detect a double movement, marking the transition from the lower to the higher levels of civilized law and custom. On the one hand, the social order is strengthened and extended.... On this side the individual human being becomes more and more subject to social constraint, and, as we have frequently seen, the changes making for the tightening of the social fabric may diminish the rights which the individual or large classes of individuals can claim.... In this relation liberty and order become opposed. But the opposition is not essential. From the first the individual relies on social forces to maintain him in his rights, and in the higher form of social organization we have seen order and liberty drawing together again.... The best ordered community is that which gives most scope to its component members to make the best of themselves, while the 'best' in human nature is that which contributes to the harmony and onward movement of society.... The responsible human being, man or woman, is the center of modern ethics as of modern law, free so far as custom and law are concerned to make his own life.... The social nature of man is not diminished either on the side of its needs or its duties by the fuller recognition of personal rights. The difference is that, so far as rights and duties are conceived as attaching to human beings as such, they become universalized, _and are therefore the care of society as a whole rather than of any partial group organization_."[196]
With this statement may be compared the words of Green and Alexander. According to Green, moral progress consists in the _extension_ of the area or range of persons whose common good is concerned, and in the deepening or _intensification_ in the individual of his social interest: "the settled disposition on each man's part to make the most and best of humanity in his own person and in the person of others."[197] Alexander's formulae for moral growth are the "laws of differentiation and of comprehension." The first means diversification, specialization, differentiating the powers of an individual with increased refinement of each. The law of comprehension means the steady enlargement of the size and scope of the social group (as from clan to modern national state) with its increased complexity of ways in which men are brought into contact with one another.[198]
O=rder and Laws.=--The world of action as a scene of organized activities going on in regular ways[199] thus presents a public or common order and authority, with its established modes of operation, its laws. Organized institutions, from the more permanent to the more casual, with their orderly rules of conduct, are not, of course, prior to individual activity; for their elements are individual activities related in certain ways. But with respect to _any one_ individual in his separate or distributive capacity, there is a genuine and important sense in which the institution comes first. A child is born into an already existing family with habits and beliefs already formed, not indeed rigid beyond readaptation, but with their own order (arrangements). He goes to schools which have their established methods and aims; he gradually assumes membership in business, civic, and political organizations, with their own settled ways and purposes. Only in participating in already fashioned systems of conduct does he apprehend his own powers, appreciate their worth and realize their possibilities, and achieve for himself a controlled and orderly body of physical and mental habits. He finds the value and the principles of his life, his satisfaction and his norms of authority, in being a member of associated groups of persons and in playing his part in their maintenance and expansion.
At some periods, this view has led to a monastic retreat from all social affairs for the sake of cultivating personal goodness. At other times, it has led to the political indifference of the Cynic and Stoic. For ages, it led to a morality of "other worldliness"; to the belief that true goodness can be attained only in another kind of life and world--a belief which carried with it relative contempt and neglect of concrete social conditions in this life. Social affairs at best were only "secular" and temporal, and, in contrast with the eternal and spiritual salvation of the individual's own soul, of little account. After the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, this kind of moral individualism persisted in different forms. Among the hedonists, it took the form of assuming that while social arrangements are of very great importance, their importance lies in the fact that they hinder or help individuals in the attainment of their own private pleasures. The transcendentalists (such as Kant) asserted that, since morality is wholly a matter of the inner motive, of the personal attitude towards the moral law, social conditions are wholly external. Good or evil lies wholly inside the individual's own will. Social institutions may help or hinder the outward _execution_ of moral purpose; they may be favorable or hostile to the successful outward display of virtue. But they have nothing to do with originating or developing the moral purpose, the Good Will, and hence, in themselves, are lacking in moral significance. Thus Kant made a sharp and fast distinction between _morality_, appertaining solely to the individual's own inner consciousness, and _legality_, appertaining to the social and political conditions of outward behavior. Social institutions and laws may indeed regulate men's outer acts. So far as men externally conform, their conduct is legal. But laws cannot regulate or touch men's motives, which alone determine the morality of their behavior.
We shall not repeat here our prior criticisms of hedonism and utilitarianism in order to point out the falsity of this division of moral action into unrelated inner (or private) and outer (or social) factors. We may recall to memory, however, that Kant himself virtually passed beyond his own theory of moral individualism in insisting upon the promotion of a "Kingdom of Ends," in which every person is to be treated as an end in himself. We may recall that the later utilitarians (such as Mill, Leslie Stephen, Bain, and Spencer) insisted upon the _educative_ value of social institutions, upon their importance in forming certain interests and habits in the individual. Thus social arrangements were taken out of the category of mere means to private good, and made the necessary factors and conditions of the development of an individuality which should have a reasonable and just conception of its own nature and of its own good. We may also enumerate some of the more fundamental ways in which social institutions determine individual morality.
1. Apart from the social medium, the individual would never "know himself"; he would never become acquainted with his own needs and capacities. He would live the life of a brute animal, satisfying as best he could his most urgent appetites of hunger, thirst, and sex, but being, as regards even that, handicapped in comparison with other animals. And, as we have already seen, the wider and the richer the social relationships into which an individual enters, the more fully are his powers evoked, and the more fully is he brought to recognize the possibilities latent in them. It is from seeing noble architecture and hearing harmonious music that the individual learns to know to what his own constructive and rhythmic tendencies, otherwise blind and inchoate, may come. It is from achievement in industrial, national, and family life that he is initiated into perception of his own energy, loyalty, and affection.
2. Social conditions not only evoke what is latent, and bring to conscious recognition what is blind, but they select, encourage, and confirm certain tendencies at the expense of others. They enable the individual to discriminate the better and the worse among his tendencies and achievements. There is no limit in the power of society to awaken and strengthen this habit of discrimination, of choice after comparison, in its individual members. A small social group with fixed habits, a clan, a gang, a narrow sect, a dogmatic party, will restrict the formation of critical powers--i.e., of conscientiousness or moral thoughtfulness. But an individual who _really_ becomes a member of modern society, with its multiple occupations, its easy intercourse, its free mobility, its rich resources of art and science, will have only too many opportunities for reflective judgment and personal valuation and preference. _The very habits of individual moral initiative, of personal criticism of the existent order, and of private projection of a better order, to which moral individualists point as proofs of the purely "inner" nature of morality, are themselves effects of a variable and complex social order._ =The Moral Value of the State.=--If then we take modern social life in its broadest extent, as including not only what has become institutionalized and more or less fossilized, but also what is still growing (forming and re-forming), we may justly say that it is as true of progressive as of stationary society, that the moral and the social are one. The virtues of the individual in a progressive society are more reflective, more critical, involve more exercise of comparison and selection, than in customary society. But they are just as socially conditioned in their origin and as socially directed in their manifestation.
In rudimentary societies, customs furnish the highest ends of achievement; they supply the principles of social organization and combination; and they form binding laws whose breach is punished. The moral, political, and legal are not differentiated. But village communities and city-states, to say nothing of kingdoms and empires and modern national States, have developed special organs and special regulations for maintaining social unity and public order. Small groups are usually firmly welded together and are exclusive. They have a narrow but intense social code:--like a patriarchal family, a gang, a social set, they are clannish. But when a large number of such groups come together within a more inclusive social unity, some institution grows up to represent the interests and activities of the whole as against the narrow and centrifugal tendencies of the constituent factors. A society is then _politically_ organized; and a true public order with its comprehensive laws is brought into existence. The moral importance of the development of this public point of view, with its extensive common purposes and with a general will for maintaining them, can hardly be overestimated. Without such organization, society and hence morality would remain sectional, jealous, suspicious, unfraternal. Sentiments of intense cohesion within would have been conjoined with equally strong sentiments of indifference, intolerance, and hostility to those without. In the wake of the formation of States have followed more widely co-operative activities, more comprehensive and hence more reasonable principles of judgment and outlook. The individual has been emancipated from his relative submergence in the local and fixed group, and set upon his own feet, with varied fields of activity open to him in which to try his powers, and furnished with principles of judging conduct and projecting ideals which in theory, at least, are as broad as the possibilities of humanity itself.
Sec. 2. RESPONSIBILITY AND FREEDOM The more comprehensive and diversified the social order, the greater the responsibility and the freedom of the individual. His freedom is the greater, because the more numerous are the effective stimuli to action, and the more varied and the more certain the ways in which he may fulfill his powers. His responsibility is greater because there are more demands for considering the consequences of his acts; and more agencies for bringing home to him the recognition of consequences which affect not merely more persons individually, but which also influence the more remote and hidden social ties. =Liability.=--Freedom and responsibility have a relatively superficial and negative meaning and a relatively positive central meaning. In its external aspect, responsibility is _liability_. An agent is free to act; yes, but--. He must stand the consequences, the disagreeable as well as the pleasant, the social as well as the physical. He may do a given act, but if so, let him look out. His act is a matter that concerns others as well as himself, and they will prove their concern by calling him to account; and if he cannot give a satisfactory and credible account of his intention, subject him to correction. Each community and organization informs its members what it regards as obnoxious, and serves notice upon them that they have to answer if they offend. The individual then is (1) likely or liable to have to explain and justify his behavior, and is (2) liable or open to suffering consequent upon inability to make his explanation acceptable.
In short, the limitations upon freedom both of the physical conditions and the mental values of life are at bottom expressions of one and the same divorce of theory and practice,--which makes theory remote, sterile, and technical, while practice remains narrow, harsh, and also illiberal. Yet there is more cause for hope in that so much has been accomplished, than for despondency because mental power and service are still so limited and undeveloped. The intermixture and interaction of classes and nations are very recent. Hence the opportunities for an effective circulation of sympathetic ideas and of reasonable emotions have only newly come into existence. Education as a public interest and care, applicable to all individuals, is hardly more than a century old; while a conception of the richness and complexity of the ways in which it should touch any one individual is hardly half a century old. As society takes its educative functions more seriously and comprehensively into account, there is every promise of more rapid progress in the future than in the past. For education is most effective when dealing with the immature, those who have not yet acquired the hard and fixed directing forms of adult life; while, in order to be effectively employed, it must select and propagate that which is common and hence typical in the social values that form its resources, leaving the eccentric, the partial, and exclusive gradually to dwindle. Upon some generous souls of the eighteenth century there dawned the idea that the cause of the indefinite improvement of humanity and the cause of the little child are inseparably bound together.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.