Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics · John Dewey
XVI.
Pleasure as the Standard of Conduct. The line of criticism on this point may be stated as follows: Pleasure fails as a standard for the very reason that it fails as a motive. Pleasure, _as conceived by the hedonist_, is passive, merely agreeable sensations, without any objective and qualitative (active) character. This being so, there is no permanent, fixed basis to which we may refer _acts_ and by which we may judge them. A standard implies a single comprehensive end which unifies all acts and through connection with which each gets its moral value fixed. Only action can be a standard for acts. To reduce all acts to means to getting a mere state of feeling is the inevitable consequence of hedonism. So reducing them is to deprive them of any standard of value. An end to serve as standard must be (1) a comprehensive end for all the acts of an individual, and (2) an end comprehending the activities of various individuals--a common good. 1. The moral end must be that for the sake of which all conduct occurs--the _organizing principle_ of conduct--a totality, a system. If pleasure is the end it is because each detail of conduct gets its placing, its moral value through relation to pleasure, through the contribution it makes to pleasure. 2. The moral end must also include the ends of the various agents who make up society. It must be capable of constituting a social system out of the acts of various agents, as well as an individual system out of the various acts of one agent; or, more simply, the moral end must be not only the good for all the particular acts of an individual, but must be a _common good_--a good which in satisfying one, satisfies others. All ethical theories would claim that the end proposed by them served these two purposes. We shall endeavor to show that the hedonistic theory, the doctrine that the pleasure is the good, is not capable of serving either of them.
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