John Dewey's Ethical Theory

The 1932 Ethics

Roberto Frega, Steven Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429535505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book provides a wide-ranging, systematic, and comprehensive approach to the moral philosophy of John Dewey, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. It does so by focusing on his greatest achievement in this field: the Ethics he jointly published with James Hayden Tufts in 1908 and then republished in a heavily revised version in 1932.

The essays in this volume are divided into two distinct parts. The first features essays that provide a running commentary on the chapters of the 1932 Ethics written by Dewey. Each chapter is introduced, situated within a historical perspective, and then its main achievements are highlighted and discussed. The second part of the book interprets the Ethics and demonstrates its contemporary relevance and vitality. The essays in this part situate the Ethics in the broader interpretive frameworks of Dewey's philosophy, American pragmatism, and 20th-century moral theory at large. Taken together, these essays show that, far from being a mere survey of moral theories, the 1932 Ethics presents the theoretical highpoint in Dewey's thinking about moral philosophy.

This book features contributions by some of the most influential Dewey scholars from North America and Europe. It will be of keen interest to scholars and students of American pragmatism, ethics and moral philosophy, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

Part I

Introduction

1 Contextualizing Dewey’s 1932 Ethics

Gregory Fernando Pappas

In this chapter I argue for the importance of contextualizing Dewey’s 1932 Ethics in order to appreciate its claims, importance, and limitations. There are a variety of different contexts that may be relevant in understanding the text of a philosopher, for instance, his or her personal life, historical events, intellectual trends, and commonly shared assumptions of that period. While I consider some of these contexts, I mainly focus on appreciating the place of Dewey’s 1932 Ethics in the context of the larger framework of his moral philosophy and the rest of his philosophy. Dewey’s philosophy was holistic in the sense that a part is dependent on other parts and the whole. Moreover, each part was the result of a continuous process of inquiry so that each text is the result of the development and reconstruction of prior ideas.

In this essay three related general issues are considered. First, are there important changes between the earlier texts in Ethics (e.g., the 1908 Ethics) and that of 1932? Are there changes in Dewey’s own larger inquiries in philosophy (metaphilosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, education) that may be important for understanding the changes in his ethical thought? How do his inquiries into other areas of philosophy bear on the changes he made to his 1932 Ethics?

Second, what is the significance, place, or importance of the 1932 Ethics in Dewey’s overall ethics? How does the 1932 text compare with and relate to Dewey’s other texts on morals? Are there other works that must be consulted to complement and enhance one’s reading of the 1932 Ethics, and also to appreciate how radical his mature ethical thought was compared to mainstream ethical theory?

Third, what characterizes Dewey’s mature and overall ethics by 1932?

Important Changes between Earlier Texts in Ethics (e.g., the 1908 Ethics) and the 1932 Edition

To appreciate the importance of the 1932 text and why it represents Dewey at his most mature, sophisticated, and radical (in comparison with traditional ethics), it is worth comparing it with his earlier version of the same text (1908). In their introduction to the 1932 edition Edel and Flower highlight the most important changes. There is no point in duplicating their work here. However, there is a need to revisit these changes today in light of Dewey’s overall philosophy. One must keep in mind that by 1932 Dewey had the benefit of working out and significantly improving his theory of inquiry and experience.

Let me address, even if briefly, some of the most important changes in each of the following topics.

The Historical-Natural Aspects of Morality and the Relation between Customary and Reflective Morality

A commonly shared assumption of many thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century was the notion of a linear theory of the evolution of morality. Some of the terminology (e.g., “primitive”) is present in early Dewey, especially because it coincided with the distinction between customary group morality and the reflective individual morality of the more modern human. This distinction gradually disappears in Dewey as he questions some of its background assumptions about history and culture.

By 1932, and already in “Anthropology and Ethics” (LW 3, 11–24) and Public and its Problems (LW 2, 1927), there is no determinate linear evolutionary pattern or historical substructure. Dewey’s approach or understanding of history is different. Dewey became worried about grand abstractions and totalizing metanarratives about history in the hands of philosophers. Instead, undertaking specific historical inquiries and examining specific groups and conflicts are the proper context-sensitive approaches. As Edel and Flower observe,

What replaced the linear view was simply a more genuinely socio-historical analysis of the social phenomena in their specific sociohistorical contexts. … Emerging moral forms are now seen not as general stages of moral evolution but as specific responses to challenges in the specific historical problems and conflicts.

(LW 7, xv)

In the 1932 Ethics the earlier distinction between customary and reflective morality remains, but it is a functional distinction at any time and not two separated historical epochs or domains. Custom is redefined as valued social habit, and there is an acknowledgment that the customary can embody previous reflection. Edel and Flower speculate that Dewey’s stay in China may have had some influence on this issue. Perhaps seeing the extent to which China relied on custom and not being able to assert that they were at an early developmental stage, Dewey comes to appreciate “the conservatism of the Chinese as more intellectual and deliberative rather than as merely clinging to custom” (LW 7, xxiii).

Relevant to this last change is the development in Dewey’s view of “habit” between 1919 and his 1922 Human Nature and Conduct (MW14),an important textthat should be consulted to fully understand the richer view of the moral self presupposed in the 1932 Ethics. The continuity between custom and intelligence can be shown in terms of habits and impulses (his social psychology). Habits, learned via one’s social environment, give social shape to impulses (biological). They constitute the self and character as an interpenetration of habits. Conflicts of habits, new needs and conditions, prompt reconstruction via reflection. Reflection becomes “intelligence” as a special set of habits.

The Nature and Function of “Moral Intelligence”

Reason and rationality have been the favorite categories of ethical theory in Western ethics. Dewey’s pragmatismquestioned the modern conceptions of reason and even the entire traditional way of doing epistemology. This made a difference in his resulting ethics. Drawing the implications from his epistemology (or theory of inquiry) to ethical thinking and theory accounts for many of the changes in Dewey’s ethical writings. Between 1908 and 1932 Dewey worked and reworked some of his more-advanced views on the nature of thinking and intelligence. Reason as a faculty is rejected, and instead, intelligence as a complex set of habits is embraced. More significant is the extent to which by 1932 Dewey had significantly moved away from even the most liberal understanding of reason, rationality, and knowledge in Western philosophy. Dewey’s reconstruction of epistemology in such works as his 1910 How we Think (MW 6), the 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic (MW 10), the 1929 Quest for Certainty (LW 4), and especially his 1931 “Qualitative Thought” (LW 5, 243–261) must be consulted to understand how radical the mature view of moral deliberation and reflection presupposed in the 1932 Ethics is. Moral thinking beyond analytic and conceptual reasoning includes creative elements, imagination, and feelings. Flower and Edel admit this much, but Dewey’s brief and general descriptions of the role of feelings, the imagination, and the non-cognitive context of the situation in the 1932 Ethics fall short of what he could have written, given the state of his epistemology at that time. This is understandable since the book was intended to be an introduction to ethics, but there is the risk that readers that do not consult, for example, Dewey’s “Qualitative Thought” (1931) may not appreciate how rich and radical Dewey’s view of moral deliberation is. Reasoning and reasons are only a fraction of what goes on in moral inquiry as a process.

Individual/Social

Dewey never ceased finding new dualisms to question in philosophy. By 1932 it became clear to Dewey that using the dualistic categories of individual/social in general tended to adversely affect sociopolitical and ethical inquiry. This is too abstract a starting point. In addition, the distinctions between the psychological and the social in the study of moral experience (life) were merely functional. Individuality was important but is self-nurtured by its relations. By 1932 “the idea of the common good is now enriched by specific ideas of sharing and participating. And it becomes intelligible why morality is neither wholly social nor wholly individual” (LW 7, xxi). There is no conflict between the social and the individual, but it contains aspects of any moral thought and action. The backdrop and full arguments to be consulted in understanding why Dewey insisted on this point in his 1932 Ethics are works from the same time period in which he became critical of how sociopolitical inquiry tended to start with abstract categories and large historical narratives of conflicts. Instead, he felt the starting point should be conflicts of particular groups and people at particular times and places, that is, “specific inquiries into a multitude of specific structures and interactions” (MW 12, 193).

From the Self to Situations as the Context and Locus of Moral Life

By 1932, as a result of his parallel inquiries into other areas of philosophy such as metaphilosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics, Dewey’s notion of moral experience became more centered on particular morally problematic situations. The starting point of the 1932 Ethics is not some moral development of mankind nor is it the self, as is obvious in his 1908 Ethics, but situations, which are the ultimate context and locus of moral life. The importance of the self remains, but it is a more-transactional conception bounded by situations. In Dewey’s ethics the moral self becomes an integral part of the process of reconstructing morally problematic situations. The self therefore affects and is affected by what goes on while transactions take place in a particular situation. This establishes a very important, organic relation between the quality of what we do and the quality of the character we bring to a situation. A growing educative moral life requires improvement of both the habits that determine the quality of present experience, and of the present experiences that determine the quality of our habits.

Edel and Flower account for the difference between Dewey’s earlier and mature ethics in the following way:

As long as he was doing chiefly psychological ethics, supported by the individualism of the theory of moral evolution, the ethical concepts were interpreted wholly in terms of inner-individual process. Now, however, the view is no longer simply of an individual … it is rather a direct focus on the full complexity of natural and social relations that occur in the field itself.

(LW 7, xxvi)

However, more should be said about what this “field” or context of moral experience comes to. While Dewey does provide some descriptions of this concrete context in his 1932 Ethics, consulting other texts of Dewey on how lived experience is a matter of living in “situations” during this same period is desirable. A situation is the field or context of all inquiries. Dewey makes clear in his discussion with Bertrand Russell how important this notion is for understanding his philosophy: “Mr. Russell has not been able to follow the distinction I make between the immediately had material of non-cognitively experienced situations and the material of cognition—a distinction without which my view cannot be understood” (LW 14, 33). Indeed, Dewey’s Ethics cannot be fully understood unless one understands what he means by a morally problematic situation. This was the subject of his essay “Three Independent Factors in Morals” (LW 5, 279–288). Dewey’s empirical approach to philosophy demands that ethical theory begins with the primitive situations of life in which moral experiences are had. In this sense, moral subject-matter is always experienced as a part of the field that constitutes a situation, in particular those situations that pose a moral problem.

In Dewey’s view, the tendency to absolutize or universalize in ethics by providing theories of “the good” constitutes a failure to see that any meaningful quest for the good is always tied to a particular inquiry within the unique context of a morally problematic situation. The dualisms or splits that have plagued most moral theories (self versus act, character versus conduct, and fact versus value, to name but a few) are also a result of the failure to begin with situated experience rather than with theory. Instead of starting empirically then with the “integrated unity” and “unanalyzed totality” found in a lived situation, modern moral philosophy begins antiempirically, with ontological gaps. These dichotomies have in turn generated all kinds of false dilemmas and debates, such as on egoism versus altruism, subjectivism versus objectivism, and an “ethics of character” versus an “ethics of the act.”

By 1932 the amelioration of specific morally problematic situations became the alternative to traditional views of moral life as the search from some telos (some ultimate good), or of ethics as the application of rules or the avoidance of transgressing moral laws. The moral life is not a quest for the acquisition of some good (happiness or even virtue). This is important to keep in mind since the temptation in the history of the secondary literature on Dewey has been to try to find evidence somewhere in the text that Dewey assumes some ultimate good or telos, or assumed a form of consequentialism, or is another virtue ethics. By 1932 Dewey had totally abandoned the language of self-realization as the aim of moral life (found in his earlier ethical writings). His ethics became much more pluralistic, complex, and context sensitive, as we will explore in the next sections.

Pluralism of Moral Experience

In the 1908 Ethics the “good” as a category is central—everything is filtered through it, and the self is the central focus. However, by 1932 “the three major ethical concepts of good, right or obligation, and virtue; originally analyzed in terms of the good, were now declared independent, each resting on a different force in human life” (LW 7, xv). This shift represents a fresh way of looking at what goes on in moral life. The new view was set forth in a 1930 lecture in France “Three Independent Factors in Morals” (LW 5, 279–288). Edel and Flower explain the significance of this shift in Dewey’s ethics:

The changes in conceptual structure that are carried through in the 1932 Ethics consolidate the central Deweyean outlook on ethics: that it is the concrete task of bringing the broadest lessons of experience and the resources of inventiveness to the solution of particular problems, not the application of fixed and pre-set code of moral universals.

(LW 7, xxviii)

However, I think more can be said about the important relation between the “Three Independent Factors in Morals” and the 1932 Ethics.

In “Three Independent Factors of Morals”¹ Dewey argues that the history of moral philosophy is characterized by one-sidedness because philosophers have abstracted one factor or feature of situations that are experienced as morally problematic, and then made that factor supreme or exclusive. Hence, moral theories have been classified according to whether they take good (teleological-consequentionalist), virtue (virtue ethics), or duty (deontological theories) as their central category or source of moral justification. As Dewey points out, however, good, virtue, and duty are all irreducible features that are intertwined in moral situations.

While “Three Independent Factors of Morals” is a short essay, reading the 1932 Ethics without reading the essay amounts to not having the benefit of reading the full argument for why an empirical ethics must be radically pluralistic. In the essay Dewey concludes that we must find an alternative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dewey Citations
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Commentary on the Chapters of the 1932 Ethics
• Part III Historical and Systematic Perspectives
• Notes on Contributors
• Index