Copyright 1999-2000 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
Dewey and Tufts Ethics was first published in 1908. Tufts wrote Part I, "The Beginnings and Growth of Morality," and Dewey wrote Part II, "Theory of the Moral Life." The book went through several editions and was commonly used as a text in ethics. The most significant revision was in 1932, and Dewey reorganized his part significantly at that time. The present book is a republication of Dewey's 1932 portion of this text.
Historians of Pragmatism have often selected "thought" and "action" as the two key terms of the movement. The focus, in other words, is on the exercise of human intelligence, how we think and act and what we reflectively take away from the results of our actions. This fits into the issue of our moral life so intimately that we may not even identify it as Pragmatic reasoning.
Traditionally, ethics is divided into two arenas. There is morality as defined by a culture or society; and there is morality as we can seek it through our own reflection. We follow morality of the first kind by training and by habit. Aristotle believed that no one can attain the second kind without, in fact, being well prepared in the former. In morality of the second kind, we must reflection upon action and determine the moral paths. In doing this, we must be free to choose; that is, actions must be voluntary.
But what is moral activity? In our day and age, largely under the long-term influence of Christian moralizing, we tend to assume that morality means only right and wrong in conduct, perhaps obedience to the Ten Commandments. Virtue is Christian virtue. Philosophers, on the other hand, have a much older and wider tradition. Virtue can be construed as that which is excellent in something. For instance, we might ask what the virtue of golf is. Thus, being virtuous as a human can mean developing those traits in which human excellence is demonstrated. In the Golden Age of Athens, virtue was more-or-less equally shared by courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. Philosophers have been more interested in asking how we should live our lives in a broad sense. Dewey adds to this position the interesting observation that actions have to be viewed as widely interrelated so that almost all of our actions have potential moral content because even simple activities may carry us on paths that later have demonstrable classic rightness or wrongness. The problem of moral theory, then, is necessarily a matter of learning how to think through all of our actions.
Dewey adds another observation regarding our historical place. While it was certainly true enough in 1908, it must have been burningly true in 1932. Our world, he says, has simply changed so extensively in the last century that classic culturally enforced morality has lost much of its relevance or, at the very least, its avenues of application have become very blurred. Situations like this (if any have ever even occurred before) demand a theoretical approach to morality; that is, we have to reinvent a moral sense that can potentially become the new cultural directive. If anything, this must be even more apparent in 2000. In a society that can do anything it wants, how does it decide what it should do?
While it is simple to suggest that difference between accepting moral behavior as defined by a culture and thinking through the grounds of moral behavior in developing a theory of moral life, the issues divide along many lines. Dewey begins his discussion by considering the problem of ends. Outside of simply accepting the common opinions of our age, how do we determine worthy ends? What is good? What does practical wisdom suggest?
On the other hand, some people will argue that moral action is based on something entirely different from good ends. Immanuel Kant argued that we must not even consider ends when discussing moral action. Moral action, indeed, can only be considered in contrast to desired ends and in conjunction with the exercise of duty. In this realm of discussion, the moral issue is right and wrong and not good or bad. One should behave according to right even if that means turning away from ends that he/she would define as good. For Kant, indeed, the best test of rightness and duty was where an individual is forced to deny the ends that seem good.
The question is whether a morality based on rightness is necessarily based on different reasoning than a morality based on good ends. Dewey demonstrates, largely through a discussion of Kant, that it does not. While Kant attempts to secure his theory of categorical imperatives on reason alone, Dewey argues, convincingly, that the application of reason forces us into a consideration of human ends. The dutiful actor rejects a specific action as wrong because an attempt to make it a universal law of behavior is impossible precisely at that place where we understand its implications for human ends in general.
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