 Human Nature and Conduct, an Introduction to Social Psychology, Part 4 by John Dewey, published in 1922. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording by William Jones, Benita Springs, Florida. Section 1, The Good of Activity, including Better and Worse, Morality of Process, Evolution and Progress, Optimism, Epicureanism, Making Others Happy. The foremost conclusion is that morals has to do with all activity in which alternative possibilities enter. For wherever they enter, a difference between better and worse arises. Reflection upon action means uncertainty and consequent need of decision as to which course is better. The better is the good. The best is not better than the good, but is simply the discovered good. Comparative and superlative degrees are only paths to the positive degree of action. The worse, or evil, is a rejected good. In deliberation, and before choice, no evil presents itself as evil. Until it is rejected, it is a competing good. After rejection, it figures not as a lesser good, but as the bad of that situation. Actually, then only deliberate action, conduct into which reflective choice enters, is distinctively moral. For only then does there enter the question of better and worse. Yet it is a perilous error to draw a hard and fast line between action into which deliberation and choice enter, and activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit. One of the consequences of action is to involve us in predicaments where we have to reflect upon things formerly done as matter-of-course. One of the chief problems of our dealings with others is to induce them to reflect upon affairs which they usually perform from unreflective habit. On the other hand, every reflective choice tends to relegate some conscious issue into a deed or habit henceforth taken for granted and not thought upon. Potentially, therefore, every and any act is within the scope of morals being a candidate for possible judgment with respect to its better or worse quality. It thus becomes one of the most perplexing problems of reflection to discover just how far to carry it, what to bring under examination, and what to leave to unscrutinized habit. Because there is no final recipe by which to decide this question, all moral judgment is experimental and subject to revision by its issue. The recognition that conduct covers every act that is judged with reference to better or worse, and that the need of this judgment is potentially co-extensive with all portions of conduct, saves us from the mistake which makes morality a separate department of life. Potentially, conduct is 100% of our acts. Hence we must decline to admit theories which identify morals with the purification of motives, edifying character, pursuing remote and elusive perfection, obeying supernatural command, and acknowledging the authority of duty. Such notions have a dual bad effect. First they get in the way of observation of conditions and consequences. They divert thought into side issues. Secondly, while they confer a morbid exaggerated quality upon things which are viewed under the aspect of morality, they release the larger part of the acts of life from serious, that is moral, survey. Anxious solicitude for the few acts which are deemed moral is accompanied by edicts of exemption and baths of immunity for most acts. A moral moratorium prevails for everyday affairs. When we observe that morals is at home, wherever considerations of the worse and better are involved, we are committed to noting that morality is a continuing process, not a fixed achievement. Morals means growth of conduct in meaning. At least it means that kind of expansion in meaning which is consequent upon observations of the conditions and the outcome of conduct. It is all one with growing. Growing and growth are the same fact expanded in actuality or telescoped in thought. In the largest sense of the word, morals is education. It is learning the meaning of what we are about and employing that meaning in action. The good, satisfaction, end of growth of present action in shades and scope of meaning is the only good within our control and the only one, accordingly, for which responsibility exists. The rest is luck, fortune. And the tragedy of moral notions most insisted upon by the morally self-conscious is the relegation of the only good which can fully engage thought, namely present meaning of action, to the rank of an incident of a remote good, whether that future good be defined as pleasure or perfection or salvation or attainment of virtuous character. Present activity is not a sharp, narrow knife blade in time. The present is complex, containing within itself a multitude of habits and impulses. It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward, and a look outward. It is of moral moment because it marks a transition in the direction of breath and clarity of action or in that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction, adding fullness and distinctness of meaning and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance, determinations and grasp. Those who hold that progress can be perceived and measured only by reference to a remote goal first confuse meaning with space and then treat spatial position as absolute, as limiting movement instead of being bounded in and by movement. There are plenty of negative elements due to conflict, entanglement and obscurity in most of the situations of life and we do not require a revelation of some supreme perfection to inform us whether or no we are making headway in present rectification. We move on from the worst and into, not just towards, the better, which is authenticated not by comparison with the foreign but in what is indigenous. Unless progress is a present reconstructing, it is nothing. If it cannot be told by qualities belonging to the movement of transition, it can never be judged. Men have constructed a strange dream world when they have supposed that without a fixed ideal of a remote good to inspire them, they have no inducement to get relief from present troubles, no desires for liberation from what oppresses and for clearing up what confuses present action. The world in which we could get enlightenment and instruction about the direction in which we are moving only from a vague conception and unattainable perfection would be totally unlike our present world. Sufficient into the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient it is to stimulate us to remedial action, to endeavor in order to convert strife into harmony, monotony into a variegated scene, and limitation to expansion. The converting is progress, the only progress conceivable or attainable by man. Hence, every situation has its own measure and quality of progress, and the need for progress is recurrent and constant. If it is better to travel than to arrive, it is because traveling is a constant arriving, while a rival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying. We find our clues to direction in the projected recollection of definite experienced goods, not in vague anticipations, even when we label the vagueness perfection, the ideal, and proceed to manipulate this definition with dry dialectic logic. Progress means increase of present meaning, which involves multiplication of sensed distinctions as well as harmony and unification. This statement may perhaps be made generally in application to the experience of humanity. If history shows progress, it can hardly be found elsewhere than in this complication and extension of the significance found within experience. It is clear that such progress brings no surseys, no immunity from perplexity and trouble. If we wish to transmute this generalization into a categorical imperative, we should say, so act as to increase the meaning of present experience. But even then, in order to get instruction about the concrete quality of such increased meaning, we should have to run away from the law and study the needs and alternative possibilities lying within a unique and localized situation. The imperative, like everything absolute, is sterile. Till men give up the search for a general formula of progress, they will not know where to look to find it. A businessman proceeds by comparing today's liabilities and assets with yesterday's, and projects plans for tomorrow by a study of the movement thus indicated in conjunction with study of the conditions of the environment now existing. It is not otherwise with the business of living. The future is a projection of the subject matter of the present. A projection which is not arbitrary in the extent in which it divines the movement of the moving present. The physician is lost who would guide his activities of healing by building up a picture of perfect health, the same for all and in its nature complete and self-enclosed once for all. He employs what he has discovered about actual cases of good health and ill health and their causes to investigate the present alien individual so as to further his recovering. Recovering an intrinsic and living process rather than recovery which is comparative and static. Moral theories, which however have not remained mere theories but which have found their way into the opinions of the common man, have reversed the situation and made the present subservient to a rigid yet abstract future. The ethical import of the doctrine of evolution is enormous, but its import has been misconstrued because the doctrine has been appropriated by the very traditional notions which in truth it subverts. It has been thought that the doctrine of evolution means the complete subordination of present change to a future goal. It has been constrained to teach a futile dogma of approximation instead of a gospel of present growth. The use of fruct of the new science has been seized upon by the old tradition of fixed and external ends. In fact evolution means continuity of change and the fact that change may take the form of present growth of complexity and interaction. Significant stages in change are found not in excess of fixity of attainment but in those crises in which a seeming fixity of habits gives way to a release of capacities that have not previously functioned. In times that is of readjustment and redirection. No matter what the present success in straightening out difficulties and harmonizing conflicts, it is certain that problems will recur in the future in a new form or on a different plane. Indeed every genuine accomplishment instead of winding up an affair and enclosing it as a jewel in a casket for a future contemplation complicates the practical situation. It effects a new distribution of energies which have henceforth to be employed in ways for which past experience gives no exact instruction. Every important satisfaction of an old want creates a new one and this new one has to enter upon an experimental adventure to find its satisfaction. From the side of what has gone before, achievement settles something. From the side of what comes after, it complicates introducing new problems, unsettling factors. There is something pitifully juvenile in the idea that evolution, progress, means a definite sum of accomplishment which will forever stay done and which by an exact amount lessens the amount still to be done. Disposing once and for all of just so many perplexities in advancing us just so far on our road to a final stable and unperplexed goal. Yet the typical 19th century mid-Victorian conception of evolution was precisely a formulation of such a consummate journalism. If the true ideal is that of a stable condition free from conflict and disturbance then there are a number of theories whose claims are superior to those of the popular doctrine of evolution. Logic points rather in the direction of Rousseau and Tolstoy who would recur to some primitive simplicity who would return from a complicated and troubled civilization to a state of nature. For certainly progress in civilization has not only meant increase in the scope and intricacy of problems to be dealt with but it entails increasing instability. For in multiplying once, instruments and possibilities it increases the variety of forces which enter into relations with one another and which have to be intelligently directed. Or again, stoic indifference or Buddhist calm have greater claims, who it may be argued since all objective achievement only complicates the situation. The victory of a final stability can be secured only by renunciation of desire. Since every satisfaction of desire increases force and this in turn creates new desires withdrawal into an inner passionless state. Indifference to action entertainment is the sole road to possession of the eternal stable and final reality. Again, from the standpoint of definite approximation to an ultimate goal the balance falls heavily on the side of pessimism. The more striving the more attainments perhaps but also assuredly the more needs and the more disappointments. The more we do and the more we accomplish the more the end is vanity and vexation. From the standpoint of attainment of good that stays put that constitutes a definite sum performed which lessens the amount of effort required in order to reach the ultimate goal of final good. Progress is an illusion but we are looking for it in the wrong place. The world war is a better commentary on the 19th century misconception of moral achievement. A misconception however which it only inherited from the traditional theory of fixed ends attempting to bolster up that doctrine with aid from the scientific theory of evolution. The doctrine of progress is not yet bankrupt. The bankruptcy of the notion of fixed goods to be attained and stably possessed may possibly be the means of turning the mind of man to a tenable theory of progress to attention to present troubles and possibilities. Adherence of the idea that betterment growth and goodness consist in approximation to an exhaustive stable immutable end or good have been compelled to recognize the truth that in fact we envisage the good in specific terms that are relative to existing needs and that the attainment of every specific good merges insensibly into a new condition of maladjustment with its need of a new end and a renewed effort. But they have elaborated an ingenious dialectical theory to account for the facts while maintaining their theory intact. The goal, the ideal, is infinite. Man is finite, subject to conditions imposed by space and time. The specific character of the ends which man entertains and of the satisfaction he achieves is due therefore precisely to his empirical and finite nature in its contrast with the infinite and complete character of the true reality, the end. Consequently, when man reaches what he had taken to be the destination of his journey, he finds that he has only gone a piece on the road. Infinite vistas still stretch before him. Again he sets his mark a little way further ahead and again when he reaches the station set he finds the road opening before him in unexpected ways and sees new distant objects beckoning him forward. Such is the popular doctrine. By some strange perversion this theory passes for moral idealism. An office of inspiration and guidance is attributed to the thought of the goal of ultimate completeness or perfection. As a matter of fact, the idea sincerely held brings discouragement and despair, not inspiration or hopefulness. There is something either ludicrous or tragic. In the notion that inspiration to continued progress is had in telling man that no matter what he does or what he achieves, the outcome is negligible in comparison with what he set out to achieve. That every endeavor he makes is bound to turn out a failure compared with what should be done. That every attained satisfaction is only for ever bound to be only a disappointment. The honest conclusion is pessimism. All is vexation, and the greater the effort the greater the vexation. But the fact is that it is not the negative aspect of an outcome, its failure to reach infinity, which renews courage and hope. The positive attainment, actual enrichment of meaning and powers opens new vistas and sets new tasks, and creates aims and stimulates new efforts. The fact are not such as to yield unthinking optimism and consolation, for they rendered impossible to rest upon attained goods. New struggles and failures are inevitable. The total scene of action remains as before, only for us more complex and more subtly unstable. But this very situation is a consequence of expansion, not of failures of power. And when grasped and admitted, it is a challenge to intelligence. Instruction in what to do next can never come from an infinite goal, which for us is bound to be empty. It can be arrived only from study of the deficiencies, irregularities and possibilities of the actual situation. In any case, however, arguments about pessimism and optimism based upon considerations regarding fixed attainment of good and evil are mainly literary in quality. Man continues to live because he is a living creature, not because reason convinces him of the certainty or probability of future satisfactions and achievements. He is instinct with activities that carry him on. Individuals here and there cave in, and most individuals sag, withdraw and seek refuge at this and that point. But man as man still has the dumb pluck of the animal. He has endurance, hope, curiosity, eagerness and love of action. These traits belong to him by structure, not by taking thought. Memory of the past and foresight of the future convert dumbness to some degree of articulateness. They illumine curiosity and steady courage. When the future arrives with its inevitable disappointments as well as its fulfillment and with new sources of trouble, failure loses something of its fatality and suffering yields fruit of instruction, not of bitterness. Humility is more demanded at our moments of triumph than at those of failure, for humility is not a catish self-depreciation. It is the sense of our slight inability, even with our best intelligence and effort to command events, a sense of our dependence upon forces that go their way without our wish or plan. Its purport is not to relax effort, but to make us prize every opportunity of present growth. In morals, the infinitive and the imperative develop from the participle, the present tense. Perfection means perfecting, fulfillment, fulfilling, and the good is now or never. Idealistic philosophies, those of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, like the hypothesis now offered, have found the good in meanings belonging to a conscious life, a life of reason, not in external achievement. Like it, they have exalted the place of intelligence in securing fulfillment of conscious life. These theories have at least not subordinated conscious life to external obedience, not thought of virtue as something different from excellence of life. But they set up a transcendental meaning and reason remote from present experience and opposed to it. Or they insist upon a special form of meaning and consciousness to be obtained by peculiar modes of knowledge inaccessible to the common man involving not continuous reconstruction of ordinary experience, but as wholesale reversal. They have treated regeneration, change of heart, as wholesale and self-enclosed, not as continuous. The utilitarian also made good and evil, right and wrong, matters of conscious experience. In addition, they brought them down to earth, to everyday experience. They strove to humanize other worldly goods, but they retained the notion that the good is future and hence outside the meaning of present activity. Insofar as it is sporadic, exceptional, subject to accident, passive and enjoyment, not a joy, something hit upon, not a fulfilling. The future end is, for them, not so remote from present action as a platonic realm of ideals, or as the Aristotelian rational thought, or the Christian heaven, or Spinoza's conception of the universal woe. But still it is separate in principle and in fact from present activity. The next step is to identify the sought-for good with the meaning of our impulses and our habits, and the specific moral good or virtue with learning this meaning, a learning that takes us back not into an isolated self, but out into the open-air world of objects and social ties, terminating in an increment of present significance. Doubtless there are those who will think that we thus escape from remote and external ends only to fall into an epicureanism which teaches us to subordinate everything else to present satisfactions. The hypothesis preferred may seem to some to advise a subjective, self-centered life of intensified consciousness, an aesthetically dilettant type of egoism, for is not its lesson that we should concentrate attention each upon the consciousness accompanying his action so as to refine and develop it? Is not this like all subjective morals and antisocial doctrine instructing us to subordinate the objective consequences of our acts, those which promote the welfare of others, to an enrichment of our private conscious lives? It can hardly be denied that as compared with the dogmas against which it reacted, there is an element of truth in epicureanism. It strove to center attention upon what is actually within control to find the good in the present instead of in a contingent, uncertain future. The trouble with it lies in its account of present good. It failed to connect this good with the full reach of activities. It contemplated good of withdrawal rather than of active participation. That is to say, the objection to epicureanism lies in its conception of what constitutes present good, not in its emphasis upon satisfaction as at present. The same remark may be made about every theory which recognized the individual self. If any such theory is objectionable, the objection is against the character or quality assigned to the self. Of course, an individual is the bearer or carrier of experience. What of that? Everything depends upon the kind of experience that centers in him. Not the residence of experience counts, but its content. What's in the house? The center is not the abstract amenable to our control, but what gathers about it is our affair. We can't help being individual selves, each one of us. If selfhood as such is a bad thing, the blame lies not in the self, but with the universe with providence. But in fact the distinction between a selfishness with which we find fault and an unselfishness which we esteem is found in the quality of the activities which proceed from and enter into the self according as they are contractive, exclusive or expansive and outreaching. Meaning exists for some self, but this truistic fact doesn't fix the quality of any particular meaning. It may be such as to make the self small or such as to exalt or dignify the self. It is as impertinent to decry the worth of experience because it is connected with a self as it is fantastic to idealize personality just as personality aside from the question what sort of person one is. Other persons ourselves too. If one's own present experience is to be depreciated in its meaning because it centers in a self, why act for the welfare of others? Suffishness for selfishness, one is as good as another. Our own is worth as much as another's, but the recognition that good is always found in a present growth of significance in activity protects us from thinking that welfare can consist in a soup kitchen happiness in pleasures we can confer upon others from without. It shows that good is the same in quality wherever it is found, whether in some other self or in one's own. An activity has meaning in the degree in which it establishes and acknowledges a variety and intimacy of connection. As long as any social impulse endures, so long an activity that shuts itself off will bring inward dissatisfaction and entail a struggle for compensatory goods no matter what pleasures or external successes acclaim its course. To say that the welfare of others, like our own, consist in a widening and deepening of the perceptions that give activity its meaning in an educated growth is to set forth a proposition of political import to make others happy except through liberating their powers and engaging them in activities that enlarge the meaning of life is to harm them and to indulge ourselves under cover of exercising a special virtue. Our moral measure for estimating any existing arrangement or any proposed reform is its effect upon impulse and habits. Does it liberate or suppress, ossify or render flexible, divide or unify interest? Its perception, quickened or dulled, is memory made apt and extensive or narrow and diffusively irrelevant. Is imagination diverted to fantasy and compensatory dreams or does it add fertility to life? Is thought creative or pushed one side into pedantic specialism? There is a sense in which to set up social welfare as an end of action only promotes an offensive condescension, a harsh interference or an oleaginous display of complacent kindliness. It always tends in this direction when it is aimed at giving happiness to others directly, that is, as we can hand a physical thing to another. To foster conditions that widen the horizon of others and give them command of their own powers so that they can find their own happiness in their own fashion is the way of social action. Otherwise, the prayer of a free man would be to be left alone and to be delivered above all from reformers and kind people. End of part four, section one, The Good of Activity. Human Nature and Conduct, an introduction to social psychology, part four by John Dewey, published in 1922. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in a public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording by William Jones, Bonita Springs, Florida. Part four, section two, Morals Are Human. Since morals is concerned with conduct, it grows out of specific empirical facts. Almost all influential moral theories, with the exception of the utilitarian, have refused to admit this idea. For Christendom as a whole, morality has been connected with supernatural commands, rewards, and penalties. Those who have escaped this superstition have content themselves with converting the difference between this world and the next to a distinction between the actual and the ideal, what is and what should be. The actual world has not been surrendered to the devil in name, but it is treated as a display of physical forces incapable of generating moral values. Consequently, moral considerations must be introduced from above. Human nature may not be officially declared to be infected because of some aboriginal sin, but it is said to be sensuous, impulsive, and subjected to necessity, while natural intelligence is such that it cannot rise above a reckoning of private expediency. But in fact, morals is the most humane of all subjects. It is that which is closest to human nature. It is ineradicably empirical, not theological, nor metaphysical, nor mathematical. Since it directly concerns human nature, everything that can be known of the human mind and body in physiology, medicine, anthropology, and psychology is pertinent to moral inquiry. Human nature exists and operates in an environment, and it is not in that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil. It is of them continuous with their energies, dependent upon their support, capable of increase only as it utilizes them and as it gradually rebuilds from their crude indifference an environment genially civilized. Hence, physics, chemistry, history, statistics, engineering science are a part of disciplined moral knowledge so far as they enable us to understand the conditions and agencies through which man lives and on account of which he forms and executes his plans. Moral science is not something with a separate province. It is physical, biological, and historic knowledge placed in a human context where it will illuminate and guide the activities of men. The path of truth is narrow and straightened. It is only too easy to wonder beyond the course from this side to that. In a reaction from that air which has made morals fanatic or fantastic, sentimental or authoritative by serving them from actual facts and forces, theorists have gone to the other extreme. They have insisted that natural laws are themselves moral laws so that it remains after noting them only to conform to them. This doctrine of accord with nature has usually marked a transition period. When mythology is dying in its open forms and when social life is so disturbed that custom and tradition fail to supply their wanted control men resort to nature as a norm. They apply to nature all the eulogistic predicates previously associated with divine law or natural law is conceived of as the only true divine law. This happened in one form in Stoicism. It happened in another form in the deism of the 18th century with its notion of benevolent, harmonious, wholly rational order of nature. In our time this notion has been perpetuated in connection with a laissez-faire social philosophy and the theory of evolution. Human intelligence is thought to mark an artificial interference if it does more than register fixed natural laws as rules of human action. The process of natural evolution is conceived as the exact model of human endeavor. The two ideas met in Spencer. To the enlightened of a former generation, Spencer's evolutionary philosophy seemed to afford a scientific sanction for the necessity of moral progress while it also proved up to the health the futility of deliberate interference with the benevolent operations of nature. The idea of justice was identified with the law of cause and effect. Transgression of natural law wrought in the struggle for existence, its own penalty of elimination and conformity with it brought the reward of increased vitality and happiness. By this process, egoistic desire is gradually coming into harmony with the necessity of the environment till at last the individual automatically finds happiness in doing what the natural and social environment demands and serves himself in serving others. From this point of view, earlier scientific philosophers made a mistake, but only the mistake of anticipating the date of complete natural harmony. All that reason can do is to acknowledge the evolutionary forces and thereby refrain from retarding the arrival of the happy day of perfect harmony. Meantime, justice demands that the weak and ignorant suffer the effect of violation of natural law while the wise and able reap the rewards of their superiority. The fundamental defect of such views is that they will fail to see the difference made in conditions and energies by perception of them. It is the first business of mind to be realistic, to see things as they are. If, for example, biology can give us knowledge of the causes of competency and incompetency, strength and weakness, that knowledge is all to the good. A non-centimidal morals will seek for all the instruction natural science can give concerning the biological conditions and consequences of inferiority and superiority. But knowledge of facts does not entail conformity and acquiescence. The contrary is the case. Perception of things as they are is but a stage in the process of making them different. They have already begun to be different in being known, for by that fact they enter into a different context, a context of foresight and judgment of better and worse. A full psychology of a separate realm of consciousness is the only reason this fact is not generally acknowledged. Morality resides not in perception of fact, but in the use made of its perception. It is a monstrous assumption that its sole use is to utter benedictions upon fact and its offspring. It is the part of intelligence to tell when to use fact to conform and perpetuate and when to use it to vary conditions and consequences. It is absurd to suppose that knowledge about the connection between inferiority and its consequences prescribes adherence to that connection. It is like supposing that knowledge of the connection between malaria and mosquitoes enjoins the breeding mosquitoes. The fact when it is known enters into a new environment. Without ceasing to belong to the physical environment, it enters also into a medium of human activities, of desires and aversions, habits and instincts. Yet thereby gains new potencies, new capacities. Gunpowder in water does not act the same as gunpowder next to a flame. A fact known does not operate the same as a fact unperceived. When it is known, it comes into contact with the flame of desire and the cold bath of antipathy. Knowledge of the conditions that breed incapacity may fit into some desire to maintain others in that state while averting it for oneself. Or it may fall in with a character which finds itself blocked by such fact and therefore strives to use knowledge of causes to make a change in effects. Morality begins at this point of use of knowledge of natural law, a use varying with the active system of dispositions and desires. Intelligent action is not concerned with the bare consequences of the thing known, but with to be brought into existence by action conditioned on the knowledge. Men may use their knowledge to induce conformity or exaggeration or to effect change and appellation of conditions. The quality of these consequences determines the question of better or worse. The exaggeration of the harmony attributed to nature aroused men to note its disharmonies. An optimistic view of natural benevolence was followed by a more honest, less romantic view of struggle and conflict in nature. Actor Helvetius and Bentham came Malthus and Darwin. The problem of morals is the problem of desire and intelligence. What is to be done with these facts of disharmony and conflict? After we have discovered the place and consequences of conflict in nature, we have still to discover its place and working in human need and thought. What is its office, its function, its possibility or use? In general, the answer is simple. Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It chocks us out of sheep-like passivity and sets us at noting and contriving. Not that it always affects this result, but that conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity. When this possibility of making use of conflict has once been noted, it is possible to utilize it systematically and substitute the arbitration of mind for that of brutal attack and brute collapse. But the tendency to take natural law for a norm of action which the supposedly scientific have inherited from 18th century rationalism leads to an idealization of the principle of conflict itself. Conflict's office in promoting progress through arousing intelligence is overlooked, and it is erected into the generator of progress. Karl Marx borrowed from the dialectic of Hegel the idea of the necessity of a negative element of opposition for advance. He projected it into social affairs and reached the conclusion that all social development comes from conflict between classes and that therefore class warfare was to be cultivated. Hence a supposedly scientific form of the doctrine of social evolution preaches social hostility as the road to social harmony. It would be difficult to find a more striking instance of what happens when natural events are given a social and practical sanctification. Darwinism has been similarly used to justify war and the brutalities of competition for wealth and power. The excuse, the provocation, though not the justification for such a doctrine is found in the actions of those who say peace, peace, when there is no peace, who refuse to recognize facts as they are, who proclaim a natural harmony of wealth and merit, of capital and labor, and the natural justice in the main of existing conditions. There is something horrible, something that makes one fear for civilization in denunciations of class differences and class struggles which proceed from a class in power, one that is seizing every means even to a monopoly of moral ideals to carry on its struggle for class power. This class adds hypocrisy to conflict and brings all idealism into disrepute. It does everything which ingenuity and prestige can do to give color to the assertions of those who say that all moral considerations are irrelevant and that the issue is one of brute trial of forces between this side and that. The alternative, here as elsewhere, is not between denying facts and behalf of something termed moral ideals and accepting facts as final. There remains the possibility of recognizing facts and using them as a challenge to intelligence to modify the environment and change habits. End of Part 4, Section 2, Morals Are Human Human Nature and Conduct, an Introduction to Social Psychology Part 4 by John Dewey, published in 1922. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording by William Jones, Benita Springs, Florida. Part 4, Section 3, What is Freedom? The place of natural fact and law in morals brings us to the problem of freedom. We are told that seriously to import empirical facts into morals is equivalent to an abrogation of freedom. Facts and laws mean necessity, we are told. The way to freedom is to turn our back upon them and take flight to a separate ideal realm. Even if the flight could be successfully accomplished, the efficacy of the prescription may be doubted. For we need freedom in and among actual events, not apart from them. It is to be hoped therefore that there remains an alternative, that the road to freedom may be found in that knowledge of facts which enables us to employ them in connection with desires and aims. A physician or engineer is free in his thought and his action in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. Possibly we find here the key to any freedom. What men have esteemed and fought for in the name of liberty is varied and complex. But certainly it has never been a metaphysical freedom of will. It seems to contain three elements of importance, though on their face not all of them are directly compatible with one another. One, it includes efficiency in action, ability to carry out plans, the absence of cramping and thwarting obstacles. Two, it also includes capacity to vary plans to change the course of action to experience nobilities. And again, three, it signifies the power of desire and choice to be factors in events. Few men would purchase even a high amount of efficient action along definite lines at the price of monotony, or if success and action were brought by all abandonment of personal preference. They would probably feel that a more precious freedom was possessed in the life of ill-assured objective achievement that contained undertaking of risks, adventuring in new fields, a pitting of personal choice against the odds of events, and a mixture of success and failures provided choice had a career. The slave is a man who executes the wish of others when doomed to act along lines predetermined to regularity. Those who have defined freedom as ability to act have unconsciously assumed that this ability is exercised in accord with desire and that his operation introduces the agent into fields previously unexplored. Hence the conception of freedom is involving three factors. Yet efficiency and execution cannot be ignored to say that a man is free to choose to walk while the only walk he can take will lead him over a precipice is to strain words as well as facts. Intelligence is the key to freedom in act. We are likely to be able to go ahead prosperously in the degree in which we have consulted conditions and formed a plan which enlists their consenting cooperation. The gratuitous help of unforeseen circumstance we cannot afford to despise. Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us but it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid and the gifts of fortune when they come are fleeting except when they are made taught by intelligent adaptation of conditions. In neutral and adverse circumstances a study and foresight are the only roads to unimpeded action. Insistence upon a metaphysical freedom of will is generally at its most strident pitch with those who despise knowledge of matters of fact. They pay for their contempt by halting and confined action. Glorification of freedom in general at the expense of positive abilities in particular has often characterized the official creed of historic liberalism. Its outward sign is the separation of politics and law from economics. Much of what is called the individualism of the early 19th century has in truth little to do with the nature of individuals. It goes back to metaphysics which held that harmony between man and nature can be taken for granted if once certain artificial restrictions upon man are removed. Hence it neglected the necessity of studying and regulating industrial conditions so that a nominal freedom can be made in actuality. Find a man who believes that all men need is freedom from oppressive legal and political measures and you have found a man who unless he is merely obstinately maintaining his own private privileges carries at the back of his head some heritage of the metaphysical doctrine of free will plus an optimistic confidence in natural harmony. He needs a philosophy that recognizes the objective character of freedom and its dependence upon a congruity of environment with human wants an agreement which can be obtained only by profound thought and unremitting application. For freedom as a fact depends upon conditions of work which are socially and scientifically buttressed. Since industry covers the most pervasive relations of man with his environment freedom is unreal which does not have as its basis an economic command of environment. I have no desire to add another to the cheap and easy solutions which exist of the seeming conflict between freedom and organization. It is reasonably obvious that organization may become a hindrance to freedom. It does not take us far to say that the trouble lies not in organization but in over organization. At the same time it must be admitted that there is no effective or objective freedom without organization. It is easy to criticize the contract theory of the state which states that individuals surrender some at least of their natural liberties in order to make secure as civil liberties what they retain. Nevertheless there are some truths in the idea of surrender and exchange. A certain natural freedom is possessed by man. That is to say in some respects harmony exists between a man's energies and his surrounding such that the latter support and execute his purposes. Insofar as he is free without such a basic natural support conscious contravences of legislation, administration and deliberate human institution of social arrangements cannot take place. In this sense natural freedom is prior to political freedom and its condition. But we cannot trust wholly to a freedom thus procured. It is at the mercy of accident. Conscious agreements among men must supplement and in some degree supplant freedom of action which is the gift of nature. In order to arrive at these agreements individuals have to make concessions. They must consent to curtailment of some natural liberties in order that any of them may be rendered secure and enduring. They must in short enter into an organization with other human beings so that the activities of others may be permanently countered upon to assure regularity of action and far reaching scope of plans and courses of action. The procedure is not insofar unlike surrendering a portion of one's income in order to buy insurance against future contingencies and thus to render the future course of life more equibly secure. It would be folly to maintain that there is no sacrifice. We can however contend that the sacrifice is a reasonable one justified by results. Viewed in this light, the relation of individual freedom to organization is seen to be an experimental affair. It is not capable of being settled by abstract theory. Take the question of labor unions and the closed or open shop. It is folly to fancy that no restrictions and surrenders of prior freedoms and possibilities of future freedoms are involved in the extension of this particular form of organization. But to condemn such organization on the theoretical ground that a restriction of liberty is entailed is to adopt a position which would have been fatal to every advanced step in civilization and to every net gain in effective freedom. Every such question is to be judged not on the basis of antecedent theory but on the basis of concrete consequences. The question is to the balance of freedom and security achieved as compared with practicable alternatives. Even the question of the point where membership in an organization ceases to be a voluntary matter and becomes coercive or required is also an experimental matter, a thing to be decided by scientifically conducted study of consequences of pros and cons. It is definitely an affair of specific detail not of wholesale theory. It is equally amusing to see one man denouncing on the grounds of pure theory the coercion of workers by a labor union while he avails himself of the increased power due to corporate action in business and praises the coercion of the political state and to see another man denouncing the latter as pure tyranny while lauding the power of industrial labor organizations. The position of one or the other may be justified in particular cases but justification is due to results in practice not to general theory. Organization tends, however, to become rigid and to limit freedom in addition to security and energy and action novelty, risk, change are the ingredients of the freedom which men desire. Variety is more than a spice of life it is largely of its essence making a difference between the free and the enslaved. Invariant virtue appears to be as mechanical as uninterrupted vice for true excellence changes with conditions. Unless character rises to overcome some new difficulty or conquer some temptation from an unexpected quarter we suspect its gain is only a veneer. Choice is an element in freedom and there can be no choice without unrealized and precarious possibilities. It is this demand for genuine contingency which is caricatured in the orthodox doctrine of a freedom of indifference a power to choose this way or that apart from any habit or impulse without even a desire on the part of will to show off. Such an indetermination of choice is not desired by the lover of either reason or excitement. The theory of arbitrary free choice represents indeterminateness of conditions grasped in a vague and lazy fashion and hardened into a desirable attribute of will. Under the title of freedom men prize such uncertainty of conditions as give deliberation and choice and opportunity. But uncertainty of volition which is more than a reflection of uncertainty of conditions is the mark of a person who has acquired in facility of character through permanent weakening of his springs of action. Whether or not indeterminateness uncertainty actually exists and the world is a difficult question. It is easier to think of the world as fixed settled once for all and man as accumulating all the uncertainty there is in his will and all the doubt there is in his intellect. The rise of natural science has facilitated this dualistic partitioning making nature fully fixed and mind fully open and empty. Fortunately for us we do not have to settle the question. A hypothetical answer is enough. If the world is already done and done for if his character is entirely achieved so that his behavior is like that of a man lost in routine the only freedom for which man can hope is one of efficiency in overt action but if change is genuine if accounts are still in process of making and if objective uncertainty is the stimulus to reflection then variation in action novelty and experiment have a true meaning in any case the question is an objective one. It concerns not man in isolation from the world but man in his connection with it a world that is at points and times indeterminate enough to call out deliberation and to give play to choice to shape his future is a world in which will is free not because it is inherently vacillating and unstable but because deliberation and choice are determining and stabilizing factors upon an empirical view uncertainty, doubt, hesitation, contingency and novelty genuine change which is not mere disguised repetition are facts only deductive reasoning from certain fixed premises creates a bias in favor of complete determination and finality. To say that these things exist only in human experience not in the world and exist there only because of our finitude is dangerously like paying ourselves with words. Empirically the life of man seems in these respects as in others to express a culmination of facts in nature to admit ignorance and uncertainty in man while denying them to nature involves a curious dualism variability, initiative, innovation departure from routine experimentation are empirically the manifestation of a genuine nieces in things at all events it is these things that are precious to us under the name of freedom it is their elimination from the life of a slave which makes his life servile intolerable to the freeman who has once been on his own no matter what his animal comfort and security a free man would rather take his chance in an open world than be guaranteed in a closed world these considerations give point to the third factor in love of freedom the desire to have desire count as a factor a force even if will chooses unaccountably even if it be capriciously impulse it does not follow that there are real alternatives genuine possibilities open in the future what we want is possibilities open in the world not in the will except as will or deliberate activity reflects the world to foresee future objective alternatives and to be able by deliberation to choose one of them and thereby wait its chances in the struggle for future existence measures our freedom it is assumed sometimes that if it can be shown that deliberation determines choice and deliberation is determined by character and conditions there is no freedom this is like saying that because a flower comes from root and stem it cannot bear fruit the question is not what are the at scenes of deliberation and choice but what are their consequences what do they do that is distinctive the answer is that they give us all the control of future possibilities which is open to us and this control is the crux of our freedom without it we are pushed from behind with it we walk in the light the doctrine that knowledge, intelligence rather than will constitutes freedom is not new it has been preached by moralists of many a school all rationalists have identified freedom with action emancipated by insight into truth but insight into necessity has by them substituted for foresight of possibilities Tolstoy for example expressed the idea of Spinoza and Hegel when he said the ox is a slave as long as he refuses to recognize the yoke and chafes under it while if he identifies himself with his necessity and draws willingly instead of rebelliously he is free but as long as the yoke is a yoke it is impossible that voluntary identification with it should occur conscious submission is an either fatalistic submissiveness or cowardice the ox accepts in fact not the yoke but the stall and the hay to which the yoke is a necessary incident but if the ox foresees the consequences of the use of the yoke if he anticipates the possibility of harvest and identifies himself not with the yoke but with the realizations of his possibilities he acts freely voluntarily he hasn't accepted a necessity as unavoidable he has welcomed a possibility as a desirability perception of necessary law plays indeed a part but no amount of insight into necessity brings with it as such anything but a consciousness of necessity freedom is the truth of necessity only when we use one necessity to alter another when we use the law to foresee consequences and to consider how they may be averted or secured then freedom begins employing knowledge of law to enforce desire in execution gives power to the engineer employing knowledge of law in order to submit to it without further action constitutes fatalism no matter how it is dressed up thus we recur to our main contention morality depends upon events not upon commands and ideals alien to nature but intelligence treats events as moving as fraught with possibilities not as ended or final in forecasting their possibilities the distinction between better and worse arises human desire and ability cooperates with this or that natural force according as this or that eventuality is judged better we do not use the present to control the future we use the foresight of the future to refine and expand present activity in this use of desire deliberation and choice freedom is actualized end of part four section three what is freedom human nature and conduct an introduction to social psychology part four by John Dewey published in 1922 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org this recording by William Jones Vanita Springs, Florida section four morality is social intelligence becomes ours in the degree in which we use it and accept responsibility for consequences it is not ours originally or by production it thinks is a truer psychological statement than I think thoughts sprout and vegetate ideas proliferate they come from deep unconscious sources I think is a statement about voluntary action some suggestion surges from the unknown our active body of habits appropriates it the suggestion then becomes an assertion it no longer merely comes to us it is accepted and uttered by us we act upon it and thereby assume by implication its consequences the stuff of belief and proposition is not originated by us it comes to us from others by education, tradition and the suggestion of the environment our intelligence is bound up so far as this materials are concerned with the community life of which we are a part we know what it communicates to us and know according to the habits it forms in us science is an affair of civilization not of individual intellect so with conscience when a child acts those about him react they shower encouragement upon him visit him with approval or they bestow frowns and rebuke what others do to us when we act is as natural a consequence of our action as what the fire does to us when we plunge our hands in it the social environment may be as artificial as you please but its action in response to ours is natural not artificial in language and imagination we rehearse the responses of others just as we dramatically enact other consequences we foreknow how others will act and the foreknowledge is the beginning of judgment passed upon action we know with them there is conscience and assembly is formed within our breast which discusses and appraises proposed and performed acts the community without becomes a forum and tribunal within a judgment seat of charges, assessments and exculpations our thoughts of our own actions are saturated with the ideas that others entertain about them ideas which have been expressed not only in explicit instruction but still more effectively in reaction to our acts liability is the beginning of responsibility we are held accountable by others for the consequences of our acts they visit their like and dislike of those consequences upon us in vain do we claim that these are not ours that they are products of ignorance and not design or are incidents in the execution of a most laudable scheme their authorship is imputed to us we are disproved and disapproval is not an interstate of mind but a most definite act others say to us by their deeds we do not care a fig whether you did this deliberately or not we intend that you shall deliberate before you do it again and that if possible your deliberation shall prevent a repetition of this act we object to the reference in blame and every unfavorable judgment is prospective not retrospective theories about responsibility may become confused but in practice no one is stupid enough to try to change the past approbation and disapprobation are ways of influencing the formation of habits and aims that is of influencing future acts the individual is held accountable for what he has done in order that he may be responsive in what he is going to do gradually persons learn by dramatic imitation to hold themselves accountable and liability becomes a voluntary deliberate acknowledgement that our deeds are our own that their consequences come from us these two facts that moral judgment and moral responsibility are the work brought in us by the social environment signify that all morality is social not because we ought to take into account the effect of our acts upon the welfare of others but because of facts others do take account of what we do and they respond accordingly to our acts their responses actually do affect the meaning of what we do the significance thus contributed is as inevitable as is the effect of interaction with the physical environment in fact as civilization advances the physical environment gets itself more and more humanized for the meaning of physical energies and events becomes involved with the part they play in human activities our conduct is socially conditioned whether we perceive the fact or not the effect of custom on habit and of habit upon thought is enough to prove this statement when we begin to forecast consequences the consequences that most stand out are those which will proceed from other people the resistance and the cooperation of others is the central fact in the furtherance or failure of our schemes connections with our fellows furnish both the opportunities for action and the instrumentalities by which we take advantage of opportunity all of the actions of an individual bear the stamp of his community as assuredly as does the language he speaks difficulty in reading the stamp is due to variety of impressions in consequence of membership in many groups the social saturation is, I repeat, a matter of fact not of what should be, not of what is desirable or undesirable it does not guarantee the rightness or goodness of an act there is no excuse for thinking of evil action as individualistic and right action as social deliberate unscrupulous pursuit of self-interest is as much conditioned upon social opportunities, training and assistance as is the course of action prompted by a beaming benevolence the difference lies in the quality and degree of the perception of ties and interdependency in the use to which they are put consider the form commonly assumed today by self-seeking namely command of money and economic power money is a social institution property is a legal custom economic opportunities are dependent upon the state of society the objects aimed at the rewards sought for are what they are because of social admiration prestige competition and power if money-making is morally obnoxious is because the way these social facts are handled not because a money-making man has withdrawn from society into an isolated selfhood or turned his back upon society his individualism is not found in his original nature but in his habits acquired under social influences it is found in his concrete aims and these are reflexes of social conditions well-grounded moral objection to a motive conduct rest upon the kind of social connections that figure not upon lack of social aim a man may attempt to utilize social relationships for his own advantage in an inequitable way he may intentionally or unconsciously try to make them feed one of his own appetites then he is denounced as egoistic but both his course of action and the disapproval he is subject to are facts within society they are social phenomena he pursues his unjust advantage as a social asset explicit recognition of this fact is a prerequisite of improvement in moral education and of an intelligent understanding of the chief ideas or categories of morals morals is as much a matter of interaction of a person with his social environment as walking is an interaction of legs with a physical environment the character of walking depends upon the strength and competency of legs but also it depends upon whether a man is walking in a bog or on a paved street upon whether there is a safeguarded path set aside or whether he has to walk amid dangerous vehicles if the standard of morals is low it is because the education given by the interaction of the individual with his social environment is defective of what avail is it to preach unassuming simplicity and contentment of life when communal admiration goes to the man who succeeds who makes himself conspicuous and envied because of command of money and other forms of power if a child gets on by pivichness or intrigue then others are his accomplices who assist in the habits which are built up the notion that an abstract ready-made conscience exists in individuals and that it is only necessary to make an occasional appeal to it and to indulge in occasional crude rebukes and punishments is associated with the causes of lack of definitive and orderly moral advance for it is associated with lack of attention to social forces there is a peculiar inconsistency in the current idea that morals ought to be social the introduction of the moral ought into the idea contains an implicit assertion that morals depend upon something apart from social relations morals are social the question of ought should be is a question of better and worse in social affairs the extent to which the weight of theories has been thrown against the perception of the place of social ties and connections in moral activity is a fair measure of the extent to which social forces work blindly and develop an accidental morality the chief obstacle for example to recognizing the truth of a proposition frequently set forth in these pages to the effect that all conduct is potential if not actual matter of moral judgment is the habit of identifying moral judgment with praise and blame so great is the influence of this habit that it is safe to say that every professed moralist when he leaves the pages of theory and faces some actual item of his own and others behavior first or instinctively thinks of acts as moral or non moral and the degree in which they are exposed to condemnation or approval now this kind of judgment is certainly not one which could profitably be dispensed with its influence is much needed but the tendency to equate it with all moral judgment is largely responsible for the current idea that there is a sharp line between moral conduct and a larger region of non moral conduct which is a matter of expediency shrewdness success or manners moreover this tendency is a chief reason why the social forces effective in shaping actual morality work blindly and unsatisfactorily judgment in which the emphasis falls upon blame and approbation has more heat than light it is more emotional than intellectual it is guided by custom personal convenience and resentment rather than by insight into causes and consequences it makes toward reducing moral instruction the educated influence of social opinion to an immediate personal matter that is to say to an adjustment of personal likes and dislikes fault finding creates resentment in the one blamed and approval and complacency rather than a habit of scrutinizing conduct objectively it puts those who are sensitive to the judgment of others in a standing defensive attitude creating an apologetic self accusing and self excavating habit of mind with what is needed is an impersonal impartial habit of observation moral persons get so occupied with defending their conduct from real and imagined criticism that they have little time left to see what their acts really amount to and the habit of self blame inevitably extends to include others since it is a habit now it is a wholesome thing for anyone to be made aware that thoughtless self centered action on his part exposes him to the indignation and dislike of others there is no one who can be safely trusted to be exempt from immediate reactions of criticism there are few who do not need to be braced by occasional expressions of approval but these influences are immensely overdone in comparison with the assistance that might be given by the influence of social judgments which operate without accompaniments of praise and blame which enable an individual to see for himself what he is doing and which put him in command of a method of analyzing the obscure and usually unavowed forces which move him to act we need a permeation of judgments on conduct by the method and materials of a science of human nature without such enlightenment even the best intentioned attempts at the moral guidance and improvement of others often eventuate in tragedies of misunderstanding and division as is so often seen in the relations of parents and children the development therefore of a more adequate science of human nature is a matter of first rate importance the present revolt against the notion that psychology is a science of consciousness may well turn out in the future to be the beginning of a definitive turn in thought and action historically there are good reasons for the isolation and exaggeration of the conscious phase of human action an isolation which forgot that conscious is an adjective of some acts and which erected the resulting abstraction consciousness into a noun an existence separate and complete these reasons are interesting not only to the student of technical philosophy but also to the student of the history of culture and even politics they have to do with the attempt to drag realities out of occult essences and hidden forces and get them into the light of day they were part of the general movement called phenomenalism and of the growing importance of individual life and private voluntary concerns but the effect was to isolate the individual from his connections both with his fellows and with nature and thus to create an artificial human nature one not capable of being understood and effectively directed on the basis of analytic understanding it shut out from you not to say from scientific examination the forces which really move human nature it took a few surface phenomena for the whole story of significant human motive forces and acts as a consequence physical science and its technological applications were highly developed while the science of man, moral science is backward I believe that it is not possible to estimate how much of the difficulties of the present world situation are due to the disproportion and unbalance thus introduced into affairs it would have seemed absurd to say in the 17th century that in the end the alteration in methods of physical investigation which was then beginning would prove more important than the religious wars of that century yet the wars marked the end of one era the dawn of physical science the beginning of a new one and a trained imagination may discover that the nationalistic and economic wars which are the chief outward mark of the present are in the end to be less significant than the development of a science of human nature now in Coate it sounds academic to say that substantial bearing of social relations waits upon the growth of a scientific social psychology for the term suggests something specialized and remote but the formation of habits of belief desire and judgment is going on at every instant under the influence of the conditions set by men's contact intercourse and associations with one another this is the fundamental fact in social life and in personal character it is the fact about which traditional human science gives no enlightenment a fact which this traditional science blurs and virtually denies the enormous role played in popular morals by appeal to the supernatural and quasi magical is in effect a desperate admission of the futility of our science consequently the whole matter of the formation of the predispositions which effectively control human relationships is left to accident to custom and immediate personal likings resentments and ambitions it is a common place that modern industry and commerce are conditioned upon a control of physical energies due to proper methods of physical inquiry and analysis we have no social arts which are comparable because we have so nearly nothing in the way of psychological science yet through the development of physical science and especially of chemistry, biology, physiology, medicine and anthropology we now have the basis for the development of such a science of man signs of its coming into existence are present in the movements in clinical behavioristic and social, in its narrowest sense, psychology at present we not only have no assured means of forming character except crude devices of blame, praise, exhortation and punishment but the very meaning of the general notions of moral inquiry is matter of doubt and dispute the reason is that these notions are discussed in isolation from the concrete facts of the interactions of human beings with one another an abstraction as fatal as was the old discussion of phlogiston, gravity and vital force apart from concrete correlations of changing events with one another take for example such a basic conception as that of right involving the nature of authority in conduct there is no need here to rehearse the multitude of contending views which give evidence that discussion of this matter is still in the realm of opinion we content ourselves with pointing out that this notion is the last resort of the anti-empirical school in morals that approves the effect of neglect in social conditions in effect its adherents argue as follows let us concede that concrete ideas about right and wrong and particular notions of what is obligatory have grown up within experience but we cannot admit this about the idea of right, of obligation itself why does moral authority exist at all? why is the claim of the right recognized in conscience even by those who violate it indeed? our opponents say that such and such a course is wise, expedient, better but why act for the wise or good or better? why not follow our own immediate devices if we are so inclined? there is only one answer, we have a moral nature, a conscience, call it what you will and this nature responds directly in acknowledgement of the supreme authority of the right over all claims of inclination and habit we may not act in accordance with this acknowledgement but we still know that the authority of moral law, although not its power, is unquestionable men may differ indefinitely according to what their experience has been as to just what is right, what its contents are but they all spontaneously agree in recognizing the supremacy of the claims of whatever is thought of as right otherwise there would be no such thing as morality but merely calculations of how to satisfy desire grant the foregoing argument and all the apparatus of abstract moralism follows in its wake a remote goal of perfection ideals that are contrary in a wholesale way to what is actual, a free will of arbitrary choice all of these conceptions band themselves together with that of a non-empirical authority of right and a non-empirical conscious which acknowledges it they constitute a ceremonial or formal train why indeed acknowledge the authority of right? that many persons do not acknowledge it in fact in action and that all persons ignore it at times is assumed by the argument just what is the significance of an alleged recognition of a supremacy which is continually denied in fact how much would be lost if it were dropped out and we were left face to face with actual facts if a man lived alone in the world there might be some sense in the question why be moral? were it not for one thing? no such question would then arise as it is we live in a world where other persons live too our acts affect them they perceive these effects and react upon us in consequence because they are living beings they make demands upon us for certain things from us they approve and condemn not in abstract theory but in what they do to us the answer to the question why not put your hand in the fire? is the answer of fact if you do your hand will be burnt the answer to the question why acknowledge the right is of the same sort for right is only an abstract name for the multitude of concrete demands in action which others impress upon us and of which we are obliged if we would live to take some account its authority is the exigency of their demands the efficacy of their insistencies there may be good ground for the contention that in theory the idea of the right is subordinate to that of the good being a statement of the course proper to attain good but in fact it signifies the totality of social pressures exercised upon us to induce us to think and desire in certain ways hence the right can in fact become the road to the good only as the elements that compose this unremitting pressure are enlightened and only as social relationships become themselves reasonable it will be retorted that all pressure is a non-moral affair partaking of force not of right that right must be ideal thus we are invited to enter again the circle in which the ideal has no force and social actualities no ideal quality we refuse the invitation because social pressure is involved in our own lives as much as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on if we had desires judgments and plans in short a mind apart from social connections then the latter would be external and their action might be regarded as that of a non-moral force but we live mentally as physically only in and because of our environment social pressure is but a name for the interactions which are always going on and in which we participate living so far as we partake and dying so far as we do not the pressure is not ideal but empirical yet empirical here means only actual it calls attention to the fact that considerations of right are claims originating not outside of life but within it they are ideal in precisely the same degree in which we intelligently recognize and act upon them just as colors and canvas become ideal when used in ways that give an added meaning to life accordingly failure to recognize the authority of right means defect in effective apprehension of the realities of human association not an arbitrary exercise of free will this deficiency and perversion in apprehension indicates a defect in education that is to say in the operation of actual conditions in the consequences upon desire and thought of existing interactions and interdependencies it is false that every person has a consciousness of the supreme authority of right and then misconceives it or ignores it in action one has such a sense of the claims of social relationships as those relationships enforce one's desire and observations the belief in a separate ideal or transcendental practically ineffectual right is a reflex of the inadequacy with which existing institutions perform their educative office their office in generating observation of social continuities it is an endeavor to rationalize this defect like all rationalizations it operates to divert attention from the real state of affairs thus it helps maintain the conditions which created that standing in a way of effort to make our institutions more humane and equitable a theoretical acknowledgment of the supreme authority of right of moral law gets twisted into an effectual substitute for acts which would better the customs which now produce vague dull halting and evasive observation of actual social ties we are not caught in a circle we traverse a spiral in which social customs generate some consciousness of interdependencies and this consciousness is embodied in acts which in improving the environment generate new perceptions of social ties and so on forever the relationships the interactions are forever there as fact but they acquire meaning only in the desires judgments and purposes they awaken we recur to our fundamental propositions morals is connected with actualities of existence not with ideals ends in obligations independent of concrete actualities the facts upon which it depends are those which arise out of active connections of human beings with one another the consequences of the mutually intertwined activities and life of desire believe judgment satisfaction and dissatisfaction and this sense conduct and hence the morals are social they are not just things which ought to be social and which failed to come up to the scratch but there are enormous differences of better and worse in the quality of what is social ideal morals begin with the perception of these differences human interaction and ties are there or operative in any case but they can be regulated employed in an orderly way for good only as we know how to observe them and they cannot be observed a right they cannot be understood and utilized when the mind is left to itself to work without the aid of science for the natural unaided mind means precisely the habits of belief thought and desire which have been accidentally generated and confirmed by social institutions or customs but with all their admixture of accident and reasonableness we have at last reached a point where social conditions create a mind capable of scientific outlook and inquiry to foster and develop the spirit is the social obligation of the present because it is its urgent need yet the last word is not with obligation nor with the future infinite relationships of man with his fellows and with nature already exist the ideal means as we have seen a sense of those encompassing continuities with their infinite reach this meaning even now attached to present activities because they are set in a whole to which they belong and which belongs to them even in the midst of conflict struggle and defeat a consciousness is possible of the enduring and comprehending whole to be grasped and held this consciousness needs like every form of consciousness objects and symbols in the past men have sought many symbols which no longer serve especially since men have been idolaters worshipping symbols as things yet within these symbols which have so often claimed to be realities and which have imposed themselves as dogmas and intolerances there has rarely been absent some trace of a vital and enduring reality that of a community of life in which continuities of existence are consummated consciousness of the whole has been connected with references affections and loyalties which are communal but special ways of expressing the communal sense have been established they have been limited to a select social group they have hardened into obligatory rights and been imposed as conditions of salvation religion has lost itself in cults dogmas and myths consequently the office of religion as sense of community and one's place in it has been lost any fact religion has been distorted to a possession or burden of a limited part of human nature of a limited portion of humanity which finds no way to universalize religion except by imposing its own dogmas and ceremonies upon others of a limited class within a partial group priests saints at church thus other gods have been set up before the one God religion as a sense of the whole is the most individualized of all things the most spontaneous undefinable and varied for individuality signifies unique connections in the whole it has been perverted into something uniform and immutable it has been formulated into fixed and defined beliefs expressed in required acts and ceremonies instead of marking the freedom and peace of the individual as a member of an infinite whole it has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment and intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many yet every act may carry within itself a consoling and supporting consciousness of the whole to which it belongs and which in some sense belongs to it with responsibility for the intelligent determination of particular acts may go a joyful emancipation from the burden for responsibility for the whole which sustains them giving them their final outcome and quality there is a conceit fostered by perversion of religion which assimilates the universe to our personal desires but there is also a conceit of carrying the load of the universe from which religion liberates us within the flickering and inconsequential acts of separate selves draws a sense of the whole which claims and dignifies them in its presence we put off morality and live in the universal the life of the community in which we live and have our being is the fit symbol of this relationship the acts in which we express our perception of the ties which bind us to others are its only rights and ceremonies in the section for morality is social in the book human nature and conduct and introduction to social psychology by John Dewey