John Dewey Human Nature and conduct

There is a positive and negative side to morals. In ethics it may be sufficient to do no harm, but morals go beyond mere avoidance of the contumely of society. This is the spiritual pride of the prodigal son’s elder brother. Claiming moral praiseworthiness only on the basis of an absence of blameworthiness is above all only another permutation of self-concern. Not being the cause of ill is not the same as creating a new good. Yet there are some who do not break their arm when patting themselves on the back based upon not being a killer or bringing harm with the best of intentions. On the other hand, there are those whose exaltation of an ideal world wherein imperfection could be seen as an opportunity for real positive change instead of confirming evidence of the dichotomy between the ideal and actual and furthermore a confirmation of a neo-Platonic distinction between personal realities such as that theorized by Rene’ Descartes.

Indeed, the Cartesian solution for the mind-body problem leads some to give up real physical morality and ethics as a bad idea unattainable in a world not ideal, something only to be pursued within the individual consciousness. This aversion to the actual drags morality away form ethics; makes it something personal and not social. Something that is divorced from human interaction, something that is exclusively human inaction. All religions condemn this form do unto others . . . to practice compassion at all times to all creatures. Even Islam whose ideal is a religious society teaches that morality is a matter of social interaction.

Dewey elucidates two theories of social change, one wherein all social improvement is founded upon the preeminent change of individual character, and one for which improved morality “trickles down” from a primary change in social institutions. Each, in promoting its preferred theory of change, asserts the impossibility of the obverse. Each limits human individual freedom. One, by exalting it to exclusive ethereality, and the other by denying it completely. Shall a person contemplate their navel until it absorbs them, or shall society be condemned to follow some law of historical evolution or dialectical materialism into the new horizon? Some would deny this dilemma. Like Dewey these would point out that human behavior is the interaction between the individual and their surroundings. Environmental psychology for the natural surroundings and social psychology for group behavior. But is group behavior the same as interaction between the individual and social environment? We see that social change can stimulate individual change and individual change can stimulate social change but is this organic change that brings reform just as planned economies fail, planned social reform brings unintended consequences. One cannot merely do one thing.

Morals are a science of ends, means, and actions. Morality is not constrained to stasis as character alone. Morality is dynamic. Morality is a matter of intelligent design. It is teleological; involved with final causes. The forces of relativism confuse the actions of the individual, the interrelationship of the individual to the environment, and the individual themselves. The morality of an act is not the result of a changing environment, but the result of the individual’s choice of interaction with that environment.