Dewey’s attempt to elucidate the importance of inquiry to moral and political action has always generated concern. The reason for this is a simple one: inquiry seemingly obscures the inescapable imprecision and messiness that moral and political life can present. When inquiry is connected to morality it seems too reductionist; it cannot address one of the central themes of modernity—namely, the crisis of normative evaluation. What is meant by this, as contemporary thinkers explain, is that we often confront both as a society and within the unfolding of our individual lives a conflict among competing visions of the Good, Right, and Virtue without a fixed rule for assessment (cf. TIM [LW5:279–89]; E3 [LW7: pt. II]).1 In this regard we are reminded of Charles Hodge’s worry that in the wake of Darwin, we would lose those standards that prefigure the human, but are nonetheless essential to guiding our individual and social lives. This argument was echoed later by Max Weber, who identified the crisis in normative evaluation with the modern horizon itself. The issue for him was not the absence of values, but rather the plurality and diversity of values that emerge once an objective horizon disappears. In such a world how could normative evaluation be anything but mere whim or conviction?
The argument against Dewey’s account of inquiry, with its aspirations to achieving synthetic harmony among conflicting claims, is that he distorts and fails to take seriously this aspect of the modern condition. As scholars argue, this is a relic of his much earlier commitment to Hegelian idealism—the ontological framework in which inquiry is located.2 If Hodge and Weber are correct about the conditions of modern life and Dewey’s critics are correct about his philosophy, we run into a twofold problem. The first is that he cannot provide us with resources to defend the proposition that the relationship between mind and world is thoroughly normative at the most basic epistemic level. Second, he seems unable to take seriously the irreducibility of moral conflict that develops after the eclipse of a unifying sacred foundation. The two problems are related; it is the absence of a normatively laden world to which we might appeal to guide our judgments that contributes to the rise of conflict.
The aim of this chapter is to explore the way the post-Darwinian development of Dewey’s philosophy mitigates any presumptive belief in synthetic harmony. This much we see in four of his mature works—Democracy and Education (1916), Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922), “Three Independent Factors of Morals” (1930), and Ethics (1932).3 In these works, two dimensions emerge in Dewey’s moral philosophy. The first stipulates ethical harmony as a goal of deliberation in the context of conflict, and the second nonetheless views deliberation as potentially deepening our apprehension of conflict, defying harmony.
These two dimensions, however, are embedded within the larger framework of Dewey’s philosophy that we have considered throughout and that centers on the normative character of self-understanding. While he willingly acknowledges the absence of a determinant rule for settling moral conflicts, he does not believe this bespeaks some general crisis in normative evaluation. As I argue in the first section below, this is because for him the moral life is grounded in and coterminous with what I call mutual responsiveness—a kind of attentiveness to the claims of others that creates the framework necessary for thinking about moral situations from the outset. The moral life, to appropriate George Herbert Mead’s language, is “in a genuine sense constituted within the social process of experience, by the communication and mutual adjustment of behavior among the individual organisms which are involved in the process and which carry it on.”4 For both Dewey and Mead, mutual responsiveness is part and parcel of our introduction into the social world and signals the immanence of normativity. This claim is part of Dewey’s social psychology and serves as a counterpart to his philosophy of action and defense of democratic self-reliance.5
In proceeding this way, we can distinguish two different levels of analysis. The first relates to the generative character of the normative world and the reflective and perceptual capacities that it includes. The second concerns the place of conflict in the modern self-understanding and its specific character.6 For Dewey, the need for moral deliberation emerges precisely at the point where the socially constituted value-sphere in which individuals are located fractures, implicating them in conflicting possibilities for a concrete situation. At this juncture the following practical question arises: What should I do? (E3 [LW7:164]). The question invites a reconstructive and evaluative moment in our moral experience.
This reconstructive and evaluative moment is more fundamentally a way of seeing the landscape from within the space of moral reflection. But the essential point for Dewey is that because the social world is always already normative, we can only reflect from inside that space. In this regard I turn in the second section to elucidating the outlook of the deliberating agent—that is, the best achievable state that allows, in Dewey’s view, individuals to track the salient features of the current moral situation in order to do justice to the competing factors.7 We should read him, as I remarked at the conclusion of chapter 2, as attempting to engender an outlook toward the art of living that transforms the emotional and intellectual course one takes into any one particular issue in life. The point is to provide people who see themselves as moral agents with insight into how to make reflection more enlightened.8
What are the habits of character that render reflection more enlightened, that allow the self to see and hear clearly the call of competing claims? In short, what is the substantive content of the best achievable state? For Dewey, to be a practical actor engaged in deliberation in the context of a moral problem requires willingness to see one’s judgments as revisable, ability to assess the place of general principles in particular situations, and, most important, a sense of “sympathy”—that is, the ability to imaginatively participate in the life of others (E3 [LW7:249–251]).9 When taken together, these elements help fill out and define the dramatic character of deliberation (HNC [MW14: chaps. 16–17]; E3 [LW7:298–301]). As such, “best achievable state” denotes an ideal perceptive condition, whose aim is to track the deliverances from a person’s character on the one hand and the larger environment on the other in the context of concrete conflicts.
The role of sympathy is especially important in this process. For Dewey, sympathy works through the imagination (i.e., the inferential dimension of inquiry) to foreground the complex and variegated landscape in which the agent is situated.10 In other words, sympathy registers content from the world, and in so doing prepares the individual for the potential expansion of her provincial horizons—so that she may become, as Dewey says, an “impartial observer” (E3 [LW7:251]; cf. AE2 [LW10:338]).11 This use of “observer” rather than “actor” is significant, for it captures the spectatorial role Dewey intends for the agent to assume. But the emphasis should not be placed on the image of the spectator as occupying a view from nowhere. Rather, Dewey imagines the spectator as that of a surveyor—one who sees and measures the texture and diversity of the moral landscape for decision-making. Through sympathy, contextual sensitivity becomes the key to an impartial or objective outlook.
In the last part of this chapter, “The Tragic Self: Deliberation and Conflict,” I turn to the disjunction in Dewey’s moral philosophy that scholars overlook. Here I mean the difference in his analysis of deliberation that informs Human Nature and Conduct, on the one hand, and “Three Independent Factors of Morals” and specific examples he offers in his Ethics, on the other. Precisely because deliberation proceeds from the domain of practical action, it has the potential to make the goal of synthetic harmony and our teleological psychologies problematic. Deliberation does not always resolve conflict by enlarging our thoughts and dramatically proposing a course of action that encompasses the conflicting factors. So “best achievable state” does not imply that if we sincerely engage in deliberation we will always dissolve conflict. In fact, deliberation for Dewey may potentially deepen our sense of conflict. We come to discover that the various factors of moral life are truly at “cross purposes and exercise divergent forces” in which choice becomes a question of what kind of person I want to be and what kind of world I long to inhabit (TIM [LW5:280]). We must forgo one if another is to be realized. Dewey’s much earlier Hegelian commitment to ethical harmony is thus redescribed on Darwinian grounds: “[T]he Hegelian emphasis upon continuity and the function of conflict persisted on empirical grounds after my earlier confidence in dialectic had given way to skepticism.”12
In previous chapters we discussed the social character of action and self-understanding for Dewey, with its liberating and constraining aspects (chap. 2, third section). We considered the way our actions are explicable through a practice of reason-giving (chap. 2, last section), a kind of mutual responsiveness. This is a feature upon which democratic life is based and which attempts to support it (chap. 3, first section). Yet Dewey wants to make a stronger claim about mutual responsiveness—for him, it forms the generative core of moral life. That is, to inhabit a social world is to live within a normative one. He thus agrees with the Jamesian point cited at the conclusion of the last chapter: “Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below.”13 It cannot be denied that there will most certainly be conflicts within such a world about what the good life comprises or about which rights to uphold and defend. But this is a separate issue, pace Hodge and Weber, from the one that questions the existence of the world in which those conflicts emerge. We are awakened to the demands of the moral life by acquiring a kind of conceptual awareness that is slowly refined and honed through reflection and deliberation. This is part of what Dewey refers to as our “secondary and acquired” nature (HNC [MW14:63]). He would thus agree with John McDowell’s recent description of the normative dimension of social existence—a description, I should add, that is framed specifically against the disenchantment thesis:
When a decent upbringing initiates us into the relevant way of thinking, our eyes are opened to the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons. Thereafter our appreciation of its detailed layout is indefinitely subject to refinement, in reflective scrutiny of our ethical thinking. We can so much as understand, let alone seek to justify, the thought that reason makes these demands on us only at a standpoint within a system of concepts and conceptions that enables us to think about such demands, that is, only at a standpoint from which demands of this kind seem to be in view.14
To ask the question “Why be attentive to the demands of the moral life?,” says Dewey, is like asking the question, “Why live?” And the only answer, he continues, “is that if one is going to live one must live a life of which these things form the substance” (HNC [MW14:58]). Of course, he can understand the crisis in normative evaluation, but he encourages us not to find the crisis gripping.
WITHIN THE SPACE OF MORAL LIFE
For Dewey, the emergence of moral life is coterminous with conditioning individuals for mutual responsiveness.15 As with dancing, for example, mutual responsiveness is what allows us to follow the movements of our partners from the perspective of our own moves. Responsiveness thus means that moral life requires us to react appropriately to an experience of the world, its evidence, and objects that now call on our attention. We can begin to interpret this point if we turn to chapter 5 of Human Nature and Conduct, “Custom and Morality,” where he investigates morality’s authoritative force. In this context, he is aware of the age-old question: “Why be moral?” For him, all moral claims can be reduced to this question if we so choose. Yet Dewey seems to think that at the empirical level the answer is straightforward, suggesting that the question “Why be moral?” is often one of theoretical analysis rather than practical concern. And so the claim morality has on us, he answers dramatically, “is that of life” (HNC [MW14:57]).
But what does he mean when he invokes the term “life”? Before turning specifically to how he answers, let us consider for a moment the word itself. At first blush it isn’t clear how the word can function authoritatively. What is its content and who is its author to which I am answerable? This way of approaching the term may obscure its more mundane function. After all, when the term “life” is invoked authoritatively it comes in common phrases such as “That’s life” or “Such is life.” Both phrases attempt to reconcile us to fate—the way things are. In doing so they generate a feeling of inevitability—the sense that things could not be otherwise. That Dewey invokes the term authoritatively in the context of the moral life equally aims to invoke this sense of inevitability. We are, for him, beings for whom it is natural to be moral creatures.
The suggestion for this reading comes in the final chapter of Human Nature and Conduct, entitled, “Morality Is Social,” where Dewey begins to explain how he uses the term:
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 response of others just as we dramatically enact other consequences. We foreknow how others will act, and the foreknowledge is the beginning of judgment passed on action. (HNC [MW14:216] [emphasis added])
This is the first half of this all-important but compact passage. Here Dewey indicates that the internal process of “life” is the practice of taking the attitude of others, which I shall say more about in a moment. But at this juncture, he understands morality as a social function precisely because it generates by its very workings a kind of foreknowledge indexed to the attitude of others. Through a process of acculturation we come to experimentally, and therefore inferentially, adjust our linguistic and social behavior in advance as part of interacting with others. The adjustment is a reading, if you will, of the action of the other. Mead captures this point when he writes: “Just as in fencing the parry is an interpretation of the thrust, so, in the social act, the adjustive response of one organism to the gesture of another is the interpretation of that gesture by that organism—it is the meaning of that gesture.”16 If this were not the case we would permanently experience each others’ actions as wholly foreign, indexed to something we know not (HNC [MW14:65–67]; DE [MW9:32–33]).
The previous point, along with the claim about the importance of acculturation, should not be understated. Dewey is drawing our attention to the importance of our “second nature” and the way it opens us up to the moral life. “For practical purposes,” he says, “morals mean customs, folkways, established collective habits…. They are the pattern into which individual activity must weave itself” (HNC [MW14:54]). This theme also figures prominently in the ethical naturalism of McDowell and Sabina Lovibond, both of whom are concerned with showing the continuity between reason and nature and so revealing the immanence of normativity. For them, as well as for Dewey, acculturation involves the biological hardware that makes our first nature receptive to acquiring a second nature. This much he explains in his discussion of habits, keeping in mind that habits function as norms for action at both the basic and most complex levels of life:
Habits as organized activities are secondary and acquired, not native and original. They are outgrowths of unlearned activities which are part of man’s endowment at birth…. In the life of the individual, instinctive activity comes first. But an individual begins life as a baby, and babies are dependent beings. Their activities could continue at most for only a few hours were it not for the presence and aid of adults with their formed habits. And babies owe to adults more than procreation, more than the continued food and protection which preserve life. They owe to adults the opportunity to express their native activities in ways which have meaning. Even if by some miracle original activity could continue without assistance from the organized skill and art of adults, it would not amount to anything. It would be mere sound and fury. In short, the meaning of native activities is not native; it is acquired. It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium. (HNC [MW14:65] [original emphasis])
Notice that this formulation recalls our discussion of the liberating and constraining aspects of practical action, since acculturation limits what we can do even as it provides resources for transformation. In this context, however, Dewey’s point is that our entrance and participation in social life gives rise to an acquired nature. We might say, as Dewey and Lovibond do, that it is akin to learning our first language (HNC [MW14:57]).17 We would not call the acquired first language “natural” in the sense that we come already wired with it, but neither would we see it as unnatural to have acquired such a language. Similarly, we would not call our norms for action, which we can acquire only through participation in social life, “natural” at the biological level, although our biology participates in allowing us to acquire and develop them. For Dewey, we should appropriately understand our second nature as continuous and emergent from our first (QC [LW4:171–172]).
But observe how he describes the matter in the quoted passage. For him, the social medium provides the opportunity to express native capacities—which is simply to say there are native capacities for norm acquisition that are necessary for acquiring the specific norms that we do take in.18 Our “second nature,” then, refers not only to the specificity of collective habits, but also to the conceptual framework in which those habits are located. The former awakens us to the existence of the latter such that it becomes impossible for us to see ourselves otherwise. If this description is accurate, there should be no legitimate question about the very idea or existence of habits as norms for action, apart from those that we address in our encounters with specific habits.19
We may still worry about what Dewey is attempting to elucidate if we conclude that taking on the attitudes of others, for instance, which is essential to entering and managing social life, means mere imitation. Habit talk often carries this connotation. And imitation also seems to be implied by his earlier discussion of rehearsal. We may think that the category of the social as implied by acculturation looms too large and threatens to trap us within a narrow horizon. For all of their insight, there are unfortunately few social-psychological resources in McDowell and Lovibond to allow us to get at the dynamism of the process. Merely referring to our second nature does not yet elucidate the energetic process that acquiring a second nature implies. Yet Dewey’s account, owing to his Darwinian commitments, is intended to be adaptive and more generative even as he insists on the relevance of the imitative dimension (HNC [MW14:49–50]; cf. HWT2 [LW8:283–284]; DE [MW9:39]).20
We can make sense of this if we consider once again the case of language, to which Dewey often refers as a model for thinking about moral life. One’s ability to respond to a question—that is, to give a reply that is intelligible to its recipient—implies an interpretation of what constitutes “responding.” This could only be possible because the individual is at some point simultaneously acting as both questioner and responder—that is, the agent has internalized the differentiation of roles and responsibilities that questioning and responding embody. “The act,” says Dewey, “must come before the thought, and a habit before an ability to evoke the thought at will” (HNC [MW14:25]; cf. EN [LW1:135]). Through my response, I see myself from the standpoint of the person I address so that I import something of their conduct—i.e., a way of feeling, thinking, and doing—into my own that makes my response intelligible. We have a moment of taking the attitude of the other (a kind of imitative process that fits with Dewey’s language of rehearsal), but with a difference attributable to the asymmetry of the response needed to complete the process (EN [LW1:140–144]; cf. DE [MW9:40]).21
The example of language is important because it does substantive work for Dewey. Language, for him, is the paradigmatic example with which to think about social practices generally, but morality in particular, because language is the grounding mechanism for the emergence of common and shared inferences that underwrite any practice we label “social.” Our coordination and interaction are at once funneled through the use of signs that orient us in a certain kind of way, which simultaneously gives those signs meaning for future appropriation.22 As Mead explains, we rehearse the response of others (i.e., they represent symbols) just as we dramatically enact other consequences, so that we come not merely to respond in the same way (i.e., imitate others), but to respond appropriately (i.e., address the symbols because they elicit specific responses).23 “Responding appropriately” must only mean that the meaning-content of the response is intelligible, not that the content comports with what the listener wishes to hear. Only through language, however, can I hold out the hope of getting my interlocutors to see things as I do, to change their minds such that they register an order other than their own thickly layered one. This process is what leads Dewey to the following claim: “When communication occurs all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision; they are readapted to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking” (EN [LW1:132] [emphasis added]).
Of course, for Dewey there are those instances in which behavioral expectations reach all the way down into meaning itself. We might consider a brief example of this. In baseball, when the batter hits the ball we immediately (all things considered) expect him to run to the appropriate base. Now walking would obviously satisfy getting the batter to the next base, but we would surely question his interest in getting “safe,” and so potentially garnering points for the team, if he decided to walk rather than run. We would even wonder if he knows how the game is played. He has not responded to the event (i.e., the hitting of the ball and its movement through the air) in view of its place in an inclusive social practice (i.e., baseball). In other instances behavioral expectations and their meaning-content are not understood to be immediately indexed to each other. This may be either the result of the asymmetrical form of the relationship itself or simply the result of trying to reach some understanding of the subject matter or object to which we are oriented (E3 [LW7:218–219]). But we cannot yet ascertain this prior to our immersion in a context that includes intentions and expectations. This is precisely why Dewey’s aim is to articulate a more fundamental account in which the general composition of mutual responsiveness is explained.
Developmentally the practice of taking on the attitude of others is not always an outer conversation—as we often see between parent and child, teacher and student, coach and player—but rather becomes a truncated, inner conversation with oneself (HNC [MW14:217]; DE [MW9:32–35]; EN [LW1:134]). In the case of conduct, Dewey is saying that one becomes reflexively aware through a process of communication of the social significance of one’s actions (they represent symbols to self and other and achieve independent status) and can continue an interaction given this awareness. This is only possible because, as he argues, a human form of consciousness emerges from a communicatively mediated process by which we take on the attitude of others—that is, are responsive to them and them to us. “Through speech,” Dewey explains, “a person dramatically identifies himself with potential acts and deeds; he plays many roles … in a contemporaneously enacted drama. Thus mind emerges” (EN [LW1:135]).24
We finally come to the precise meaning of morality’s authoritative force that Dewey intends to capture with the term “life.” Let us turn to the second half of the passage quoted from the chapter “Morality Is Social” in Human Nature and Conduct, beginning with the last sentence from the passage above.
We foreknow how others will act, and the foreknowledge is the beginning of judgment passed on action. We know with them; there is conscience. An 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 actions. (HNC [MW14:216–217] [original emphasis])
In this passage he describes a discursively formed practice that is internalized by the self through a process of socialization, what Mead refers to as “the generalized other.” Mead explains it this way:
In abstract thought the individual takes the attitude of the generalized other toward himself, without reference to its expression in any particular other individuals; and in concrete thought he takes that attitude in so far as it is expressed in the attitudes toward his behavior of those other individuals with whom he is involved…. And only through the taking by individuals of the attitude or attitudes of the generalized other toward themselves is the existence of a universe of discourse, as that system of common or social meanings which thinking presupposes at its context, rendered possible.25
In both accounts there is an implicit normative claim that is entailed by the process itself. As Dewey says, we know not as them, but with them. Another way to capture the dual feature that “with” intends to register is to say that the process allows us to track each others’ commitments, assess entitlement to our own, and chastise ourselves and others for “commitments undertaken irresponsibly.”26 This is the function that the “tribunal” imagery serves in Dewey’s account.
As Dewey and Mead understand the matter, this normative claim becomes a feature of character formation as such. We assess and guide our own actions and hold others to account for theirs, which alone determines for all participants the meaning and significance of those actions and the objects to which they are directed from the outset. To recall Dewey’s earlier remark: “The only answer is that if one is going to live one must live a life of which these things form the substance” (HNC [MW14:58]). Herein lies the sense of inevitability referred to earlier—we are the kind of organisms for which it is second nature to live within a normative world. As he says, the central question is not whether we will be moral agents—that is, whether or not we will engage in normative evaluation—but rather with what competency will we exercise that agency. “In short, the choice is not between a moral authority outside custom and one within it. It is between adopting more or less intelligent and significant customs” (HNC [MW14:58]). The point merely restates an observation made earlier about our second nature: there is no legitimate question about the very idea and existence of norms and the place they occupy in our lives, apart from investigation of specific norms.
At this juncture, we can begin to see Dewey’s subtle understanding of the importance of our second nature specifically and its relationship to identity formation generally. For him, identity formation is not exhausted by the process of socialization that his account of mutual responsiveness implies. Nor does it imply a form of moral reflection that is undetermined by that process and whose imaginative resources are therefore detached from a narrative of experience. So when he speaks of an “assembly” being formed within “our breast which discusses and appraises proposed and performed acts,” he means to capture the core of what makes moral life possible, independent of the specific content of that life. This is what allows Mead to say in agreement, “We must not forget this other capacity, that of replying to the community and insisting on the gesture of the community changing. We can reform the order of things; we can insist on making the community standards better standards.”27 This is because our actions and the commitments they express emerge from a general responsiveness that, although realized through a specific community, becomes necessary for one to be a competent moral agent in both that world and all future social worlds one inhabits. Comparing the moral life to language once more, Dewey speaks of it as having “transcendent importance” because “it creates demands which take effect [and] extends to the common life in communication, counsel and instruction” (HNC [MW14:57]). This simply means, to appropriate McDowell’s language, that the moral life “stands over against all parties to communication in it, with a kind of independence of each of them that belongs with its meriting a kind of respect.”28
But this picture of moral transcendence is not independent of one’s socially constituted identity; rather, it moves in the same direction that mutual responsiveness already demands. And this direction is one in which, as Mc-Dowell explains, “we make ourselves answerable not just to the verdicts of our fellows but to the facts themselves.”29 Dewey makes the point with the following example:
A traffic policeman holds up his hand or blows a whistle. His act operates as a signal to direct movements. But it is more than an episodic stimulus. It embodies a rule of social action. Its proximate meaning is its near-by consequences in coordination of movements of persons and vehicles; its ulterior and permanent meaning—essence—is its consequence in the way of security of social movements. Failure to observe the signal subjects a person to arrest, fine or imprisonment…. The essence embodied in the policeman’s whistle is not an occult reality superimposed upon a sensuous or physical flux and imparting form to it; a mysterious subsistence somehow housed within a psychical event. Its essence is the rule, comprehensive and persisting, the standardized habit, of social interaction, and for the sake of which the whistle is used…. This meaning is independent of the psychical landscape, the sensations and imagery, of the policeman and others concerned. But it is not on that account a timeless spiritual ghost nor pale logical subsistence divorced from events. (EN [LW1:149]).
Dewey’s talk of independence in this passage merely recalls the harmless view of transcendence expressed by him, McDowell, and Robert Brandom, as discussed in chapter 2. He is concerned to show that “meanings” have objective status, even though the objectivity of “meanings” is not independent of human practices. The meaning of a gesture, for instance, is determined by its connection to a more complete context of norms and practices. I correctly grasp the meaning of the officer’s hand gesture when I respond appropriately according to that established meaning. Whether I succeed in discerning the correct meaning is a matter of consequence: Am I able to get along in this practice? The meaning is objective in the following senses. First, it is grounded in a socially shared habit that transcends the understanding of particular individuals. Second, correct interpretation is determined by responses and consequences. These are objective in the sense that they are publicly observable events in the world to which we are answerable whether we acknowledge it or not. I take Dewey to mean here what Charles S. Peirce maintained in a much earlier context: “Reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it.” 30
For Dewey, “answerable” does not mean, for instance, that we necessarily go along with the policeman’s wishes, for we may think that the whistle has been used inappropriately (e.g., by attempting to stop a legitimate protest) or that there is some more effective use to achieve traffic management. So the use of the whistle may be out of step with what it claims to be about or its use may not be the best way of realizing its intended purpose. But notice that even in this context, the norm that governs the practice—what Dewey refers to as its meaning—has a kind of independence to which our reasons are directed, even if those reasons potentially expand and transform the norm itself.
This is not to deny, as James famously says, that “the trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.”31 But if we are to hold on to an intelligible account of the objectivity of norms, and properly understand what both James and Dewey mean, we should take seriously the definite article in James’ remark that precedes his invocation of the word “human”. That our norms are human-dependent simply means that they would neither emerge nor be intelligible to us if we were not beings for whom it is second nature to employ them as fundamental to our social practices. This is what Dewey means when he affirms the independence of meaning, but then cautions us not to interpret independence as a “timeless spiritual ghost” or “pale logical subsistence divorced from events.” He wants to discourage us from reifying any particular norm, even as we acknowledge that norms qua norms are part and parcel of human social practices.
Another way to understand this harmless view of transcendence is to say that we participate in the practice of giving and asking for reasons that leave our perspective and its conceptual content susceptible to being constrained, improved, or expanded by the world we inhabit. This practice, says Dewey, “sets up a heightened emotional appreciation and provides a new motive for fidelities previously blind. It sets up an attitude of criticism, of inquiry, and makes men sensitive to the brutalities and extravagancies of customs” (HNC [MW14:55]). I take him to mean that if we are to remain committed to our norms, it will not simply be because our fellows give a nod. As he says in his Logic of 1938: “A proposition does not gain validity because of the number of persons who accept it” (L [LW12:484 n. 4]). Rather, our commitment to our norms will persist because they can withstand the challenge of reason, evidence, and argumentation.32 Where such evidence exists but is nonetheless ignored by someone or when someone refuses to engage in the practice of reason-giving, the question is not what we will say to them, but what we will say about their epistemic position in the world. That is, what stands in the way of a reciprocal willingness to fully engage in discursive exchange? And are the obstacles of the kind that seek to keep in place some dubious and, perhaps, harmful set of practices?33
This leads us to an important observation. In forming moral judgments in a conflict situation, for instance, identities are open (whether we perceive the fact or not) to experiential and discursive testing, given the holistic and moving encounter between self, other, and environment. What Jürgen Habermas rightly says of Mead must also apply to Dewey: The “formation of moral judgments” is emergent from a process that “simultaneously socializes and temporalizes practical reason.”34 For them, “temporalizing” practical reason means making explicit the experimental and developmental quality mutual responsiveness implies in future moral evaluation. As we shall see, Dewey’s account of moral deliberation is expressive of just this process. But before we move there, we need a characterization of the moral situation and conflict.
THE CHARACTER OF CONFLICT UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS
Dewey’s description of the immanence of the normative world puts in place a framework in which to locate and think about conflict, even as it holds off the supposition that the emergence of conflict implies a crisis in normative evaluation. To separate these two issues is of crucial importance. It allows us to better understand how he thinks about the character of conflict under modern conditions while simultaneously separating out the reflective resources he believes are necessary to managing conflict. Once we understand this, we can then return to elucidating those reflective resources while holding off the suggestion that Dewey is insensitive to the irreducibility of conflict.
We should begin with his Ethics. In part 2 of that work, “Theory of the Moral Life,” Dewey opens with a background description of the modern condition. Here the question at the heart of moral reflection comes into view precisely because of this specific background. After all, he writes his Ethics primarily as a college textbook, and so he principally seeks to orient the student to the moral life and the demands that emerge. Consider that all-important opening passage:
The intellectual distinction between customary and reflective morality is clearly marked. The former places the standard and rules of conduct in ancestral habit; the latter appeals to conscience, reason, or to some principle which includes thought. The distinction is as important as it is definite, for it shifts the centre of gravity in morality. Nevertheless the distinction is relative rather than absolute. Some degree of reflective thought must have entered occasionally into systems which in the main were founded on social wont and use, while in contemporary morals, even when the need of critical judgment is most recognized, there is an immense amount of conduct that is merely accommodated to social usage. In what follows we shall, accordingly, emphasize the difference in principle between customary and reflective morals rather than try to describe different historic and social epochs. (E3 [LW7:162] [original emphasis])
Dewey’s distinction between customary and reflective morality is based on the now-familiar story—discussed in the last chapter—regarding the absence of a dominant ethical or theological framework to which all appeal. In posttraditional societies, there is more of a disjunction between the meaning and purpose of life and its relationship to institutional and symbolic structures; in the last chapter this was expressed as the absence of some dominant theological framework underwriting self and society. For this reason, Dewey set out to provide a post-traditional account of piety and faith that is sensitive to the fact of pluralism. In the context of the moral life, the distinction between customary and reflective also implies that there is no de facto normative position of “my station and its duties” to which the agent retreats in thinking about moral situations and which necessarily does justice to the particular details that characterize such situations.35 “The necessity for judgment and choice,” Dewey writes, “comes from the fact that one has to manage forces with no common denominator” (TIM [LW5:280]).
For him this is the determinant horizon from which moral reflection takes its point of departure in modern times. Dewey explains this several paragraphs later: “Moral theory cannot emerge when there is positive belief as to what is right and what is wrong, for then there is no occasion for reflection. It emerges when men are confronted with situations in which different desires promise opposed goods and in which incompatible courses of action seem to be morally justified” (E3 [LW7:164]). This passage makes a number of claims, not the least of which is the centrality of conflict to his thinking. We shall come back to this point in a moment. There is, however, a more critical observation we ought to underscore: The absence of a solution in the moral situation constitutes the problem; it sparks the practical question of what to do.36
The next point to observe about the relationship between this background account and moral reflection is the following: Philosophers of morality are in no more of a certain position about what to do regarding moral action in general than the agent who finds himself in a specific situation. Because Dewey insists on drawing a distinction in principle between customary and reflective morality, he rejects exhibiting blind deference to existing norms in order to solve the moral predicament (E3 [LW7:165]). Speaking once more to the student, he says that moral philosophy “does not offer a table of commandments in a catechism in which answers are as definite as are the questions which are asked…. [T]he student who expects more from moral theory will be disappointed” (E3 [LW7:166]).
But what exactly does he mean by moral conflict? This question is central to appreciating the role he ascribes to moral theory vis-à-vis conflict and to understanding the function of individual reflection in the light of the same. To answer this question we need to turn briefly to an address Dewey delivered before the French Philosophical Society in 1930, namely, “Three Independent Factors of Morals.” Unfortunately this address receives surprisingly little consideration from both admirers and critics.37 And yet it remains the locus, in my view, for understanding how attentive Dewey is to both conflict and its irreducibility.
One purpose of this lecture, among others, is to address what Dewey takes to be the central outlook of most moral theories: “[A]ll postulate one single principle as an explanation of moral life” (TIM [MW5:280]; cf. RIP [MW12:172–173]). Here he distinguishes between two major theories. The first postulates the Good, understood as “happiness … pleasure, [or] self-realization,” as the universal end by which all action is measured and presumed to be in the service of (TIM [MW5:281]; cf. RIP [MW12: chap. 7]; E3 [LW7: chap. 11]). The other major theory makes the Right, “understood as the morality of law,” central (TIM [MW5:281]). Unlike the postulate of the Good, the morality of law prescribes what is legitimate and obligatory, so that “moral good becomes that which is in agreement with juridical imperative, while the opposite is not true” (TIM [MW5:281]; cf. RIP [MW12: chap. 7]; E3 [LW7: chap. 12]).
We do not need a substantive explication of these two traditions or their specific representatives; it seems sufficient to say that these descriptions cover much of the philosophical terrain in moral philosophy.38 Notwithstanding this, however, in each case Dewey is very clear that both branches of thought elide conflict and the uncertainty that it presents. His point at this stage of the essay is to argue that once morality is reduced to a single principle, the genuineness of conflict no longer seems plausible.
To see how this is so, consider two problems that Dewey identifies. The first is that reliance by traditional moral theories on one principle of assessment is based on the quest for certainty (TIM [LW5:282–283]; cf. RIP [MW12:174–175]; QC [LW4: chap. 10]). As previously noted, the quest for certainty is understood largely as an epistemic affair, so that certain beliefs (either located deep in the self or found in nature) are then used as directives on the political and ethical level of existence. Such beliefs act through the guise of a covering-law universalism, so that justification has only one universally valid factor. Yet for him, the fact that the history of human action reveals a disjunction between being good and doing good, between norms for action and what the natural and social world will allow, indicates that moral action often places us in a position where we court adverse circumstances that cannot be subsumed under one normative category. The quest for certainty is seemingly inattentive to just this dimension of experience, and in so being distorts the psychology of expectation Dewey believes is so important to a modern outlook.
The second problem that emerges, which is connected to the first, is what Dewey characterizes as insensitivity to the uniqueness of the situations in which individuals find themselves (RIP [MW12:176]). After all, we may be able with some intellectual energy to explain how two duties and the actions to which they commit us can be in conflict, and yet be unable to see why those duties are at loggerheads. To answer the “why” question will often require a richer narrative about individuals and their relationship to the situation of concern. “The selective determination and relation of objects in thought”—that is, the choices that now recommend themselves to the agent—“is controlled by reference to a situation” (QT [LW5:246]). The situation calls out in the self diverse habits that give the entire encounter between self and situation a qualitative unity. Consider the following example he offers of moral conflict:
Take … the case of a citizen of a nation which has just declared war on another country. He is deeply attached to his own State. He has formed habits of loyalty and of abiding by its laws, and now one of its decrees is that he shall support war. He feels in addition gratitude and affection for the country which has sheltered and nurtured him. But he believes that this war is unjust, or perhaps he has a conviction that all war is a form of murder and hence wrong. One side of his nature, one set of convictions and habits, leads him to acquiesce in war; another deep part of his being protests. He is torn between two duties: he experiences a conflict between the incompatible values presented to him by his habits of citizenship and by his religious beliefs respectively. Up to this time, he has never experienced a struggle between the two; they have coincided and reinforced one another. Now he has to make a choice between competing moral loyalties and convictions. The struggle is not between a good which is clear to him and something else which attracts him but which he knows to be wrong. It is between values each of which is an undoubted good in its place but which now get in each other’s way. (E3 [LW7:165])
This is a revealing example of Dewey’s thoughts at work because it shows us how the conflict arises out of the deeper features of one’s character. This passage reveals the concern we have for and owe to the objects and/or persons to which the conflicting values point. There is a story we could tell that allows us to understand why the patriot’s values were never previously in conflict. And there are reasons to be had, as James tells us, for why incompatible courses of action now appear from the outset of reflection as “living options.”39 Uniqueness is thus located in the texture of the narrative.
“Sometimes,” Dewey says in his Ethics, “a juncture is so critical that a person, in deciding upon what course he will take, feels that his future, his very being, is at stake” (E3 [LW7:171]). Now why one feels his very being to be at stake requires attentiveness to one’s character and the stand that each of the choices takes in the life of the individual. As Dewey explains, the “failure to acknowledge the situation leaves, in the end, the logical force of objects and their relation inexplicable” (QT [LW5:246]). The primacy of insensitivity prevents us from seeing, inquiring into, and explaining just these dimensions of the morally problematic situation.
If insensitivity prevents these two traditional accounts from seeing the uniqueness of the situation, it also obscures the potential irreducibility of moral conflict. Obviously, the language of “irreducibility” is what critics of Dewey deny that he is capable of acknowledging. And so despite his emphasis on deliberation, they maintain, he nonetheless occludes this potentially tragic dimension of the moral life. We will return to this in the final section of this chapter, but for the moment two comments are in order.
1. As Dewey understands the matter, the intimate connection between self and context aids in explaining not only why the competing factors recommend themselves to the agent, but also, more important, why conflict may defy reconstructive analysis. “Because the environment,” Dewey maintains, “is not all of one piece, man’s house is divided within itself, and at times, against itself” (HNC [MW14:39]). This remark may seem vague, unless we understand that it occurs in a larger passage from Human Nature and Conduct regarding the objective status of multiple habits and commitments. These constitute one’s moral horizon. But there is no presumptive belief that they are internally harmonized. Notwithstanding, Dewey is keen to highlight that “diversity does not of itself imply conflict” (HNC [MW14:38]). In other words, if a value-judgment is to serve a practical purpose then some state of affairs must obtain in fact that brings the otherwise divergent values into conflict. In such instances the “possibility of conflict” that diversity suggests “is realized in fact” (HNC [MW14:38]; cf. L [LW12:112]). This is the point the passage above conveys.
2. But in what sense might Dewey mean that moral conflict potentially defies reconstructive analysis? In answering this question, it would be a gross misreading of him to conclude that in recognizing value commitments that pull in different directions the goal is to order them such that we get out of the conflict. Isaac Levi has advanced this point in his essay “Conflict and Inquiry.” As he writes against thinkers such as Bernard William, Martha Nussbaum, and Isaiah Berlin: “Following Dewey, I would say that when we find ourselves endorsing two value commitments which cannot be jointly satisfied, we ought first to extricate ourselves from inconsistency by modifying our value commitments so that we no longer regard ourselves under an obligation either to perform the act or to refrain from doing so.”40 But nowhere in the Ethics or Human Nature and Conduct, even when he speaks about reconstructing the moral situation, do we find this position. In fact, Dewey is much closer to these thinkers regarding value pluralism. He acknowledges the possibility of incommensurability just to the extent that he views mere modification of value commitments as obscuring the hold such commitments have on us.
Appreciating Dewey’s careful response to the question above and the correction to Levi’s reading that I am advancing requires us to accept the truth of two previous claims. First, he never abandons his interest in cultivating a more humble psychology of expectation. Second, cultivating that outlook is part of appropriately orienting students to the moral life. From these two positions follows a third tentative, yet implied, commitment. As Rosalind Hursthouse points out, insensitivity will often prevent us from understanding that the question at issue may not simply be: “Which is the morally right decision, to do x or to do y?,” but more precisely, “Which is the morally right action (with no qualification about remainder, the good action about which the agent need feel regret), x or y?”41 As with Dewey’s example of the patriot above, notice that Hursthouse’s formulation takes for granted that a choice will be made. This is not the issue. If the conflict is genuine, as Dewey’s example intends to suggest, then even if we choose, we will not be shielded from a sense of loss or regret.42
These two questions are the same, but with a difference attributable to a kind of perceptive state that is more thoroughly bound up with and partly defines reflection. This is expressed in the second formulation. For Dewey, this sensitivity is part of what it means to see the situation as a conflict among competing values. His explicit acknowledgment of this comes out in “Three Independent Factors,” where he cautions us from beginning with the claim that conflict is “specious and apparent” (TIM [LW5:280]).43 It follows that his emphasis on the importance of being sensitive intends for agents to track not only those cases in which the first question is appropriately asked, but also those instances in which the answer is attentive to the substantive implications of the parenthetical in the second formulation. We need to be prepared to ask which we should choose, x or y, where the answer, following reflection, does not extinguish the possibility of feeling regret and loss because a plan of action and the value it registers go unrealized. To be sure, we move on and develop along that chosen path, but there remains a place in our memories where we dare not visit often, and when we do, we do so with a seriousness of mind and a somberness of voice.
Dewey’s understanding of moral conflict comes into view against his rejection of the quest for certainty in the moral life on the one hand, and the insensitivity that follows on the other. Conflict refers to the incompatibility of ends within a particular situation, where the pull of those ends is realized at the intersection of subject and context. For him, conflict is between some portion of an agent’s values (as in the example above), or between the agent’s values and those of the other members of the situation of concern, or between some values expressed by a more generalized community (E3 [LW7:324–325]). The immediate identification of conflict—that is, the recognition that these two values cannot be actualized concurrently—means that the agent (or agents, given the political bent of the latter) must engage in the process of reflection to find a resolution.
In contemporary parlance, his identification of these three kinds of conflict reveals that Dewey acknowledges both moral (i.e., the obligatory) and ethical (i.e., questions pertaining to the Good) conflicts as the subject matter of reflection. Indeed, to capture this point he stipulates the various moral properties that historically have come into conflict and may still do so. These properties are part of the topography of moral experience, as Dewey understands it. Thus he writes in “Three Independent Factors”:
I shall content myself with presenting the hypothesis that there are at least three independent variables in moral action. Each of these variables has a sound basis, but because each has a different origin and mode of operation, they can be at cross purposes…. Goods, I repeat, have to do with deliberation upon desires and purposes; the right and obligatory with demands that are socially authorized and backed; virtues with widespread approbation. (TIM [LW5:280, 286]; cf. E3 [LW7: chaps. 11–13])
As the passage reveals, he is clear that his list may not be exhaustive, but his claim is that each of the features identified has an undeniable place within our moral experience. In saying “undeniable,” I mean to suggest that for Dewey we can survey our social experiences and find factors that appeal to our desires and purposes given our narrative of experience but which have nothing to do with what is obligatory. And there are rights and duties just insofar as their claim on us is not exhausted by what we desire. As Dewey notes in a section of his Ethics entitled “The Idea of the Right,” the Right denotes both phenomenologically and linguistically “exaction, demand,” a feature that is at once missing from the Good, but that is ready for discursive and experiential unpacking to bring the Good in harmony with it (E3 [LW7:215]). This explains why, in the section entitled “The Justification of a Claim,” Dewey argues that while “particular rights and duties may, then, be arbitrary there is nothing arbitrary or forced in the existence of right and obligation” (E3 [LW7:228]). What undermines the arbitrary quality of a particular right and potentially brings freedom and law into harmony is the extent to which it is open to “examination and criticism” regarding its contribution “to a good in which the one from whom an act is demanded will share” (E3 [LW7:229–230] [original emphasis]).44
As the passage on the independent factors makes clear, we can also identify expressions of praise and blame that serve as principles of action, but which are not reducible to the Right or the Good. To be sure, Dewey acknowledges that such expressions can “operate as reflex imputations of virtue and vice … as sanctions of right, and as an individual comes to prize the approving attitude of others as considerations to be taken into account in deliberating” (TIM [LW5:286] [original emphasis]). But he believes that virtues nonetheless seem capable of functioning in a way that has little to do with satisfying one’s desires or making demands upon others. After all, saying that someone is heroic or courageous is often rendered intelligible precisely because their acts have little to do with their vision of the Good or with what they are obligated to do. That individuals may define their conception of the Good as involving heroic or courageous actions—as we see, for example, among some of Homer’s characters or our own military and law enforcement units—does not negate the fact that such virtues may stand on their own. Indeed, to say that someone has “gone beyond the call of duty” is to capture precisely the semantic and substantive moment when Virtue is unhinged from the Right and the Good.
For Dewey, that we may find it difficult to hear the call of some of these independent factors does not yet deny their claim on us; rather, it helps us to define the elements constituting the sensitivity of moral agency. Given the social-psychological account provided earlier, “total deafness regarding the hold of these factors on us” would be an inaccurate descriptive characteristic of any agent we could recognize as moral. Consider the following example of Antigone, which Dewey does not use but I think is helpful for sharpening the point. Creon is not deaf to Antigone’s claim to give her brother an appropriate burial—that is, Creon can recognize the claim. This is part of the moral repertoire of his community, even if the meaning-content of his response does not comport with what Antigone desires to hear. Similar to the moral theorist described above, Creon is insensitive to the pull of competing factors, and so he fails to acknowledge the legitimate place of Antigone’s claim as a rival to his own position.
What is crucial to observe about Creon, however, is that he does not engage Antigone’s discursive move because the cultural and institutional apparatus—which makes him king—blunts the need for him to be responsive to her claim. That this reading is consistent with Dewey’s outlook is obvious when he argues that a failure to be answerable to the claims of others implies a
defect in effective apprehension of the realities of human association…. 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 an endeavor [by existing institutions] 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 it, standing in the way of effort to make our institutions more humane and equitable. (HNC [MW14:224–225])
Obviously for Dewey, a world of kings and subjects is very different from a world of representatives and citizens. Both, in his view, involve some element of mutual responsiveness (DE [MW9:89–90]), but it is clear that one of these worlds makes the practice and necessity of reason-giving more constitutive of how it conducts its ongoing affairs. This is, after all, the basis for his distinction between customary and reflective morality; in the latter the practice of reason-giving is more consistently invoked with the hopes of refining it in conduct.
In failing to do justice to the conflict, Creon finds himself implicated in a more terrible situation, which includes the death of his son.45 As Creon’s son makes clear before his death: “Whoever thinks that he alone is wise, his eloquence, his mind, above the rest, come the unfolding, shows his emptiness.”46 Dewey’s belief in the political and moral importance of democracy follows precisely from this kind of outlook—that is, the extent to which democracy encourages each individual to understand that he or she has no special access to wisdom (see specifically DEA [LW11:215–225]). As we will see in chapter 5, the idea of having no special access to wisdom is what Dewey explicates as a normative element to curb an elitist vision of democracy; it points away from a vision of political decision-making based on deference to experts and toward a view of democratic legitimacy as expressed in the criteria of reciprocal and general acceptance among the governed. In short, democracy takes the reason-giving quality implicit in mutual responsiveness as the key for understanding political legitimacy.
This last statement reveals an important political dimension to Dewey’s threefold distinction. He does not deny that there is an ethical character to our identities, but Dewey is concerned to retain that element alongside the legal-moral character our identities assume in the context of democracy. Here he touches two debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy. The first is over the relationship between the Right and Good under modern conditions of pluralism; it revisits some of the considerations of the last chapter. The second relates to the scope of the “we” that ought to comprise democratic decision-making. We may miss the political thrust of his distinctions if we do not offer comments at precisely this juncture—comments that clearly point to how Dewey understands what I want to call the “best achievable state” of moral agency.
For him, specific rights and duties achieve legitimacy insofar as they embody mutual responsiveness and generality for those who fall within their orbits (E3 [LW7:225–231]). Otherwise, their authoritative quality will derive from arbitrary force, emptying “morality” generally and democracy specifically of much that we find appealing and rationally defensible in their function.47 To link legitimacy to mutual responsiveness and general acceptance means that individuals can absorb the content of those rights into their conceptions of the Good48—that is, without good opposing argument. This is why he says that such rights and duties contribute to a good in which one can share, and this claim appears, you will recall, in his section of Ethics entitled “Justification of a Claim.”
But what does this mean? Dewey does not tell us explicitly, but I believe we can offer a plausible inference. In concrete terms, rights that protect various forms of difference, for example, do not necessarily require an ethical commitment on my part to those forms of difference, but rather a moral obligation of respect—an obligation grounded in my own desire to be different and to freely practice that difference. We can therefore speak, as Dewey did above, of absorbing those rights into our specific vision of the Good. Rights, in this instance, are internally differentiated along the lines of ethical acceptance on the one hand and moral respect on the other. In order for claims respecting various differences to become enshrined in law there must be some overlap between the ethical and the moral, otherwise the emergence of the claims will be inexplicable. But from the perspective of the entire citizenry, overlap is not necessary for such rights to be legitimate, and, indeed, will often be impossible to achieve.
This means, for Dewey, that to have a vision of the Good under modern conditions is in fact to potentially confront its limitation as an answer for guiding the lives of others. We may simply fail to convince others that how we see the world creates a space in which they can find a home. But as with his discussion of religious beliefs, it does not follow from the fact of pluralism and the absence of a unifying ethical horizon that we are precluded from engaging in the practice of reason-giving. Unable to exchange reasons, we would never be able to bring about an overlap between the ethical and the moral. His account places a limit—to be hammered out within political life, to be sure—on the extent to which that “thickness” can be encoded into laws. To the extent that democracy makes public deliberation central to its account of justification conflict is not necessarily dissolved; rather, it “bring[s] … conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised,” thus raising “social issues for moral decisions which did not exist for most men and women so long as government was autocratic and confined to a few” (LSA [LW11:56]).
We should observe that Dewey’s contextualism potentially expands, if the problem so demands, beyond a determinant political community.49 Here we touch the second issue identified above—an issue that replicates the way mutual responsiveness positions us to expand beyond our specific moral horizon. For him, because of the inherent instability of the space of political reflection—that is, no one has privileged access to knowledge and therefore authority—we need not feel impotent when trying to figure out its scope. If rights and laws are indexed on the one side to justification by mutual responsiveness and general acceptance and on the other side to the specificity of problems in which one’s interests are at stake, then going beyond existing narratives of experience for Dewey can relate to a determinant political community (i.e., the nation-state) or to a community that denotes humanity as such. In other words, “problems,” as used here, may refer to the internal dynamism of a political society or to interactions between political communities. But in both cases, the substantive content of these problems will point to the exhaustion of the existing value-sphere and the necessity of creative, but nonetheless situated, responses to alleviate or remove altogether the ways in which these problems are affecting specific communities or nations.
In this view, we cannot hold a presumptive commitment to democratic closure based on a determinant political community or a state-centric model. For Dewey, the “we” of decision-making is understood as an emergent property. This is because whether or not one is a citizen, the claim to having a say in collective decision-making in the context of a democracy is bound up with the extent to which one will be potentially impacted by the settled decisions (PP [LW2: chaps. 1–3]). As he explains in his Ethics, tracking the effects of decision-making—that is, being attentive to the complexity and depth of the landscape—potentially mitigates the extent to which we will be driven by narrow “nationalistic sentiments” in favor of “broader conceptions of human welfare” (E3 [LW7:371]). Whether they are citizens or aliens (in the legalistic sense), we are poised to regard more appropriately, to use a title, the pain of others.
To be fair to any potential criticisms: Dewey is not clear on when problems register on the local, nation-state level rather than the more global, international level. However, he does gesture toward an answer: “There is no better evidence of a well formed moral character than knowledge of when to raise the moral issue and when not. It implies a sensitiveness to values which is the token of a balanced personality” (E3 [LW7:170]). In short, he points us to the best achievable state of moral agency in which one struggles to hear and see the situation in its appropriate light. The above remarks, coming as they do in the context of a discussion of moral conflict, only distract us if we deny the political dimension to his threefold distinction. If, however, we take it seriously, as this discussion intends to do, then the best achievable state of moral agency will be understood as the backdrop of moral conflict as such, whether it is experienced by one individual, between individuals, or by an entire community.
We have considered at some length Dewey’s account of moral conflict, to which deliberation is oriented. This is part of his social-psychological account, which places mutual responsiveness at the core of moral life and conditions the rationality of its participants. As I have discussed, mutual responsiveness for Dewey has both a descriptive and normative component. His account is descriptive in that it simply tells us how human beings are, but it also outlines what is necessary for the display of moral agency. For Dewey, this is significant if, from the perspective of an elucidation of deliberation, we are to explain what outlook the self ought to assume in confronting conflict. There are several conclusions we must keep in mind. First, in emphasizing the importance of mutual responsiveness and taking on the attitude of others in his philosophy, we have already found the link to sympathy that Dewey will highlight in his understanding of deliberation. Second, this responsiveness makes the agent sensitive to the various factors that make demands in a moral conflict. Moreover, in those instances where such a conflict involves others, the agent is capable of imaginatively assuming their attitudes as a way to inform his own judgment. Third, these features are central, in Dewey’s view, if the agent is to reconstruct moral experience in the service of developing an alternative option that can reconcile the factors that now conflict.
These considerations point us back to previous discussions (see, for example, the end of chapter 2). Dewey is clear that he does not want to overdetermine the content of deliberation. He does, however, seek to explain the best achievable state of the agents so that they are prepared to hear and see the situation appropriately. This is not a contradiction. After all, the starting point for responding to any problem hinges on our ability to appropriately describe the situation so as to propose an action plan. In attributing the language of “best achievable state” to Dewey, I mean that he seeks to describe an ideal perceptive condition, that is, a state in which the self is open to the deliverances from her character on the one hand and the environment on the other. As he says of judgment: “To every shade of imagined circumstances there is a vibrating response; and to every complex situation a sensitiveness as to its integrity, a feeling of whether it does justice to all facts, or overrides some to the advantage of others. Decision is reasonable when deliberation is so conducted” (HNC [MW14:135]). The aim is to mediate the conflict such that the choice absorbs the claims expressed by the two competing factors. In this section, then, we are after a view of the agent who sees widely and feels deeply. The points to be discussed in understanding this include his notion of dramatic rehearsal, the place of principles as cumulative wisdom, and the relationship between sympathy and imagination.
We might nonetheless think that the language of “best achievable state” and “ideal perceptive condition” is unhelpful. We might ask the following: How does this help us think about moral reflection and justification? Dewey scholars might ask more directly: Since Dewey does not use this language, in what way can such terms be attributed to him?50 The first question gets at the theoretical worth of the idea for illuminating the practice of moral reflection, and the second question allows us to connect the answer given to the first to Dewey’s self-understanding. As Matthew Festenstein remarks:
Dewey’s account of morality does not attempt to provide an external vindication of an “ultimate law.” The thought that there exists such a Platonic vindication which it is the task of philosophy to articulate is part of the rejected conception of knowledge and philosophy…. However, the absence of such a vindication is not thought to entail skepticism about ethics tout court. Rather, what is attempted [by Dewey] is an internal elucidation of what it is to be a moral agent.51
Dewey’s attempt to elucidate the content of moral agency provides the hook for understanding how “best achievable state” and “ideal perceptive condition” function. They are conceptual vehicles for understanding ourselves as living within a normative world, a world in which our judgments and actions are attentive to evidence and susceptible to justification. In Dewey’s view, this requires us to abandon skepticism about being embedded within narratives of experience, having a character by that fact, and being able to trace the origin of that character to inform how we act and what we value. Indeed, these elements—narrative horizon, character, and its historically emergent process—make possible generalizable assessments that are explicable to those who exist within the space of moral reflection.
For Dewey, I am antecedently attentive to the moral life just insofar as I am a being that participates in social practices. The properties of the moral life that make a demand, constrain our actions, and implicate us in being responsive to others, and them to us, achieve their significance because without them our moral identity would be wholly vacant. If we accept this claim as a minimum feature of engaging the moral life, Dewey argues, our analysis can be redirected. For him, because our moral frameworks are the products of more or less intelligence, they are susceptible to better or worse ideal descriptions of how we ought to stand within them.52
DRAMATIC REHEARSAL AND IMAGINATION
What does Dewey mean by the term “dramatic rehearsal”? He gives us some clue when he writes the following: “We begin with a summary assertion that deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action” (HNC [MW14:132]). Each “conflicting habit,” he says, “unrolls a picture of its future history, of the career it would have if it were given head” (HNC [MW14:133]). Here he moves too quickly, conflating dramatic rehearsal with deliberation as such. But we know that he intends for us to understand dramatic rehearsal as a feature within the overall deliberative process. As the language above makes clear, dramatic rehearsal encompasses the middle stages of deliberation or inquiry—that is, where possibilities are suggested and advanced as hypotheses to be tested (see chapter 2, pp. 95–97). This also constitutes the most reflexive moment of the process. Notwithstanding, the two formulations above point to several features that define his understanding of dramatic rehearsal: the narrative character of identity and the imaginative dimension of reflection.53
As noted in chapter 2, Dewey’s account of character as a web of habits implies a narrative structure to our identity. Our habits are generated through an interaction with our social environment that is time sensitive. When pressed to explain why we have acted this or that way we can readily tell a story that draws not merely from the present, but treats our character as a historical treasure trove to be unloaded as part of the account we offer. In such moments we are recounting the drama that is our life. What habit-talk means for Dewey in a shorthand way is precisely what Alasdair MacIntyre says explicitly of the relationship between narrative and action: it is the “basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions.”54
Consider the following example of an individual who acts out of character. When one departs from what is expected, we say that somehow the person is not acting like him- or herself. Anyone who knows this person treats his or her actions as departures from the anticipated action, and so identifies those actions as violations of some truth about the person. Indeed, we draw on previous experiences as evidence, examine instances of their character, and even solicit reflections from friends and companions. All of these elements form the objective framework for understanding the person’s action as a violation of what we know to be true of the person. We do not engage in this inquiry willy-nilly, for such an inquiry is not contingently connected to truth, justification, and verification. These elements comprise its essence; they are normative concepts that help guide the practice of mutual responsiveness. As such, there is something substantially present about the person that guides our reflection, a narrative of experience that embeds the person in various activities, events, and environments that render intelligible his or her character and to which we orient our investigation. Just insofar as something is substantially present we find ourselves within a practice of giving and asking for reasons.
But for Dewey, our characters, though stable enough to allow for the above account to take hold, do not reflect unalterable categorical desires corresponding to a harmonious field of commitments. To be sure, “an act must be the expression of a formed and stable character,” but as he goes on to say, “stability of character is an affair of degrees, and is not to be taken absolutely” (E3 [LW7:167]). This is because identity emerges for Dewey in a complex and layered set of social networks in which we play distinctive roles. These roles leave narrative lines that are expressive of, contribute to, and draw on different habits. Insofar as we find ourselves part of different social experiences, we may equally trace various narrative lines that contain their own web of subplots. Such lines point outward toward the world, but also reveal the inner recesses of the self. Character, says Dewey, is “the abiding unity” in which those roles and the acts they commit us to “leave their lasting traces” (E3 [LW7:171; cf. 317]).
Yet given the two-directional structure of character, our identities never completely ossify. (Perhaps not even after death if the consequences of our actions are still felt.) In fact, this two-directional structure is at the core of those moments when we look on the early days of our lives and see ourselves as another person. We often say to our conversation partners, “I am not the person you once knew.” To say this is simultaneously to make a claim about the narrative lines in which I have found myself since those early days of my life; the remark is thus susceptible to a more detailed articulation. This detailed articulation captures Dewey’s earlier point that one’s house is not simply divided within itself, but may potentially be divided against itself. All of this suggests agreement with MacIntyre’s additional claim: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”55 As Charles Taylor remarks, this horizon provides us with an identity, “some sense of qualitative discrimination” that allows us to say some “actions, or feelings, or modes of life [are], in some way[s] morally higher or lower, noble or base, admirable or contemptible.”56 Part of what makes deliberation a dramatic rehearsal is just this narrative horizon that the self draws on to render explicable the choices which he now confronts, seeks to modify, or abandons.57
This emphasis on narrative and the way in which I have drawn a connection between Dewey on the one hand and MacIntyre and Taylor on the other may understate the difference of emphasis we find in their work on the teleological character of identity. In reflecting briefly on their differences, I will need to simplify the complex positions of MacIntyre and Taylor, which at times contain much ambivalence about the relationship between teleology and identity. Nonetheless, I do think there is a commitment in their writings that marks the difference between them and Dewey. This should allow me to clarify my earlier claim regarding my use of the Good in the context of Dewey’s philosophy.
To begin, the language of the Good in contemporary parlance often gives the impression that what we need to recover in modern times but somehow have lost is a determinant vision of the Good that reflexively informs one’s identity. In this view, the unfolding of one’s narrative is seen as a way of orienting oneself retrospectively to a background Good and elucidating how it prospectively guides action. In this regard, we think of the Good as denoting what Weber calls Weltanschauungen, or worldviews.58 And at times MacIntyre speaks this way when he says, the “unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest,” whose defining feature is a “final telos.”59 Despite his more careful understanding of modern identity, Taylor often writes in agreement, arguing that the ability to make qualitative discrimination in moral evaluation bespeaks a determinate account of “the good” which “has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story.”60 This point is emphasized more forcefully when he speaks of the necessity of a “hypergood” to identity—that is, a Good that orders and allows us to rank lesser goods. As he says, “perhaps we will find that we cannot make sense of our moral life without something like a hypergood perspective, some notion of a good to which we can grow, and which then makes us see others differently.”61 For both Taylor and MacIntyre, at least when they speak this way, without such a determinant horizon our sense of agency is lost altogether. And so both seem to share the Weberian view of the self, which “entails a constant and intrinsic relation to certain ultimate ‘values’ or ‘meanings’ which are forged into purposes and thereby translate into rational-teleological action.”62
The problem with this position is that it is typically framed in such a manner that it betrays the way the internal structure of our narratives is differentiated under modern conditions. In those moments, Dewey parts ways with Weber, Taylor, MacIntyre, and, indeed, much of contemporary discourse on the topic.63 The various roles we play through work, school, religious organizations, civil society, and our more private and clandestine activities rarely refer to a harmonious set of values and beliefs. The meaningfulness of our modern lives simply does not hinge on a fixed and undifferentiated teleological quest. And Dewey is clear that if self-realization of such a quest is placed as the end-in-view, it will often blind us to the needs, details, and claims that the present situation places upon us, including elements of the situation that may otherwise register diverging features of our identity (E3 [LW7:302]). Thus he writes: “Selfhood (except as it has encased itself in a shell of routine) is in a process of making and … any self is capable of including within itself a number of inconsistent selves, of unharmonized disposition” (HNC [MW14:96]).64 Does this undermine our ability to engage in qualitative discrimination, which Taylor believes is so essential to moral agency? Of course not; it only claims that such discriminations are themselves flexible in the light of consequent experiences and are not beholden to an antecedently unitary framework.
So when the phrase “conception of the Good” is seen as having a place within Dewey’s moral topography, it must be understood to reflect the unharmonized dynamism whose identification with the self does not exhaust the self’s reflective capacity, which is central to the acquisition of a particular identity. To the extent that a conflict between these diverging features is brought out through some state of affairs under modern conditions, individuals are more sensitive to and capable of rethinking the larger narrative of their identity.65 To appropriate Eric MacGilvray’s words: “In particular, narratives provide a conceptual framework within which we become capable of doubting and revising our moral and ethical commitments, and a mode of discourse through which it becomes possible—though by no means assured—that we can make those commitments intelligible to others.”66 Otherwise, the give and take that Dewey describes between the Right and the Good cannot be thought possible in practice. On this reading, modern identities are neither wholly fragmented, unable to connect actions to each other, nor so organized as to suggest a bundle of harmonious and fixed values that we appropriate in our future orientations.
But if narrative helps us understand the layered character that informs the dramatic rehearsal, the imagination puts us in touch with its suspenseful and creative quality. We have already considered Dewey’s discussion of the imagination in the light of his religious thought. Here, in his moral philosophy, the importance of the imagination returns, yet the relationship between imagination and moral judgment has often been seen as problematic. There is a strong belief that the imagination is often an impediment to acting in accord with duty. Imagination is seen as being too individualistic because it is caught in the emotional intensity of the moment that it paints.
Yet this account of the imagination trades on a mistake about its relationship to character and judgment. Perhaps an example is in order. While sitting in the living room of his home, Michael hears a crash in the adjacent room. It strikes him in an immediate way, to which he says to himself or another, “It sounds like someone broke the window.” We should suspect that this is merely the beginning of his inquiry. For Dewey, a person experiences moral conflict in just this immediate way, and the moment of reflection seeks to work backward on asking whether we have appropriately identified the situation as a conflict. If the answer is affirmative, the agent works forward, reflecting on what the world would be like if he chooses between these two values and their corresponding actions, while simultaneously attempting to find a choice that sublimates the competing claims.
For Dewey, what we are imagining is the world and ourselves as we would be were we to adopt a course of action. But it is not simply future (i.e., other) selves that we are imagining but the future of the current self. This is what he means when he says in his Ethics that deliberation is “dramatic and active, not mathematical and impersonal; and hence it has the intuitive, the direct factor in it” (E3 [LW7:275]). This remark is critical to understanding the constraining element of the imagination. If the intuitive and direct factor in deliberation is character itself, and we understand character to be expressive of a narrative horizon, then Dewey means that through the imagination we have access to and are able to focus on funded experiences for future possibilities. As he says in his Ethics, we need to make a distinction “between goods which, when they present themselves to imagination are approved by reflection after wide examination of their relations, and the goods which are such only because their wider connections are not looked into” (E3 [LW7:203]). As this passage makes clear, he sees the imagination as providing concrete deliverances from the treasure trove that is our narrative—which, when considered, is partly necessary for making sense of our choice. In his view, ignoring the deliverances of the imagination potentially leaves choice inexplicable. That is, we cannot tie the perceived good of our choice to the larger horizon of our identity. When asked, “Why did you do x?,” we find ourselves reduced to unintelligible utterances.
Deliberation, then, is not merely reflection on means to ends. As Dewey writes in his critique of utilitarianism’s calculative understanding of deliberation: “It resembles the case in which a man has already made his final decision, say to take a walk, and deliberates only upon what walk to take. His end-in-view already exists; it is not questioned. The question is as to comparative advantages of this tramp or that” (HNC [MW14:149]). For him, the calculative approach undercuts the deliverances of the imagination, and in some instances simply ignores them altogether. In describing deliberation as fixed upon a perceived good, we will refuse to be moved by deliverances from our past that might suggest a different course of action. Indeed, the reason why a course of action unfolds imaginatively is so that we can see and feel the projected consequences and assess them before we engage in overt action (E3 [LW7:275]). This implies that the assessment seeks to reflexively affect what we value, to strengthen its hold on us and enlarge its meaning or loosen its attachment. Dewey’s point is not that referencing the deliverances of the imagination will necessarily clarify the potential fruits of the ends we seek or their apparent quality, but that we will be less well positioned to receive such enlightening information if ends and means are not fodder for the imaginative engine.
This general characterization provides us with a clear sense of the way in which deliberation is dramatic and a rehearsal. Let us now examine the two central steering mechanisms that fill out the reflective moment—namely, the place of principles as cumulative wisdom and the role of sympathy.
PRINCIPLES AS CUMULATIVE WISDOM
One way to think about the treasure trove that is our narrative which Dewey pursues is to explicate the place of principles in reflection. His contextualism, however, coupled with his aversion to a rule-based approach to moral judgment, may give the impression that he has little to say about the role of principles in reflection. And yet we would find it hard to make sense of a moral agent who did not bring general considerations in the form of principles to the table of deliberation. Dewey’s aversion is not so much to principles as such, but to how they are thought to function within particular cases—that is, as rules that outstrip the complexity of specific cases and therefore are capable of settling the matter, rather than as cumulative wisdom that focuses and guides reflection. Based on this distinction between principles as cumulative wisdom and rules as fixed properties, Dewey seeks to defend, just as he did in his reflections on religion, a more modest position for the role of the past in guiding our judgments.
How does Dewey understand this distinction? He gives us an answer in his Ethics:
Now a genuine principle differs from a rule in two ways: (a) A principle evolves in connection with the course of experience, being a generalized statement of what sort of consequences and values tend to be realized in certain kinds of situations; a rule is taken as something ready-made and fixed. (b) A principle is primarily intellectual, a method and scheme for judging, and is practical secondarily because of what it discloses; a rule is primarily practical. (E3 [LW7:276]; cf. HNC [MW14: chap. 20])
As I read this passage, for Dewey generalized statements are nothing but a normative vocabulary that has emerged over time in an attempt to manage shared experiences—that is, they have become the product of reflective control, testing, and guidance. Principles thus apply to cases by virtue of some relevant properties. As he says, because situations have “like points, experience carries over from one to another, and experience is intellectually cumulative” (E3 [LW7:275]). Rules, on the other hand, are especially insensitive to those points within experience that are not the same.
The service that principles provide is that they steer us to just those like points, so as to discern the importance of the situation. This much Dewey says:
[W]hereas the object of moral principles is to supply standpoints and methods which will enable the individual to make for himself an analysis of the elements of good and evil in the particular situation in which he finds himself. No genuine moral principle prescribes a specific course of action; rules, like cooking recipes, may tell just what to do and how to do it. A moral principle, such as that of chastity, of justice, of the Golden Rule, gives the agent a basis for looking at and examining a particular question that comes up. It holds before him certain possible aspects of the act; it warns him against taking a short or partial view of the act. It economizes his thinking by supplying him with the main heads by reference to which to consider the bearings of his desires and purposes; it guides him in his thinking by suggesting to him the important consideration for which he should be on the lookout. (E3 [LW7:280])
The functional power of principles is that when deployed they draw us to the salient elements within the situation—that is, the things that stand out and are ready to be cognitively digested. Understanding this salience is at once to see what one must consider in acting and what one may have reason to do or not to do. As Dewey says in The Quest for Certainty in a chapter appropriately entitled “The Construction of the Good”: Without principles “we should not be able to frame any ideas whatever of the conditions under which objects are enjoyed nor any estimate of the consequences of esteeming and liking them” (QC [LW4:217]). In disclosing the salience of the situation to us, principles rein in our thinking by pointing us to what makes a difference in acting one way rather than another, but do not outstrip the descriptive and creative work that thinking must do.
This emphasis on principles is also a way of achieving continuity within our judgments and marking the moments of discontinuity that spark reflection. To be sure, for Dewey, if we were not equipped with any principles, we would be unable to unite our judgments across time. Indeed, we would find it difficult to identify and distinguish cases that are truly novel from those we have encountered before. Principles are important because in highlighting continuity, they equally mark the boundary of the previously experienced from the surprisingly new features that call for our attention (QC [LW4:217]).
SYMPATHY AND THE OTHER
Thus far we have been filling out the ideal perceptive condition by pointing to the narrative quality of judgment and the way it reveals how things matter to us, the role of imagination, and the place of principles in helping us to note the salience of the situation. The final element is the recurrence of mutual responsiveness. When Dewey comes back to mutual responsiveness, especially in thinking about deliberation, it appears through the concept of sympathy. The introduction of sympathy should be of special interest to interpreters of Dewey’s ethical philosophy who underscore his importance in this regard.
Yet recent interpretations fail to explore sympathy’s importance to Dewey’s moral philosophy and in so doing narrow rather than expand (as they rightly intend) the richness of his moral philosophy.67 Consider, however, the importance Dewey attributes to sympathy: “Sympathy is the animating mold of moral judgment not because its dictates take precedence in action over those of other impulses (which they do not do), but because it furnishes the most efficacious intellectual standpoint” (E3 [LW1:270]). This efficacious standpoint, he goes on to say, is the ability to take stock, in the form of a broad imaginative survey of both the inner recesses of the self and the claims of others. Properly understood, sympathy makes us receptive to the texture of the landscape, and it is in that openness where objectivity lies for him.
Before addressing this point, Dewey is keen to distance his understanding of “intelligent sympathy” from an evaluative emotional intensity (E3 [LW1:251]). For example, when we find ourselves torn between competing options that pull on us, and whose consequences will affect others, we engage in a dramatic rehearsal to see and feel the impact. In thinking about how we will be affected by our decision, we think about how future selves will also be in the light of our actions. We find ourselves drawn into vivid mental images, sometimes brought home to us by others communicating future pain and pleasure that will result from our consequences. They do not speak in the imprecise language of pain and pleasure, but paint vivid pictures that connect the particulars of their experiences with the potential consequences of our actions. In the midst of this emotional intensity, all other factors seem to fade into the background. We do not simply take stock of the impact of our actions on others as one factor among many, but we simultaneously and immediately take hold of that person’s outlook as if it were our own. It saturates our outlook, leading others to caution us not to become “emotional.” In a similar way, Dewey cautions: regard for the impact of consequences on others should not prompt us to immediately give way to “every sentiment of sympathy … which is experienced” (E3 [LW1:251]). This kind of sentimentalism, whether it is oriented inward (a kind of self-pity) or outward toward others, “makes the immediate indulgence of a dominant emotion more important than results” (E3 [LW1:251]). When he uses the language of “results” he is not reverting to a crass utilitarianism, but referring precisely to an understanding of results that is based upon a sense of having done justice to all factors at play.
Dewey’s account of sympathy involves reconstructing the experiences of another, but without allowing a complete identification of that reconstructive moment with the evaluation the person attributes to those experiences (E3 [LW1:250–251, 270–272]).68 In this regard, sympathy is connected to the imagination. But how so? Answering this question is a matter of some delicacy. When Dewey distances intelligent sympathy from emotional absorption, this discussion comes in chapter 13 of his Ethics, “Approbation, the Standard, and Virtue,” and so he identifies his account of sympathy as a virtue or excellence of character. Yet sympathy is not just that, because he wants to argue that it helps reflection engage in a broad survey both internally and externally. The upshot of this claim is discussed in that chapter, but it comes home most forcefully in chapter 14, “Moral Judgment and Knowledge,” where he says that “an impartial sympathetic observer is the surest way to obtain objectivity of moral knowledge” (E3 [LW7:270]).
Of what does the objectivity of moral knowledge consist? Here we need to examine more carefully the internal and external workings of sympathy and draw in more tightly the imagination. Let us go back for a moment. When Dewey speaks of the dramatic element of deliberation and places particular emphasis on imagination, he introduces an important functional distinction between actor and spectator. As the different courses of action unfold along with the various potential consequences, our imagination creates a cognitive theater. He makes this point clear when he tells us what goes on when people deliberate: “Some people deliberate by dialogue. Others visualize certain results. Others rather take the motor imagery and imagine themselves doing a thing. Others imagine a thing done and then imagine someone else commenting upon it.”69 When understood as a complete rehearsal, however, these approaches collapse as part of one process of surveying the landscape. So the imagination at once places before us the unfolding of our habits and the actions to which they would potentially commit us, and in so doing simultaneously distances us from that unfolding.
We might say that the imagination allows us, as with the chorus in Greek tragedies, to be in the situation but not of it. As with the imagination, the chorus occupies a halfway position between the interested and committed characters who have only a partial view of the landscape, and the audience who sees the whole and the future anguish that will befall the characters, but who are nonetheless psychologically and practically protected. Notice that I am using the chorus rather than the audience as the key, since the latter stands outside the situation and so distorts the kind of independence Dewey is after. The chorus is a better model because it attempts to combine the deep interests and commitments of the characters with the audience’s wide emotional and intelligent vision.
As I read Dewey, the dramatic rehearsal replicates these two distinct elements that we find in the Greek chorus. In the first instance, what comes before us in the dramatic rehearsal matters to us—where this means that the affective and intellectual dimensions of judgment are thoroughly collapsed—because we are the characters. In the second instance, reception of these deliverances through the imagination should be read as an attempt to see as widely as the audience. The process is an attempt to answer the following: Are we being attentive to all factors that come before us? But here we are surveying only the internal landscape of the self. This is precisely why Dewey says in an earlier remark that all relevant elements of the self have their say.
The process is not complete. The externalist claim, then, says that doing justice to all factors includes considering the impact such consequences will have on the lives of others. But just as we need to keep a distinction between actor and spectator to achieve impartiality in our judgment, so too must we safeguard ourselves during the reconstruction of others’ experiences from completely identifying with the emotional content such reconstructions carry. As he says, intelligent sympathy “widens and deepens concern for consequences,” it allows us to “put ourselves in the place of another, to see things from the standpoint of his aims and values,” but without simultaneously making the evaluative judgment that often comes with that standpoint (E3 [LW1:270]; cf. HNC [MW14:136]).
Intelligent sympathy thus refers to a more balanced perspective, situated between blind emotion and cold calculative and unaffected reason. It “[carries] thought out beyond the self and extends its scope … [and] saves considerations of consequences from degenerating into mere calculation, by rendering vivid the interests of others and urging us to give them weight” (E3 [LW1:270]). He makes the point more dramatically only two years later in his Art as Experience (1934): “It is when the desires and aims, the interests and modes of response of another become an expansion of our own being that we understand him. We learn to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, and their results give true instruction” (AE3 [LW10:338]). This, too, occurs in the context of a discussion regarding sympathy and the imagination. His point here is that sympathy urges us to give the experiences of others weight, and that in doing so it provides true instruction. This is not merely a reporting of and identification with psychological and emotional states, but a way of considering them so that they may inform rather than replace evaluation.
For Dewey, the aim of surveying both the internal recesses of the self and the external environment is the key to objectivity. In what is now a somewhat unfair characterization, Dewey attacks Kant for claiming that our duties are derived from the categorical imperative, where this is meant to be independent of any kind of sensitivity to the situation. Instead, he says in the 1908 edition of his Ethics that his approach “does not proceed (as Kant would have it) from a mere consideration of the moral law apart from a concrete end, but from an end in so far as it persistently approves itself to reflection after an adequate survey of it in all its bearings” (E2 [MW5:284] [original emphasis]). Indeed, he argues (and I think more precisely) in the second edition of his Ethics that the spirit of the categorical imperative attempts to capture this point (E3 [LW7:223]). But his phrase “in all its bearings” points us not away from particulars, but to their multiplicity and diversity both within and outside of the self as indexed to the details of the situation. This is precisely why Dewey believes that the impartial sympathetic observer provides access to objectivity in moral knowledge. So for him, objectivity consists not in distancing ourselves from the world, assuming a view from nowhere, but rather it emerges from a form of distance that obtains only because one seeks to be responsive to the specificity of the moment in all its bearings—that is, to see widely and feel deeply about the elements of the self that are at stake and the potential consequences that will follow externally when those elements are allowed to have their play.
The argument here has advanced several important steps. Thus far, I have explicated Dewey understanding and defense of the immanence of normativity. As I argued, this provides a framework in which to situate his characterization of conflict under modern conditions. Proceeding this way, as I have suggested, allows us to take seriously moral conflict, but without interpreting conflict as resulting from some crisis in normative evaluation. And I filled out the contours of moral reflection or deliberation, which, in Dewey’s estimation, is central to engaging and managing the moral life.
Nonetheless, his understanding of moral reflection is often understood as attempting much more than simply engaging and managing conflict. More precisely, it is usually read as denying the irreducibility of conflict. This simply means that implicit in his account of moral reflection is the belief that individuals who appropriately reflect will achieve harmony among conflicting claims. He seems unable to take seriously the sense of tragedy that can possibly come in the form of the irreducibility of conflict. This is what Robert Westbrook means when he says: “Dewey’s ethics, at its worst, suggest that one could always find a synthetic resolution that harmonized competing values.”70 Although William Caspary highlights that for Dewey conflict is an “inescapable condition of democratic politics,” he nonetheless concludes that, “Dewey neglects the tragic dimension in which characters are caught up in the anguish and dire consequences of irresolvable conflict,” and so his views must be supplemented.71 These reflections are crucial, coming as they do, from thoughtful Dewey interpreters. But we need to ask the following: What needs to be the case about his philosophy for this position to hold? In my reading, Westbrook and Caspary must mean that for Dewey inquiry does not simply attempt to harmonize competing values, but that Dewey believes that reconciliation of competing claims can always be achieved through inquiry. If my inference here is correct, this is not simply a claim about inquiry but about the social world in which it functions.
These thinkers are not alone. Hilary Putnam, as indicated in the last chapter, also advances this claim, contending that Dewey cannot do justice to individuals caught in moral dilemmas. As he explains: “While Dewey’s social philosophy is overwhelmingly right, as far as it goes, his moral philosophy is less satisfactory when we try to apply it to individual existential choices.”72 He then refers specifically to an example provided by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism in which a young man finds himself caught between his commitment to going and aiding a resistance group and tending to his aging mother. The upshot of this example when used against Dewey is that he is unable to recognize the incommensurable quality of the conflict—that is, it defies reconstructive analysis, and so does not admit of a third way. Putnam then proceeds to appropriate James as a more useful guide.73 Once again, implicit in this view is a claim not simply about the faith Dewey places in inquiry, but also an argument about the kind of social world Dewey believes we inhabit. Speaking positively of his position, Larry Hickman captures the point nicely: “But a part of [Dewey’s] faith in the methods of science and democracy was his belief that even the most serious disagreements can be transcended if subjected to the proper tools.”74
As we have seen in the last chapter, Putnam’s approach wrongly drives a wedge between James and Dewey on this point. But one of Dewey’s central claims about deliberation, as we have noticed, is the way it opens the self to the deliverances from one’s character on the one hand and from the environment on the other. Unless he rejects the connection between practical reason and contingency articulated in chapter 2 (and I do not see why he would), he must acknowledge the extent to which reconstruction is not a necessary conclusion of deliberation. Indeed, the undercurrent of deliberation is that it may deepen our apprehension of conflict. For all of their insights, these thinkers are mistaken in their reading of Dewey on this point.
As I pointed out in the introduction, Dewey’s post-Darwinian outlook mitigates any presumptive belief in synthetic harmony. And I argued in the first section of this chapter that he discourages us from beginning with the assumption that conflict is specious and apparent. To better understand the argument, we should go back to “Three Independent Factors” and its relationship to Human Nature and Conduct and the Ethics. In the two latter works, Dewey places specific emphasis on the reconstructive dimension of deliberation. In many ways, this approach makes a great deal of sense. We presume psychologically that if the competing factors have a hold on the agent in just the way he describes, then what that person will be after is a kind of proposal that does justice to the competing factors. The psychology of deliberation has an arc, if you will, that points toward doing justice to the competing claims. Just as diversity does not imply conflict, so too conflict does not imply incommensurability.
But Dewey is keen to highlight that this aim is itself a hypothesis that may be undercut by specific moral dilemmas. This is precisely why he says in the passage cited in the introduction that although the emphasis he places on continuity, a feature derived from his earlier idealism, continued throughout his philosophical career, it nonetheless had to proceed on empirical grounds. If empirical grounds track the relationship that obtains between practical action and contingency, as discussed in chapter 2, then the aim of synthetic harmony may potentially go unrealized. That is, we stand in a position of uncertainty regarding what we will discover about the nature of the conflict, and this may include discovering its irreducibility.
Consider the following. After he delivers his lecture “Three Independent Factors in Morals,” it is pointed out during the question and answer session by the French pragmatist Emmanuel Leroux that in Human Nature and Conduct there is an emphasis placed on a “new state of equilibrium” that is brought about because of reflection. And yet in this lecture, Leroux continues, we find a “trinity … which [you] no longer want to reduce to a unity. Is there nevertheless an agreement between the two?” (TIM2 [LW5:501]). Dewey responds that in Human Nature and Conduct he understood the “moral problem above … from the psychological point of view, while today [that is, in this lecture] he was concerned with action proper” (TIM2 [LW5:502]). That is, he is concerned with those moments in which the psychological arc goes unrealized in the actual practice of moral deliberation because the substance of the conflict potentially embodies value incommensurability. The Ethics, then, stands as an all-encompassing text in relation to these other two works, and so holds out the possibility that deliberation may reveal the commensurability or incommensurability of values.
Armed with this analysis, let us go back once more. What is Dewey saying about deliberation in relation to moral conflict? In my view, he is making a two-pronged argument. For him, any decision made regarding moral conflicts must assume a reflective and experimental stance. We must be open to the possibility that our desires and vision of the world might change in the face of new evidence. This is a constitutive feature of deliberation. The self, as we know, is unfinished and is subject to change. In reflecting on the dilemma within the context of other agents and the concerns they raise, we might discover that it admits of a resolution. Our sympathetic outlook makes us ready to receive information, in the absence of which we might be inclined to misdescribe the situation or not see that a resolution potentially exists. That resolution, as we have noticed, sublimates the conflicting features. This simply means that we have found a way to do justice to the competing factors.
The second part of Dewey’s argument, connected with the analysis of the texts above, is the following. We may discover through the process of deliberation itself that the dilemma is of the kind where choosing a path implicates us in feelings of loss or regret. I have discussed this in the context of an individual life, but this does not preclude us from speaking about a community internally torn in just this way. In this sense, deliberation sheds light on the residual impact of loss that will be produced when we act. Shedding light is precisely what the dramatic rehearsal seeks to do, and its results are readily captured in the anguish we experience when confronted with the prospect of choosing between two competing goods or making a decision that nonetheless leaves part of the community in a less-than-satisfied state. In order to avoid misunderstanding, we undoubtedly will go on with our lives and continue to develop and grow, but this does not undercut the feeling of disappointment and regret that we feel after acting. We regret not that we could have acted otherwise, but that there was no way of acting that could have produced a more satisfactory outcome.
But what exactly does this mean, and is there any textual evidence to support the contention? Here it is worth turning to a passage from chapter 15 of the Ethics, “The Moral Self.” In this passage, Dewey is describing the end process of deliberation and its impact on the self:
Now every choice sustains a double relation to the self. It reveals the existing self and it forms the future self. That which is chosen is that which is found congenial to the desires and habits of the self as it already exists. Deliberation has an important function in this process, because each different possibility as it is presented to the imagination appeals to a different element in the constitution of the self, thus giving all sides of character a chance to play their part in the final choice. The resulting choice also shapes the self, making it, in some degree, a new self. This fact is especially marked at critical junctures, but it marks every choice to some extent however slight…. But every choice is at the forking of the roads, and the path chosen shuts off certain opportunities and opens others. (E3 [LW7:286–287])
What he is providing here is a descriptive account of how the decision following deliberation affects us. He observes that the decision made is congenial with the desires and habits of the self as it already exists. But we must be careful how we understand this point. A decision made in the case of a dilemma will undoubtedly appeal to different parts of our character—that is, the agent is receptive to each of the competing sides. Deliberation may very well deepen our apprehension of just this fact. Of course we know that a decision will be made, and it will be the case that one would be a different self, in some degree, had that decision not been made or made otherwise. At this juncture, Dewey does not specifically describe the end process of deliberation as one where the agent finds himself experiencing a sense of loss after a decision. Indeed, the image of anguish is missing. But this neutral presentation makes sense and therefore does not represent a deficit within his argument, as Caspary and Putnam contend. After all, he is offering a general descriptive account of how deliberation affects us, and it may very well be the case that we will reconstruct the situation such that no residual feeling of loss remains. Yet he adds an important caveat regarding choice, one which clearly suggests otherwise: “Every choice is at the forking of the roads, and the path chosen shuts off certain opportunities and opens others.”
On one reading, it seems trivially true that to the extent that two options cannot be simultaneously realized we have to forgo one to realize the other. Yet such situations need not imply a sense of loss or regret. For this reading to hold, however, it must deny the kind of conflict Dewey is describing. For instance, I might like to purchase a house that had a large amount of rooms, but was also environmentally friendly. The fact that, as things stand regarding my financial situation, I must sacrifice one or the other of these attributes hardly seems tragic. Dewey’s account can easily concede that this situation is not tragic, and he can do so under the rubric that it is trivially true that something has to be sacrificed. But this concession is necessary to cast into relief what he understands to be at stake in moral deliberation. For moral deliberation
differs from other forms not as a process of forming a judgment and arriving at knowledge but in the kind of value which is thought about. The value is technical, professional, economic, etc., as long as one thinks of it as something which one can aim at and attain by way of having, possessing; as something to be got or to be missed. Precisely the same object will have a moral value when it is thought of as making a difference in the self, as determining what one will be, instead of merely what one will have. (E3 [LW7:274] [original emphases])
This passage points to what my example above lacks. It is the importance of the values within any normal person’s self-conception and larger vision of what gives their lives meaning that makes choosing tragic. Connecting choice to one’s self-conception as Dewey does captures James’ thought, pace Putnam, that the consequences of choosing are momentous. That there is no way to sublimate the conflicting claims in his view also fits with James’ argument that the decision is between live options and therefore unavoidable.75 Indeed, this is precisely the point that Sartre makes regarding a genuine inability to extricate oneself from the dilemma: “No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world.”76 This fact will often be brought home to us, argues Dewey, by the very deliberative process we employ to find a third, satisfactory, option.
The claim that Dewey can accommodate tragic conflict will strike many as dubious. Indeed, the historical care provided by Westbrook in his elucidation of Dewey’s philosophy and the philosophical acumen of Putnam’s analysis may well seem to dwarf what I have provided here. But the fact that Dewey does not spend a great deal of time on tragic conflicts, I think, does not point to an unwillingness to acknowledge them or inattentiveness to the pluralism conflicts imply. I hope we can see that he does take this issue seriously. The more fair response is that he understands these moments to be a feature of our social and political world, rather than its exclusive feature. Our social and political engagements do not, on every occasion, constitute the high drama of Greek tragedy. Recall his earlier remark: “Sometimes a juncture is so critical that a person … feels that his future his very being, is at stake.” But he continues on a Jamesian note, remarking that these cases are important for theoretical reflection because “some degree of what is conspicuous in these momentous cases is found in every voluntary decision” (E3 [LW7:171] [added and original emphases, respectively]). What is conspicuous in these momentous cases that we find in every voluntary decision is simply that we must choose. But it is the difference between those choices that seem undisruptive and the ones that mark critical junctures in the understanding of an individual or community that potentially implicates the soul in feelings of loss. This leads us to a conclusion about Dewey’s outlook that James crystallizes regarding his own position—namely, “the very ‘seriousness’ that we attribute to life mean[s] that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere [but not everywhere], and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of the cup.”77
But if we are going to recognize such moments, it will be because we are struggling individually and collectively to see widely and feel deeply about the moral life. For when our judgments fail us, when we seem not to take seriously moral pluralism, it may often signal a deficit in our perceptual capacities. Dewey’s argument regarding the best achievable state of the moral agent is not simply about what the end products will be once we occupy this position, although it profoundly shapes them, but more forcefully about how we ought to stand within the moral life. Properly understood, moral agency positions us to witness the miracle of human reflection, even as it awakens us to its limitations.
I have argued that Dewey’s sensitivity to conflict should not obscure the larger framework in which his discussion is located. This allows us to separate the issue of the existence of a normative world from the conflicts that emerge therein. His account of conflict is thus framed by a more stable evaluative structure that steadies our inquiries and provides us with a way to expand our moral horizons in the context of specific conflicts. To be sure, in elucidating this point, his aim was not to overdetermine the process of deliberation, but rather to show how that evaluation looks from the inside. That is to say, what sort of beings must we be to engage in deliberation and what must this imply about our social psychology? What does this tell us about the resources within the world we inhabit for managing our moral lives?
The purpose of this chapter, then, was to provide an answer to these questions in order to better anchor the account of moral conflict. What has emerged is a vision of the moral life that is grounded more firmly in a kind of mutual responsiveness that, in Dewey’s view, must be made explicit in future evaluative moments. Indeed, it is the extent to which we make this process explicit in our encounters with others that underscores its importance not only for the moral life, but for political justification as well. When examined closely, it provides us with a way to manage power in political life and avoid the looming threat of domination that emerges when decision-making is placed beyond the purview of public oversight. It is to this final issue that we must now turn.