DEWEY, JOHN (1859-1952). Dewey's philosophy, unlike that of Aristotle and Augustine, is basically ethical because all research, logical as well as physical, has for him the purpose of solving life's problems. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is anathema to him.
Since there are both efficient and awkward ways of solving Life's problems, and since problems change from time to time and place to place, he concludes that there are no fixed norms for human action. "We institute standards of justice, truth, esthetic quality, etc... exactly as we set up a platinum bar as a standard measurer of lengths... The superiority of one conception of justice to another is of the same order as the superiority of the metric system..." (Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, New York, Hold, Rinehart, & Winston, p. 216). Another and better illustration is that the rules of morality, like the rules of grammar, are the unforeseen and unintended results of custom. There are no antecedent ideal standards. (See Human Nature and Conduct, New York, Modern Library, I, Section 5).
Scientific method can determine what customs at a given time and place are best. We should neither distrust the capacity of experience to develop ideals and norms, as Christians do in their belief in divine law; nor unthinkingly enjoy pleasures irrespective of the method used to produce them, though this is a better attitude than theism. values are fugitive. A method is needed to discriminate among them on the basis of their conditions and consequences. The reason for enjoying a value is often (to have a conclusive argument Dewey should have said always) that the object is a means to or a result of something else.
Nothing is valuable in itself. A genuine good differs from a spurious good because of its consequences. Nor are the consequences good in themselves. They too are good only as a means to something further. Nothing carries its own credential; everything is instrumental; there is no final, intrinsic value on which the value of other things depend.
Science can establish norms, or at least show which customs are best, because the problem is not one of intellectual certainty as rationalists and Christians think, but of security. Chemistry improves the food supply; and so science, by studying the conditions by which values are made more secure, solves the problems of ethics.
Again, science is the solution because not all enjoyments are de jure, rather than de facto, values. "Enjoyments that issue from conduct directed by insight into relations have a meaning and a validity due to the way in which they are experienced Such enjoyments are not to be repented of; they generate no aftertaste of bitterness" (Quest for Certainty, Minton, Balch, 1929, p. 267). For example, heating and lighting, speed of transportation and communication, have been achieved, not by lauding their desirability, but by studying their conditions: "Knowledge of relations have been obtained, ability to produce followed, and enjoyment ensured as a matter of course" (Quest for Certainty, New York, Putnam, p. 269).
The examples of heating, lighting, and communication concretize Dewey's view that there are no intrinsic values. But if there are no intrinsic values, why should one engage in arduous scientific investigations to make heating and lighting more secure? If Dewey answers, "to obtain something further," the question repeats itself: Why should one arduously develop them as means to something further, which itself has no intrinsic value? The moral question is not, as Dewey says, how to make values more secure, but, rather, how to select which values to secure.
Dewey admits that there are wrong ideals. Without aesthetic enjoyment mankind might become a race of economic monsters (Reconstruction in Philosophy, New York, Hold, 1920 p. 127). But why not choose economic monstrosity? If de jure value is conferred by a scientific study of complicated means, not only economic monstrosity but nearly any other imaginable purpose is justified.
Dewey also gives the examples of murder and wanton cruelty (Ethics, with Tufts, pp. 251, 265, 292). But it is significant that Dewey with communistic massacres and Spanish bullfights before him nowhere gives a scientific proof that these are evil.
There is a reason why Dewey dare not try to prove that murder is bad. To do so would result in a fixed rule, a hierarchy of values, and intrinsic qualities. Therefore Dewey makes all moral judgments aesthetic determinations in single cases. Each contemplated case of murder must be decided singly and individually. Hence in some cases murder may have beneficial results. The final criticism is then that scientific technique cannot select any goal. Scientific methods of communication are efficient for preaching the gospel and equally efficient for totalitarian subjugation of Hungarians, Czechs, and Vietnamese. And this means that Dewey has not solved the problem of morality
Gordon H. Clark, Dewey, Nutley, N.J., Presbyterian and Reformed, 1960; P. A. Schilpp, The Philosophy of John Dewey, New York, 1951.
Gordon H. Clark
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