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John Dewey’s Evolutionary Ethics
I am continually amazed to find that John Dewey had such a profoundly awakened evolutionary philosophy.
In his work to construct an evolutionary ethical sensibility, Dewey recognized that the efforts to create an ethics based on an evolutionary worldview up until his own time had proven unsatisfactory at best and in the worst cases led to notions of “Social Darwinism” that seemed anything but ethical.
Dewey believed that these problems resulted from an incomplete grasp and embrace of an evolutionary worldview. He felt that many philosophers and ethical thinkers were attempting to apply aspects of an evolutionary understanding of reality without letting go of fundamental aspects of older Idealistic philosophies.
This means that they applied an understanding of evolution to ethics while retaining notions of an ideal end, an ultimate perfection, to which evolution was leading. An evolutionary ethics with this foundation inevitably defined “goodness” as that which takes us closer to that ideal end. Dewey was writing decades before the Second World War would show the world just how far this thinking could travel from anything ethical, but he (like many) already anticipated the problems of ethical ambiguity that this way of thinking represented.
Dewey also recognized another inherent problem in this way of thinking. That problem was that “goodness” was a goal forever postponed into the future. He recognized that the process of evolution moves forward in ways that simultaneously bring resolution to problems of the past and create new complexities that will only be resolved with further evolution. If we have aimed “goodness” toward a perfected state, we will soon find ourselves frustrated by what appears to be our perpetual lack of progress toward our goal.
Dewey insists that this problem arises because we have not recognized that the only “goodness” that can be ascribed to evolution is the goodness of the present in action. Goodness in this sense is the experience of evolving itself, not the experience of moving closer to a goal. The good is not a goal, a place, a state or an object in the future, it is the act of evolving and perfecting, which he defined as the act of moving into an experience with an ever greater sense of inherent meaning and significance.
In this sense we look to the present moment and the progress it represents to find our ethics and our sense of satisfaction. We are not concerned with some imagined perfect possibility in the future, but with the reality of our own forward movement – or lack there of – right now.
Jeff, I hope your review of American philosophy in Boston goes well tonight. While I wish I could be there, I’ll be just as happy going to dance lessons with my wife and friends.
For me, Dewey’s contribution to pragmatism was to correct William James’ subjective extremes and then make it an applied philosophy for use in problem solving, education, and public policy.
James was definately subjective in the extreme and Dewey brought a more Hegalian metaphysics to Pragmatism.
The talk in Boston went great!
I am returning to Corlis Lamont’s The Philosophy of Humanism, this time after studying philosophy as part of Vanderbilt University’s Master of Liberal Arts & Science program. Now the context is far more familiar. The Philosophy of Humanism includes a tour of Renaissance enlightenment thinking and the American philosophic tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey.
Lamont never attained those heights and, at first take, can be written off as a tiresome gadfly with his relentless attack on supernaturalism. But looking past his repetitive denunciation of religious belief in God and an afterlife, we find he also takes down spiritual dualism and philosophic determinism as well. These are points well taken, for those so inclined. Consider another mid-20th century crackpot’s take on dualism, “God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.” — Ayn Rand
Instead of dualism, Lamont sets up an inseparable non-dual unity among intellect-emotion, body-soul, brain-mind, and earth-heaven. Thus a person feels more whole, rather than severed by conflicting interests. Regarding determinism, a free will is necessary for Lamont’s humankind to be placed on the pedestal of rational choice-making.
Every cultural advance solves the problems that came before, yet creates new problems of its own. Such is the case with Lamont’s humanism. While trumpeting social responsibility, Lamont discounts our still-relevant human nature that evolves from self-interest. Further he places his trust in socialized central planning and its unlikely ability to tame the emergent complex adaptive system known as capitalism.
It now remains to be seen if the Obama’s approach will succeed. I certainly hope so and, as an outspoken free-market capitalist, I will gladly eat my words.
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Jeff, would you give me permission to translate this and use it in our classes?
Debora.
Dear Debora, Of course you can do that….what is mine is yours. 🙂