PART 2: A NEW ETHICAL WORLD
1. SOME EXCELLENT RESULTS OF INTELLIGENT ACTIONS
In Part 2 we move on to Dewey’s new liberal model of nature science has been building over the last 150 years. This section, then, can be seen as a bridge between the new inner world we’ve been looking at, and the outer world we’ll begin describing.
As we’ve begun glimpsing already, thousands of years ago a new liberal evolutionary model of life and nature formed one of Western civilization’s 3 main philosophic models. In ancient Greece, for example, the Atomist Democritus, the Sophist Protagoras, and a few other Ionian thinkers like Anaximander helped build such a liberal model. In fact, it was so different from what conservatives and moderates had been seeing for thousands of years, people like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine reacted strongly against it. For them nature definitely has some eternal objects within it and they are the best objects to know, mainly with reason or faith and reason. In fact, their conservative political and educational models were so dominant, a modern liberal model of life and nature reached a scientific level only after Charles Darwin brought biology to its modern evolutionary stage with the publication of Origin of Species in 1859, the same year Dewey was born. Since then, however, that liberal model has continued challenging conservative and moderate models of nature as never before! In Part 2 we’ll look at some evolutionary evidence and briefly outline some of their developments.
In this section, however, we begin looking at some important everyday results Dewey’s liberal model of life and nature can produce. In it intelligent work and practice has been elevated to a much higher place in life than Plato and Aristotle ever thought possible or desirable. Dewey’s model of constructively intelligent work thus helps bridge the new inner and outer models of psychological and ethical excellence; it will show how intelligent work can produce some rather interesting dynamic and organic results. So, our first question naturally becomes: What kinds of inner and outer results can intelligently constructive work help produce.
S. Morris Eames, in his book Pragmatic Naturalism, mentions 4 such results. What are they and how might they work? As we’ve seen, Dewey believed anything we build can be either routinely unhealthful or intelligently healthful, whether it’s a habit or a new object. But what did he mean by the word ‘intelligent?’ Eames mentions 4 kinds of useful results from such work; they also show the kinds of ideas Dewey placed at the heart of his educational model of excellence. After all, what's the sense in knowing about excellent work-habits if we don't teach them to our young folks?
For Eames and Dewey intelligent work helps build 4 different kinds of useful habits. They’re listed as:
1. intellectual
2. moral
3. social, and
4. esthetic
We’ll look briefly at how each one can be produced in our daily lives.
Excellent Intellectual Feelings
Suppose, for example, I'm a woodworker and I want to expand my routine woodworking habits, and make them more creatively intelligent. How can I go about it? Basically those 4 ideas are useful. For example, as I plan to build something -- a message table for example -- I can begin playing creatively with some new intellectual ideas and meanings for the table. As we’ve seen, experimental learning uses the idea of reasoning conservatives and moderates have talked about for thousands of years; for Dewey, however, it become the 2nd stage of experimental learning. Before I draw the table’s blueprint I can playfully experiment with some different ideas of wood, metal, and other materials as well as table designs. How do I want it to look and operate? How might I improve on the standard message table shape? To imagine such creative ideas is the art of intellectual excellence! I can begin imagining how different materials and shapes might fit and relate to each other, how they'll all look and feel, what size table will be best, and a whole host of other ideas. Leaning to playfully enjoy experimenting with those kinds of ideas IS intellectual excellence!
Simply intellectually experimenting with different table ideas begins expanding my old routine building habits into something more creative and intelligent. Merely mentally experimenting helps expand and strengthen my intellect; it also helps me see how ideas relate to each other – another important part of intellectual excellence. In short, such actions help me feel different meanings and ideas. Whenever a person creates a plan to solve a problem, and thinks about how different meanings and ideas relate to each other, then an intellectual habit-art grows stronger. Even when someone thinks about creating an evening meal and how some foods will relate to each other and their health, then they’re strengthening their intellect! In any case, however, we see again how practical and simple Dewey’s thinking is about an important philosophic idea, namely intellectual excellence. Within the past 150 years such imaginative and practical intellectual actions have helped create the modern world we all live in today, with all its weaknesses and strengths. Greedy capitalists keep thinking of ways to take more of the public’s money, and progressive liberals keep thinking of ways to make life more equal for everyone.
Again, it should be clear, there’s really nothing very new here. Long ago even conservative Socrates helped others, Plato included, see how their routine ideas RELATED to other ideas, and when they were criticized then new ideas were called for. He would critically test an idea about, say, the eternal meaning of courage, and if it didn’t conflict with other ideas he accepted the definition. Such critical thinking is the work of intellect; Plato would eventually say a life without criticism is not worth living. If there was a contradiction between 2 ideas, or the results of an idea were unacceptable, then the first idea was rejected and different ideas were tested. If, say, someone defined ethical goodness as pleasure, and criticism produced a contradiction, they he simply asked for another idea to test. In that way, he challenged people to exercise their creative intellect and examine their own ideas and, if they could, then creatively think of an idea to produce better results. Most of the time such ideas weren’t discovered, but he thought it worth the effort.
As we saw earlier, building useful definitions is one of philosophy’s 2 most important intellectual arts; the other being comparing and contrasting ideas to one another, to see the results they produced. Such thinking is called critical thinking too. Many times such ideas became assumptions, and philosophers have been critically examining them and their results for thousands of years. So, for Dewey too, mentally enjoying thinking about how different ideas of, say, a message table relate to each other, and even playfully creating new ideas when some produce unacceptable results, is his pragmatically practical definition of intellectual excellence. When we don’t actively use our intellects critically to build either a new habit or object, then it’s simply called day-dreaming, or sometimes worrying. Now really, what about those philosophic ideas are too difficult to understand?
Excellent Moral Feelings
So far so good; such ideas are fairly straightforward and simply. They’re more or less obvious. However, not very many people go on to see how building something also helps build one’s moral excellence, whether it’s an inner habit or an outer object. That idea might be new to many people. So, it calls for a little explanation; Dewey’s moral model of excellence hasn’t been talked about much, but perhaps here’s a good place to start. In the following sections more will be said about it.
What did Dewey mean by excellent or intelligent morality? Early in the 20th century Dewey helped write an entire book called Ethics, in which he compares and contrasts other conservative and moderate ethical models with his own liberal pragmatic one; how are such ideas the same and how are they different? Those interested should read more about it, but here I’ll just mention a few of his basic ideas while still using our table example to help describe his ideas.
If I think first, say, of making a message table, routine building says just go ahead and reproduce someone else's ideas. Don’t bother about criticizing different ideas, just choose someone else's plan. Intelligently pragmatic morality, on the other hand, says wait a minute, why not enjoy experimenting a little with our imaginative choices to see what results they might produce? Basically, then, pragmatic morality is the habit-art of JUDGING AND CHOOSING intelligently between different ideas, and then of course testing them. So, naturally, after looking at different kinds of wood, metals, and the results they might work, I eventually make a choice from all my ideas. Simply intelligently choosing what we feel is best then becomes the first step towards building an intelligent morality, or moral excellence! The second step is then having some fun with testing our choices. In any case, however, it's fairly simple to see how merely making my own choices, and testing them, strengthens my own moral habit-art! Simply making any choice and then testing it for its results is Dewey’s pragmatic model of morality. In that way we can begin taking some control of our moral growth. Who knows? You might even become a moral moron, and elevate mere testing others to the highest good.
Something else should be mentioned here too about Dewey’s pragmatic moral model. Many modern philosophers, called Logical Positivists, have said morality can’t really become a science; it’s always based on personal choices and they vary from person to person. Dewey’s experimental model of morality, however, challenges those kinds of ideas. For him experimentally testing our choices for their results is what can make morality as scientific as physics or chemistry. Just because everyone has their own set of moral rules doesn’t mean they’re not objective. All such rules are based on objective results! Such a pragmatic model then elevates mere personal choice to a more scientific level of knowledge as I test my choices to see if they actually produce the results I want -- a beautiful and useful message table or whatever.
Again, intelligent morality begins by simply choosing among different ideas, and ends with actually testing my choices to see the results they produce! The more we test our moral choices, the more scientific our moral habits become. The more we choose, say, to respect others and just laws, and then feel their results, the more scientific our moral habits become. In fact, such testing over centuries has helped elevate those ideas to moral laws. In some situations they may not work, but in general they produce useful results. For us Deweyan liberals, then, a moral choice is any choice one makes between 2 or more genuine alternatives. When I, say, choose between building a wooden message table or a metal one, that’s a moral choice! With such a definition of moral excellence it’s easy to also see how most everyone tests their moral choices every day! When real alternatives are available, even choosing which foods to eat is a moral choice; and the objective results they produce are the same kinds of results helping make diet a scientific study.
With such a model of moral excellence Dewey has made it not only easier to feel moral excellence, but also to practice it. Comparing different ideas is intellectual excellence, and then moral excellence starts growing as we enjoy CHOOSING AND TESTING ideas! What’s more, such habits can begin growing even in young children who have begun growing their talking skills! We’ll see more about such an educational model of excellence later on.
We've already seen many times already how important it is to test our choices, but it’s also an important part of moral excellence. In fact, most people probably make and test many moral choices every day, and yet never consciously feel, much less enjoy, making such choices! Routine habits encourage routine actions. For many people life is a series of worrying about one thing after another. They don’t feel how their daily choices can become more enjoyably excellent. Such a pragmatic habit-art helps make any choice less stressful and more enjoyable.
Also, such a practical model of individual moral excellence helps build a conscious feeling of responsibility for the choices we make and the results they produce! If I, say, freely make a choice about how the table should look -- no one else, just me -- then only I’m responsible for the results of that choice! Such responsible feelings are another important part of Dewey’s moral model. They allow me to take both the credit as well as the blame for my free choices. No doubt, such choices often depend on prior choices, but in some sense I’m responsible for the results they produce when I test them. In short, for my own free choices and their results I should blame, or praise, no one else but myself! Of course, one’s already formed habits greatly influence the choices we make, but still if people aren’t held responsible for their own choices and actions, then learning how to make more intelligent choices becomes that much more difficult.
One other result should be mentioned, a rather obvious one. When my moral choices are, in fact, free, and when they’re not forced by someone else or an addictive habit, then excellent morality also encourages the growth of a moral will, or moral habit-art. The more I practice enjoying an intelligent morality, the more I keep growing and learning about moral excellence. And the more that happens, the more I help transform old and rather grotesque conservative and moderate philosophic status-quo models of morality practiced for literally thousands of years!
A Little Moral History
Since at least ancient times many philosophers have taught themselves to believe every moral choice and result was controlled and determined by some kind of outside forces, usually spirit-forces. In ancient Greece a determinist model of morality was commonly felt. As we’ve seen, conservatives like Socrates and Plato felt the gods controlled all human choices and actions; all people are merely the puppets of the gods! Even liberal Democritus felt atomic movements determined peoples’ ideas and actions. As we'll see in Book 2, Native Models of Excellence, such feelings were probably common for thousands of years before them, and they were passed on throughout the ancient and medieval worlds. For pious Christians and Muslims god's knowledge of past, present, and future events in effect control every event; a common phrase of Muslims is ‘god willing.’ As we've seen with Augustine too, feelings about god’s predestining people to their social roles and actions became an important part of Christian theology, even though it created the problem of free will: how can anyone have a free will if god knows all things? The idea's called determinism, predestination, and sometimes fatalism, and it’s also been at the foundation of many Hindu and Buddhist models of life and nature, with the idea of Karma. It’s a force in nature determining everyone’s actions; disease was commonly described as past-life Karma.
After Aristotle, however, the idea of free choice began growing with the liberal Atomist Epicurus (d. 270 BCE). Even though his philosophic teacher Democritus believed atoms’ necessary movements determined everyone’s actions, Epicurus said sometimes atoms are knocked off their usual courses and 'swerve'; sometimes atoms can change course and thus create real choices in life. No doubt, he was being honest about his own feelings of choosing freely.
Today, Dewey’s liberal pragmatic model of morality confidently wages philosophic war against all such grotesquely mythical fatalistic ideas. Such a moral war is waged with the idea of self-determination! In India, for example, the idea of Karma has been used for centuries to maintain and justify a rigid feudalistic class structure, called castes, and even in the early 1900s some wealthy Western conservatives said god had chosen them to be wealthy. For Dewey, however, such ideas merely justify a modern feudalistic social structure based on wealth or racist ideas. For Dewey, then, the more such conservative moral ideas are seen as merely different organic habits, the easier it becomes to better control wealth and racist brutality with more liberal educational ideas and laws. In short, the more moral feelings of self-determination continue growing, the more liberated people can feel from all such traditional moral models. Even though we all build habits to help satisfy our needs and wants, we still have some freedom to choose the kind of actions we want to practice. No doubt, not everyone always chooses intelligently which ideas to test, but such moral growth and freedom can continue being enjoyed all through life!
Again, for Dewey intelligent morality is a self-determining process of growth! Obviously there are reasons why people make the choices they make, my previous habit-energies affect my choices today; there are reasons why I choose my table to look and work one way rather than another. Still, for Dewey, the more we feel the freedom to choose one action rather than another, the more our sense of moral freedom grows and expands. Such growth is important. The more a pragmatic model of morality grows, the more each of us feels some freedom to determine what we want to learn. So, if we intelligently practice a pragmatic model of morality, our freedom of choice increases and becomes more self-determined, in spite of what some economists and physicists want to believe. Karl Marx, for example, was an economic determinist; people are determined to make the choices they make by their economic status. And it seems Einstein felt the same about physics; all movements can be known exactly. Dewey’s moral model is different. For him the more we learn to mentally see and test genuine alternatives, the larger our moral freedom of choice grows! And what's more, our choices BECOME morally excellent when their outer social results actually make life more satisfying, peaceful, healthful, and enjoyably meaningful. In fact, such results help elevate morality to an objective science! The more we wisely choose to produce such results, the more intelligent our moral habits become, like personal freedom, responsibility, and self-directed will power! All such naturalistic ideas and results can start growing while enjoying the simple moral art of consciously choosing and then testing our choices.
Excellent Social Feelings
Objective social results, then, also play an important role in Dewey’s liberal model of excellence. Such social results help promote liberal kinds of growth and knowledge. If, say, we’re frustrated with the social results of some habits, like allowing too much political corruption or overly conservative public schools, where students have little freedom to learn what they want to learn, then we can playfully create some new ideas to test for better social results! We can begin working for more democratic schools in our own neighborhoods. Such social results also help define Dewey’s liberal model of morality. We can also see how such ideas about social results can apply to the building of a message table.
No doubt, one social result will be its use by others and so the table should help produce some positive social results for them! They should feel more relaxed afterwards, as are those who work at the table. Such social results also become important in Dewey’s moral model. In short, pragmatic morality is much more than just one’s inner habits; it’s also about the social results too. If a table is being built to help torture innocent people, then such social results help make such work much less than excellent. For Dewey, then, more positive and constructive social results are important. How socially satisfactory will those results be? Will the table help promote the goods of life and make them more meaningful, abundant, and shared, or frustrate and narrow such results? Will the table help make people more intelligent, independent, confident, knowledgeable, and more helpful to others, or will it simply help keep people subservient and obedient to others’ ideas? Such social uses of the table also help determine how excellent our moral choices are.
Down through history, as we’ll often see, social institutions like schools and governments have often neglected to produce democratically constructive social results with their moral choices. In fact, almost the entire moral history of civilization has been to delay and ignore such democratic social results! They the more they did the less HUMANE life remained; the poor were used mainly to create more wealth for those ‘above’ them socially. Especially for conservatives, the quest for, and the holding of, political and educational social power has been an important part of their moral model of excellence. Deus vult; god wills it! For many thousands of years now such social results helped keep life dangerous and feudalistic for almost everyone, and often when more liberal moral democratic habits were talked about, they were quickly put down with brute force.
However, with the more recent growth of better communication tools, it’s become more difficult to keep such social results from growing. No doubt, we liberals are still a long way from producing better social results everywhere, but at least such ideas keep growing. For example, even in the US, conservative politicians still work to keep producing beneficial social results for their wealthy supporters. Liberals, on the other hand, say the best social results like healthcare and increasing wages should benefit as many people as possible! Such social results help make life more satisfying and enjoyable for many, and so should be worked for. Such results can affect many millions of people, and so our daily moral choices not only can, but should, help produce better social results for others. In short, Dewey’s liberal pragmatic morality is much more than what happens to us; it’s also about what’s happening to others out there too.
Such a liberal moral model has been helping make life more humane and caring for centuries now. At the core of it lies the idea of equal social rights, and all the democratic results it produces. No doubt, it’s certainly not the social result of choice everywhere, even in much of the US, but still such social results seem to be growing and that’s what’s important. Climate change and global warming, for example, is another important social result that could affect millions of people in just a few years. So again, even everyday choices about reducing such results become moral choices. Should I drive to the grocery store or walk and get some good exercise? Should I use my message table to make others feel less stressful and more relaxed? Such questions show us how important social results are to everyone. Even for, say, ex-convicts what’s important is organizations helping them grow a stronger law-abiding social habit. Such important social results keep growing within a constructive liberal moral model; more intelligent habits are just as important socially as they are personally. Thus, such a pragmatic and practical moral model can help people produce more intelligent social results for everyone, and help make life more socially creative, kinder, tolerant, and helpful. How much are your neighborhood schools helping promote or obstruct such social results?
Excellent Esthetic Feelings
Finally, the last moral idea is called esthetic excellence. No doubt, it’s a word almost no one knows about, but that everyone feels each and every day! The word esthetic merely refers to the feeling half of our consciousness. For Dewey, feelings and ideas make up the human body-mind. Philosophers, however, have usually referred to such feelings as esthetic experience or qualities. The word esthetic, however, comes from a Greek word -- what word doesn't? The pain killing drug Novocain, for example, is an anesthetic; it numbs our feelings, so intelligent esthetic experience heightens our sense-feelings. Paintings can often heighten and intensify our visual feelings, while music can heighten our auditory feelings; they’re both examples of esthetic feelings! And just like ideas, esthetic feelings too, like enjoyment and fun, can be positive and help promote intelligent kinds of results, or negative and unintelligent ones. In short, esthetic feelings can be expansive or limiting, but in any case they’re an another part of Dewey’s pragmatic moral model. For example, for me some of Beethoven’s music esthetically feels enlivening, enriching, stimulating, and life-affirming; to me it’s constructively esthetic; it not only feels good to hear, but its results are positive too. They remind me of how elegant and stimulating some art can be.
Because we're all feeling creatures, and have been since life began over 3 billion years ago, they’ve played an important part of moral growth for all that time. Still, most people don’t usually feel esthetic enjoyment is an important part of morality? An exception to that rule was many ancient Greeks; many often felt children should learn to enjoy and play music, thus including its practice in many of their educational models of excellence, Plato being one of them. In fact, one of his religious heroes was probably a Dionysian priest called Orpheus whose music was said to tame wild animals.
In any case, however, every conscious second of everyday we have sense-feelings about what’s going on. Such feelings are the esthetic part of our moral life. Positive esthetic feelings of enjoyment, for example, help us accept or avoid much of what’s going on out there, and thus help build all our habits. Our esthetic feelings of parents, too, help form our habits of interacting with them. Such esthetic feelings thus play a very important part in our moral development; children who aren’t allowed to enjoy life are said to be morally disabled; they weren’t allowed to have much fun thinking of different ideas, choosing some to test, testing them, and producing useful social results. How much do our pleasant esthetic feelings of sweet foods nurture and build our food habits? In fact, for Dewey esthetic feelings anchor us to nature's energies and so become an important part of any learning situation. As he said, our feelings reach down into nature and learn more about it. What we feel is beautiful or ugly, elegant or gross, colorful or bland helps build our model will power. In fact, liberals, moderates, and conservatives have used pleasant esthetic feelings to build the habits they think are important. In the 1800s some gases like ether were invented to help make people unconscious – unfeeling -- during surgery. In fact, some feelings are so frightening many people regularly use drugs or alcohol as anesthetics; they want to produce other feelings.
In the 1930s Dewey wrote a book called Art As Experience. Human feelings are another one of those ideas that’s evolved tremendously since ancient times. As we’ve seen, Plato especially celebrated a reasoning habit-art above all other human skills, and so he felt sensual feelings -- esthetic experience -- of the natural world were in fact dangerous for knowing eternal truth; for him only reasoning could produce excellent knowledge. And for centuries after him, conservative Christians helped deny the pleasant feeling half of human nature. Moderate Aristotle made a larger place for feelings in his philosophic model, but he too felt only reasoning could behold and reveal nature’s highest truths.
In our modern era, however, sensually esthetic feelings have been re-elevated to a place of importance; our strongest knowledge now depends on feeling the results of our testing actions! Pleasurable and enjoyable feelings, for example, became much more important to those liberal like Dewey who wanted to build a more naturalistic model of learning and ethics. Even ‘Shakespeare’ felt how important pleasant feelings are: No profit grows where no pleasure’s taken. The more the results of ideas were felt, the more important became esthetic experience. How many parents today quickly learn how important feelings are to their children who haven’t yet grown strong talking habits? In fact, our esthetic feelings about the results of our actions help guide the growth of our habits, and they then help guide the growth of more feelings. Within such a liberal organic model of learning, feelings of enjoyment and pleasure have become much more important for us liberals. Dewey didn’t see them as the only moral good; for him healthful growth was the best moral good. But for many hedonists today, pleasure have been elevated to god itself; you can then well imagine what’s going on when you hear your neighbors yelling ‘oh my god, oh my god!’ On the other hand, for many religious conservatives today, pleasure is the devil’s best bait.
No doubt, everyday experience is full of esthetic feelings, even while building a message table. The moral challenge, however, is to make such work as pleasant and enjoyable as possible! Such feelings can help make all the other 3 parts of pragmatic morality better. On an intellectual level they help us enjoy the creation of ideas we feel might help solve our current problem; on a moral level they can help us enjoy making the choices we feel are best; and on a social level they can help us keep working to produce the social results we feel are best. With a little practice we can enjoy thinking of different ideas for our message table; choosing what ideas to experiment and test, and the social uses we think are best. Such enjoyable esthetic feelings teach us pine wood has a different odor than other woods, hammering and sawing teach us their feelings too can be experimented with, but in either case our feelings are esthetic. They keep us connected to our work and world every minute of every day.
In short, then, esthetic feelings can help promote more positive and enjoyable experiences. The challenge of liberal esthetics, then, is to keep encouraging such pleasant and enjoyable feelings, especially in young children who are still forming many of their psychic habits. Such constructive activities can also teach children how both their feelings and ideas are really important parts of any learning experience. Both feelings and ideas promote feelings of organic wholeness; they’re always united and organically fused together in one on-going process of growth. In fact, building such esthetic habits is an artistic creation itself, felt in everyday experiences like building an evening meal or voting for a candidate.
The more we learn to make our esthetic actions produce more satisfying and enjoyable feelings, the more we feel what liberal esthetic excellence is. Productive esthetic experience is where new and unexpected feelings are felt, and the better the personal and social results, the more valuable the feelings become. No doubt, for most everyone such feelings exist mostly on a subconscious level throughout the day; when they’re brought to a conscious level of awareness, however, they can become useful for more intelligently directing our growth. For example, while building anything sometimes we may feel the pieces just aren’t fitting together like they should, and sometimes they fit wonderfully. Sometimes a relationship just doesn’t feel right, and sometimes it does. That’s what Dewey seems to mean by esthetic experience; it's a kind of fusing and growing of our old feelings with the new feelings we learn with new experiences. Sometimes we get new feelings when we meet someone new, and so our old feelings are changed. Normally it’s simply called learning, but again, for most everyone it all happens on an unspoken and subconscious level of awareness. Making our actions more consciously directed towards feeling, say, what a new relationship might be like, would be a conscious esthetic experience.
Some Conservative Esthetic Feelings
Part of Dewey’s liberal philosophic reconstruction is learning how to better sense and use our enjoyable esthetic feelings to make life more satisfying and less stressful. That art too is another new liberal educational challenge. In his book Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey described how people like Plato and Aristotle felt constructive building work was really quite petty and unproductive of True Knowledge. For them all excellent knowledge had to be known with reason, universalized, and felt as eternal and unchanging, like the gods themselves were often pictured. Menial constructive work was seen as the domain of lowly slaves and artisans – what many Hindu aristocrats called the very bottom of nature’s 'untouchable' social castes. Such negative esthetic social feelings were widespread in the ancient world, thus making it almost impossible to build more democratic systems of government and education. To such people, using one’s feelings to learn how to make, say, a better kind of shoe, or build a better sanitation system, could only produce the lowest level of knowledge – practical knowledge. Aristotle liked looking at animals and plants so he could behold their eternal species-form, and thus discover nature’s eternal truth.
As a result, however, their philosophic models of life and nature helped protect the status quo feelings their feudalistic social systems were producing; life and nature was thus felt as a fixed feudal ladder of worth and value. To feel any other model of nature was often not allowed or even encouraged. Such esthetic social feelings then helped guide the building of similar philosophic models of nature; all through the Middle Ages nature was felt as a closed, eternal, and fixed hierarchy of meanings and values! Plato called his highest Spirit-Idea the Form of the Good, and Aristotle called it the Prime Mover or God, as did Christians after them. Dewey’s point, however, is to say it’s not just ancient history, or the only way to feel life and nature! People can be felt as having equal rights and freedoms, just as they can be felt as part of a feudal model of life. Many conservative Republicans today continue feeling many people are worthless and should be ignored except to work and make them wealthier.
Thanks to modern science like Darwin's work in evolution, and a Progressive political movement in the early 1900s, it’s been much easier to keep challenging such conservative feelings about people and nature. Today we liberals are encouraging people to better feel what’s going on in their own neighborhoods, states, and nations. Can you feel all the ways people are out to take as much of their money as possible, and keep them in debt as well? Have you begun feeling we’re all just human, all too human, and all law-abiding people deserve the same political rights and freedoms? Such esthetic democratic feelings are now helping challenge conservative politicians, criminals, abusive spouses, and many more to build different feelings, with the help of different actions. The more we learn to produce such feelings, the more our esthetic feelings help build a more democratic world. In short, liberal esthetic excellence helps us feel more comfortable in such a world, as well as keep working to make it more respectful and democratic.
In Book 2's Native Models of Excellence, we’ll see a great example of how esthetic feelings were used to build the first stone tool. In that process new feelings about building such a tool were clarified and connected to older feelings of merely finding and using such stones. What’s more, using such tools increased one of the most enjoyable feelings of all – tasting nutritious food! For Dewey such esthetic experience is as valuable today as it was 2.5 million years ago, give or take a Super Bowl Sunday or two. In both cases new feelings are added to old ones, thus expanding one’s moral universe. When Socrates, for example, helped young men feel their ideas of justice, courage, or goodness weren't very logical and reasonable, then he helped them experience a new esthetic feeling, namely, they didn’t know what they thought they knew! Socrates used his questioning art to promote such new feelings and ideas. No doubt, it made some people uncomfortable, especially those who felt they really knew what an idea meant, but he also saw how that new feeling of ignorance helped people think more about such ideas. Today, such ideas of eternal truth are largely ignored by many people, but feelings are still used in much the same way to keep learning about natural kinds of practical knowledge. In fact, such feelings are infinite in number. How enjoyable and fun can you make all your actions feel?
Summarizing…
We can briefly summarize all these ideas about pragmatic morality. Everyone has esthetic experience, from birth to death. Everyone feels their world with their senses, but what’s important is how we use and guide our feelings to enjoy more of life! In particular, 3 areas are singled out as morally important. We can use esthetic enjoyable to keep increasing the feeling of our intellectual, moral, and social actions!
Enjoyable intellectual feelings begin with creating ideas to satisfy a need or want; they then continue with enjoying choosing and testing ideas, and also increasing the constructive social results of our choices. Such actions also increase feeling responsible for our choices, and feeling free to make other choices if we want. Atomic energy, for example, has already produced some tragic social results, but other results like cheap energy have been constructively useful. The moral challenge then becomes building safer, atomic forms of energy. The social result would help make life more satisfying and healthful for as many as possible. Liberal social actions also help produce feelings for democracy, equal rights, intelligent experimental knowledge, respect for just laws, and of course the freedom to openly discuss any and all social values, to name only a few. Even parents who treat their children as friends, rather than as people to dominate, promote such feelings. Such work also promotes intelligent esthetic experience -- feeling how old and new feelings help create better working feelings and ideas about life. Such experience can often lead to new and possibly other more usefully enjoyable habit-arts. Many now feel controlling a fusion energy generating process will help unlock the huge amounts of energy locked in our oceans, and will thus solve our energy challenges for billions of years! However, such inventive feelings can only become reality with intelligent work and experimentation, just as they helped build the first stone tool millions of years ago.
No doubt, all this may still sound far too complex at first, but the more we use and feel such possibilities in our own little daily constructive projects, the more familiar and useful they'll become. Sometimes even daydreaming can create a new idea worth testing. In any case, however, using our enjoyable feelings and ideas together will help make every experience that much fuller and richer. The results of asking food questions, for example, can help promote more enjoyable intellectual, moral, and social results. How quickly will putting hot sauce into my morning coffee relieve constipation? Will the social results be anything worse than stopping up my plumbing system again? And do I really want to esthetically feel those results? In short, any of our unsatisfying and stressful routine habit-arts can be improved with the help of intelligent esthetic experience; how deeply can we enjoy asking humorous questions? What might happen if I added some prune juice to the guacamole? Would it really solve my constipation problem or just keep me in the bathroom all morning? Now who says pragmatic knowledge is useless?
The liberal art of enjoyable esthetic experience can become stronger in any normal everyday activity. In fact, its field is infinitely large, and the sooner young folks learn how to feel what’s it like, the more chances they’ll have to continue making their own lives enjoyably meaningful as well. Only our own imagination limits such growth! When we substitute any event for ‘the table’ in our earlier example, then we can also begin feeling how esthetic experience can apply to anything built, anything from other habit-arts to food dishes to relationships to fine art to interstellar space craft, and even to better indoor plumbing! Sadly, however, because of routine educational systems in many of our public schools and universities, too many young folks never even begin consciously feeling such possibilities! To us Deweyan liberals that is indeed a tragic educational situation. Even kindergarten kids who build flower nurseries for beautifying their neighborhoods can begin consciously feeling all 4 kinds of esthetic excellence if their teachers will merely talk about them! Thus, educating both teachers and parents remains an important social challenge.
Slowly, then, by beginning to feel such new possibilities in our daily lives, and playfully enjoy practicing them, the feeling of Dewey’s pragmatic moral model will continue deepening the meanings of life itself! To us Deweyan liberals such a moral model is a powerful educational tool. It helps make any stressful and frustrating experience a potential enjoyable work of learning art! What’s more, we can build such esthetic habits of experience just like any painter or sculptor builds any painting or statue – with practice! No matter what work we do in life we can increase its enjoyable meanings with the help of intellectual, moral, social, and esthetic feelings. It’s yet another beautiful result of Dewey's Naturalistic Humanism. Instead of feeling life as eternally closed, fixed, and determined in its structure, like Plato and Aristotle often did, liberal esthetic experience helps open up our unsatisfying feelings to ever-new possibilities, even for kindergarten kids. In fact, the more young students are encouraged to feel intelligent building projects, the easier it becomes to consciously enjoy all 4 moral ideas! Oh what a creative and enjoyable work of art even daily experience can become with the help of Dewey's naturalistic ideas of moral excellence, experience as a creative art. Have you taught yourself how to feel philosophically ‘higher’ on life yet?
Perhaps once again another lamely lame limerick can sort the whole thing out; I however remain skeptical.
Harold was used to running with thugs,
Thinking he was better than other mugs.
So, in a courtroom he basked,
And quizzically asked,
You mean intelligence doesn’t mean dealing more drugs?
2. ANCIENT MODELS OF ETHICAL EXCELLENCE
In case you just flipped open the book to this page, this section describes some important ancient models of ethical excellence, while the following 2 sections focuses on Dewey’s liberal models of ethical excellence. What are some of their important similarities and differences, and what active habit-arts do they celebrate? We'll also look in particular at 3 old and useful ethical ideas -- virtues, motives, and duties -- and also at some of the social results different ideas helped produce. For us Deweyan liberals the most important ethical question is this: Have our actions helped make ourselves and our common social world more intelligent, humane, creative, kind, and peaceful for more people, or have they discouraged people from growing those habits?
In this section we'll compare some personal and social ethical results of conservatives like Plato and Augustine, moderates like Aristotle, and liberals like Democritus. You may be surprised at some of their results. If nothing else, it’ll teach us many other people have been thinking about ethical excellence for thousands of years, and thus offering people real ethical choices to make. Another important ethical question was this: are there already existing objects useful for directing our ethical actions, or is each of us left to intelligently experiment and discover what’s good for us and the world we live in? In general, conservatives and moderates have experimented with the first ethical alternative, while liberals have said the second alternative was a wiser choice in an always changing world where no 2 ethical situations are ever exactly the same.
A Little Ethical History, If You Please...
Western ethical philosophy begins in Greece; where else? In much of his public life conservative Socrates loved to ask some interesting ethical questions in his search for ethical certainty! For example, it seems he felt there really existed some eternal and unchanging meaning of ethical ideas like courage, wisdom or intelligence, friendship, and justice? He also asked what makes such ideas so valuable? Is it because the gods said they are valuable, or is it because they are already valuable?
However, he certainly wasn’t the first to offer his ethical opinions about the nature and meaning of ethical ideas like value, goodness, and excellent actions. In fact, as we’ve already seen, more liberal ethical models were already forming while Socrates was alive. Answering their challenges of ethical relativity became his main goal in life. Liberal sophists like Protagoras had challenged all conservatives and moderates with his famous say: Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, and are not. Obviously, this included ethical ideas as well. At the same time, liberal Atomists like Democritus wrote down many of his ethical ideas, many of which have been preserved, as we’ll see in Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence. Both of them were interested in defining more clearly ethical excellence in an always changing democratic world. Incidentally, the Greek word for excellence was 'arete', a word later Romans and Christians translated as the more mild-sounding word virtue. Socrates felt quite differently about nature, and so launched the conservative quest for ethical certainty. Thus, he assumed there were eternally constant forms or meanings of ethical excellence. Another question was do such virtues come from natural or supernatural sources, that is, are they something already existing and imbedded in nature itself, already set and eternally the same, as also Plato and Aristotle often felt; or are such ethical forms merely examples of habit-arts useful in a great many different situations, like honesty, and obeying laws applying to everyone? Said another way, does, say, justice have an eternal and constant meaning for it, or is it merely a word those with social power use to justify their own actions? In short, is there only one meaning for important ethical ideas, or are there as many different meanings depending on the person experimenting with them, like liberal sophists like to say? Do such ethical ideas have only one meaning, or should they be seen merely as behavioral tools for making our way through all the many different situations life offers us?
In general, Socrates, Plato, and even Aristotle believed some ethical ideas like happiness have only one eternal meaning, while liberals like Democritus and Protagoras were much more fluid and diverse with their ideas of ethical excellence. They knew no 2 situations are ever exactly the same, and so ethical excellence would always tend to vary from one situation to the next. Truth, honesty, and respect might be useful ethical habits in many different situations, but not all situations; sometimes acting dishonestly to dishonest people might be a more intelligent ethical response. Also, if, say, lying was the only way to save someone’s life, then why not lie and save someone’s life? If lying was the only way to make an upset person feel better, then why not lie? In short, for many ancient liberal sophists and Atomists, the human level of both motives and results was where all ethical excellence should focus, rather than on any untested ideas about eternal unchanging objects. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle reacted to such ethical relativism in their own ways. Incidentally, the word ethics comes from the Greek work for customs -- ethos.
Both conservative Socrates and Plato experimented with basing their models of ethical excellence on exactly such unchanging objects. Socrates, for example, wanted to reduce some ethical ideas to only one eternal meaning; he felt justice, for example, has only one eternal meaning and we can learn it by simply asking ourselves some intelligent questions. Plato, for example, said justice was a certain kind of harmony among different people. In any case, however, they assumed and experimented with the idea nature itself already has eternal ethical values built into it. Aristotle tells us Socrates didn’t separate such ideas from nature itself, whereas for Plato such ideas are eternal spirit-objects, and thus exist in a completely separate realm of nature. In order to combat humanistic relativism both he and Socrates believed such eternal ethical Truth can be known only by experimenting properly with one's reasoning faculty; the road to knowing such ethical ideas was paved with the proper questions leading to their eternal Truth. Once known, then, a person would automatically act more ethically; his famous saying was Knowledge is Excellence, and Excellence is such Knowledge. Sophists agreed, but they had much different definitions of knowledge.
In many early dialogues, Plato describes Socrates questioning other Greek men about such ethical knowledge. No doubt, his feelings about their having only one eternal meaning were already part of a much older conservative ethical tradition, and so it was easy to get many Greeks to talk with him. However, as those dialogues also show us, discovering such ethical meanings was much more difficult than it felt; in fact Plato himself was much more focused on talking about political ideas than ethical ones. He never really could describe clearly what he felt was the highest spirit-object -- the Form of the Good. At any rate, Socrates spent many of his days questioning Greek men about ethically excellent ideas, trying to discover the eternal meanings for words like wisdom, justice, and courage. For him, Plato, and Aristotle wisdom was the highest excellence. When someone would suggest some definition of it he was quick to show how it contradicted some obvious natural facts. Thus was born one of conservative ethical thinking's main problems: what exactly is the relation between eternal ethical ideas and natural facts? How exactly can they relate to each other? We'll see Dewey's answer in the following section. Stay tuned.
With such feelings Socrates made another ethical assumption: Virtue, or excellence of any kind, was learned only with the help of asking the right questions and reasoning. If, say, such contemplative reasoning remembered what courage eternally was, then you would always act courageously. Obviously it wasn't the only kind of excellence, but it was the highest kind of ethical knowledge, eternal and unchanging. What’s more, even though shoemakers and clothes makers could begin feeling courageous excellence with their actions, but it still wasn’t the highest kind of knowledge; that could only be achieved with the right kind of philosophic reasoning. Because all such workers existed on a low and vulgar intellectual level in an always changing natural world, they were continually distracted from using their reasoning skills properly, and so denied themselves the chance of knowing nature’s highest kinds of ethical truths. The result was the world he saw about him, a world in which everyone seemed to act only for their own benefit, rather than reasonably, and where people generally blindly obeyed what their elders told them to do. Most people, then, could only feel excellence rather than know it; only true philosophers like himself could discover such ideas. Thus, Socrates also believed only those aristocrats who had the leisure to build a contemplative habit and think about such ideas could best know what any kind of ethical or political excellence really was. In any case, however, Socrates probably wasn’t ready to make the leap of faith his more religious-minded student Plato did make; he didn’t want to see all such abstract ideas like ethical good merely as spirit-objects. Aristotle tells us Socrates felt it was best to view all such ethical absolutes as natural objects, as Aristotle usually did himself.
As we've seen, for about the last 30 years of Socrates’s life a Greek civil war kept Greeks killing other Greeks. His participation in some battles seems to have deeply affected his kind and gentle nature; today it’s called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. At any rate, the great questioner spent many of his last years criticizing others’ moral and political knowledge of excellence, perhaps to help them make more intelligent choices before they acted, rather than just routinely obeying orders. Perhaps knowing the eternal meaning of courage would prevent more people from merely throwing away their lives in war. Weren’t such destructive actions really the height of foolishness, rather than acting wisely and courageously? Maybe his questions might help more people know more intelligent ethical ideas, and thus act more intelligently. No doubt, he was saddened by the fact of Greeks killing other Greeks. Many Greeks believed they were superior to all other nations. During the war (431-404 BCE) his world was, as Dewey said, going to pieces, so Socrates encouraged some aristocratic young men to use their reason more than their impulses for obedience, violence, and their own personal good. If they would ask better questions, they might be able to grasp and behold eternal ethical Truth! It would then help them act more intelligently and courageously, not to mention save more Greek lives. As he talked and criticized others’ ethical ideas he also showed them what questioning excellence can sound like. Also, however, with such political questions he attacked the Athenian form of democracy itself; to him it was mainly responsible for the war in the first place. Its ruthless quest to maintain its empire provoked Sparta and its allies to attack, and it also allowed ordinary people to have a voice in government.
After the war, then, Socrates was brought to trial by democrats. By that time, however, he had had enough, and provoked the jury into sentencing him to death. One of his students, Plato, went into a self-imposed 10 year exile, but when he settled in Athens once again he began experimenting with spirit-models of both ethical and political excellence. As a result, his models of ethical and political excellence became divided from the natural world, the world liberal sophists and atomists said was the most important world. For example, like Socrates before him, he saw bodily pleasures as creating serious distractions in the quest to know eternally unchanging ethical ideas, the same kinds of idea Socrates felt were natural objects. Centuries later, Christian hermits would live much the same kind of life, or try to. For Plato, then, only when philosopher kings and queens mentally grasped and beheld the real divine natures of ethical and political excellence could they then use the knowledge properly to bring order and harmonious justice back to their own city-states and peoples' lives. These were important ethical assumptions for him. How could anyone possibly know such completely different objects and their meanings? That was easy; all such ideas were already within us at birth; questioning-asking merely served to reveal what those deeply buried ideas really were. It seemed like commonsense reasoning to him; if such ethical spirit-objects didn't exist, then where did we get the abstract ideas of courage, wisdom, and reasonableness? Mustn’t such universal and abstract ideas really correspond to and reflect some kinds of unchanging and eternal ethical and political objects? The important point is this: given such assumptions and feelings, those other ideas felt normal and natural. Only as such assumptions were shown to produce some very serious problems did his optimistic feelings change. And when that happened it showed how strongly he felt about an important ethical value, namely the truth. It was honored and respected above all other ideas.
Where did he get such assumptions and feelings for a spirit-realm? No doubt, Plato's early education and his religious habits helped him feel such objects really existed. Eventually he would say at the top of that realm was what can be called the Form of the Good. He felt it somehow gave goodness to all objects having some goodness within them. In early adulthood he was quite hopeful such meanings could be learned, and once they were, then one could simply deduce an exact and certain science of ethics, just like mathematicians had done with geometry. During his 10 year exile he probably visited some Pythagorean colonies in southern Italy, and even met a leader who became the model of his philosopher-king described in the Republic.
As we’ve seen, however, such spirit-ideas eventually created their own kinds of unsolvable problems. For example, if ethically excellent objects exist in another realm, then how could such ideas ever be tested to make sure our ethical ideas are absolutely certain? Wouldn't we have to test them each time we used them? There’s a story he eventually defined the Form of the Good with the number 1, but exactly what he meant wasn’t made clear, probably because it still wasn’t very clear to him.
Another ethical idea he used was the word ‘harmony.’ Personal justice is always a harmony among all a person’s parts, and social justice is a social harmony. If a city-state was just, then everyone would be happy with their social roles. But again, what is right, and what is good? Was it just to keep enslaving people to serve a small aristocratic class of people who spent their days leisurely thinking about life and nature? Even Aristotle seems to feel a little guilty about producing knowledge which has little social value at all. No doubt, such generalized ideas like harmony sounded good, but again, if all people have difference kinds of harmony and ideas of goodness, then in what sense can harmony create a just society? Won’t different classes of people be continually disrupting social harmony? That certainly seems to be the case even today.
Little wonder, then, as Plato grew older he turned more and more to politics and describing all the different ways people could learn about his highest ethical idea, a Form of the Good. His dialogue Laws describes hundreds of different ethical ideas, but it also describes a small group of rulers, called the Nocturnal Council. Its job was to make sure everyone complied and acted harmoniously with their ideas. If not, it might mean death to those who didn’t obey such ideas.
In short, Plato too celebrated many traditional Greek ethical ideals: moderation in actions aiming at courage, wisdom, reasonableness, and justice would promote both personal and social harmony, that is, the status quo. For him slavery was an acceptable and necessary ethical idea. Maybe he even thought the gods just wouldn't allow him to clearly see and behold nature's highest ethical truth. In any case, today conservatives like Plato have the same kinds of educational problems? If they don’t like some idea, like equal rights, then they work to merely stop such people from gaining more political power. Thus, social dis-harmony seems to be the general result of Plato’s ethical thinking. If there is only one meaning for ideas like ‘the good,’ then there must be ways of negating all forms of dissent! Even today we still see wealthy conservatives working daily in many different ways to control as much as they can the information people get, so dissent is reduced to a minimum and they can keep working to make themselves even wealthier. In today’s world money has become the form of the good. So, if all moral excellence must promote social harmony, then controlling all dissent can be justified, one way or another. Both medieval and recent history teaches us it’s often been brutally enforced. In any case, much more humane models of ethical excellence continued growing within Greece’s more liberal democratic political systems.
Ancient liberal models of ethical excellence, as Protagoras practiced it, saw it as a form of lawfully intelligent growth, no doubt guided by intelligent feelings of pleasure and pain. Pleasurable actions become unintelligent when they produce pain. Drink too much alcohol and you’ll feel the pain later. Always seeking unintelligent and risky pleasure would increase the chances of pain later on. Plato too respected and portrayed the great liberal sophist himself, and such humanistic models of ethical excellence were common in the 400s BCE, as Athenian democracy was achieving its most developed form. For a few centuries liberal thinkers like Democritus and Protagoras were free to build much more naturalistic, humanistic, and practical models of ethical and political excellence. For them such excellence all started and ended with the individual, rather than the state, as Plato imagined.
For such liberals, the meanings of excellent ethical habits were capable of growing and becoming wiser all through life. For example, Democritus said he'd rather discover another natural law than be the absolutely powerful king of Persia, so you can see the whole liberal ethical foundation had shifted to the good for individuals, rather than state good. On the whole, then, liberal Greek ethical models were much more pleasure-pain based, practical, and down-to-earth, so to speak. Ethical excellence was like a set of practical and useful habit-arts based on respect for others and just laws; such habits usually helped make social life less stressful for people, rather than for just a few powerful leaders. What’s more, for such practical kinds of ethical excellence not only was some intelligent reasoning required, but also active experimental practice was also required to feel what our weaknesses and challenges were, and then build a plan to test our ideas for improving them. If someone felt a law was unjust, then it was an ethical duty to work for its change. Even Plato felt such excellence required actions as well as knowledge.
Moderate Aristotle's Ethical Model
Aristocratic Aristotle’s model of ethical excellence was a compromise between conservative Plato and liberal sophists and atomists like Democritus. As mentioned earlier, he had carefully redd much of Democritus’s and Plato’s work, and wanted to build an ethical model using some ideas from both. Like Dewey said, he wanted to have his ethical cake and eat it too. He wanted to make a place from practical kinds of ethical excellence, but he also felt there existed one highest good; that was ethical cake for him. Thus, the great philosophic moderate celebrated both intellectual and practical kinds of ethical excellence, while also saying the intellectual was higher and better than practical kinds of excellence. After all, he felt mankind is a reasoning animal, and so only reasoning and contemplating nature’s eternal truths could produce the highest happiness. It was the ultimate fulfillment of human nature, and the most god-like as well; god eternally contemplates its own eternal absolutes. However, because it’s not practiced universally, it can best be seen as Aristotle’s highest happiness.
His moderate ethical model also told him there are natural habits of ethical excellence, like all those learned with practice; shoe makers and clothiers could become honest and honorable people by practicing those habits. But they couldn’t really grasp nature’s highest ethical good and happiness until they contemplated nature’s highest and eternally unchanging truths -- until they became godlike philosophers. Practical habits could only produce changing practical knowledge, not the highest happiness. Obviously, such an ethical model assumed there existed some eternally constant objects to contemplate and correspond to. Such Platonic-like reasoning fulfilled mankind's eternal nature as the highest reasoning animal. Because we alone have a reasoning skill it alone can lead us to our highest and most lasting happiness -- to imitate god itself, which was also eternal and unchanging! Thus, like Socrates and Plato, Aristotle too artificially divided ethical excellence into roughly 2 kinds, the lower natural and the higher intellectual.
Such a moderate ethical model celebrates many values of an aristocratic Greek gentleman; slavery was natural and normal, women should be kept out of public life, men should only associate with those of equal classes, and so on. He also wasn't very interested in liberal humanistic models like those of Democritus and Protagoras, or a very creative thinker like, say, Anaximander who created an evolutionary model of biological life over 2,000 years before Charles Darwin, as did the Sicilian Empedocles! Aristotle felt much more comfortable defending the conservative Greek philosophic and social status quo. His ideas of slavery, for example, were even accepted by Thomas Jefferson, who talked much about equality, and yet did very little to actually promote such equality. No doubt, history has shown the harmful social results of Aristotle's thinking about slavery, but if nothing else, it shows how even great philosophers and theologians, all have their habits and mental limits. Still, many of his practical ethical ideas about, say, philanthropy would be accepted by liberals like Dewey, and some similar ideas were embraced by Confucius in China, who may be called an oriental pragmatist. Even though such practical character habits can't produce certainty in an always changing world, or produce the highest kind of happiness, ethical actions like generosity and kindness to certain people are still very important for living an excellent social life.
So again, like his teacher Plato, Aristotle artificially divided ethical excellence into 2 kinds, intellectual and practical. With ideas about practical excellence he too celebrated what were very widespread and common habits among educated Greeks; they celebrated a common ethical status quo expressed by the phrase Nothing Too Much. Confucius too painted practical ethical excellence as a so-called Golden Mean between extremes; Aristotle would have agreed. For example, between acting like a coward and impulsively throwing your life away, was courage's best meaning; sometimes it’s wise to retreat and sometimes it’s wise to attack. Between having too much and too little was having the best kind of wealth. Such ethical ideas were reasonable, but Aristotle also agreed with Plato about true happiness; it’s reserved only for those philosophers who practice reasoning about nature’s eternal objects, like god. No doubt, such ethical dualism also shows how Greek society was quite divided on both physical and mental levels; today it’s often described as the difference between the haves and the have-nots.
For most people the Greek idea of moderation was already the common rule for ethical excellence. The best kind of justice, for example, could easily be described as being midway between lawlessness and dictatorship. In any case, however, the best kinds of practical ethical excellence meant building a number of useful habit-arts, like choosing moderate pleasures rather than excessive or weak ones; the best diet, for example, would be one midway between gluttony and starvation; it was a value Buddhism’s founder learned too. However, such a moderation test for ethical excellence didn’t always work; a few actions had no moderate amounts, like adultery for example, or rape. As far as we know, out of all Greek philosophers only he and Socrates ever married and Aristotle obviously took the institution seriously. For most ethical situations, however, moderation was a useful rule for practicing ethical excellence.
Within such an ethical model Aristotle also found a place for pleasure and pain; they were seen as useful learning tools for building practical habits. Like so many educators after him, he felt it was sometimes necessary to bop a child or young person on the head to remind them to act more respectfully. Even at the Catholic high school I went to, such physical punishment was a daily event. As a result, ethical education was seen as merely a preparation for adult life. Liberal Dewey would help build a rather different goal for education; he saw it as learning how to intelligently guide a student’s own growth of democratic ideas like equal rights, rather than merely teaching them how to fit in to the existing social and economic status quo. In any case, Aristotle’s ethical ideas help us see how in ancient times there was almost no social mobility between classes; most everyone stayed in the same class they were born into, and so practiced the ethical habits they learned. In India such a status quo was cemented into an eternal caste system.
Another rather modern ethical idea Aristotle celebrated was using both inner motives and outer actions to achieve ethical excellence; Dewey too celebrated that idea very much. Healthy, kind, and helpful inner motives, as well as useful outer results, were ethically important for both of them. After all, what's praiseworthy about wanting to hurt someone and yet actually helping them? Motive-feelings like generosity and kindness make it much easier to actively produce those kinds of results. And so Aristotle says to feel such emotions properly, at the right time, on the right grounds, towards the right people, for the right reasons, helps make ethics one of the most challenging of all philosophic studies. For us Deweyan liberals, however, the weakness of Aristotle’s model is the narrow range of such actions. Only to those of equal class and social status should one interact with such motives and actions. So, don’t bother feeling contempt for a pizza delivery person arriving with cold food when there's a blizzard outside and it's 200 below zero. Why not just tip them and put the pizza in the microwave, rather than put them in the microwave? What’s more, outer results are ethically important too; to give a donation at the right time, in the right amount, for the right cause, and to produce the best results is at least as important as having the right motives. In fact, for Dewey such outer results are more important.
Aristotle also mentioned another rather noble ethical idea Dewey liked -- feeling our actions not merely as a means for getting some reward, but just because such actions build a noble character! Nobel character development was important for both Aristotle and Dewey. For example, why not just feel how good it is to help those who're trying to help themselves, rather than always expecting some reward from it? To many young folks today that idea may sound a little too idealistic, but philosophers call it making an action an end-in-itself; it’s good just for itself. Such actions also celebrate the important ethical idea of staying in the present, feeling its excellent energies, and enjoying them for own sake. In China Confucius too felt such actions were a sign of a 'superior person'. In other words, our generous, kind, and law-abiding actions can be felt as ends-in-themselves as well as helping produce useful results. With such ideas Aristotle too celebrated another idea Dewey liked -- being in the present; the great Sicilian Sophist Gorgias too celebrated it. How can we possibly learn if our motives are right for the situation we're in if we don't take the time to feel what's happening here and now? After all, it's one thing to feel we should help educate others, but wisely putting that ethical excellence into action should be guided by feeling what's going on here and now; such feelings might help us see what the best size hammer would be to teach an obnoxious person better manners. Or, in a different situation, what good would yelling at a delivery person do when they’re trying mightily to return the feeling to their fingers, toes, and nose?
Christian Models of Ethical Excellence
Ancient Christian models of excellence often used Plato as their model. With the help of Augustine of Hippo, much of Plato’s work became part of the West’s conservative religious tradition. Eventually, for thousands of years, Christians too pictured the highest virtues and excellences as coming from a spirit-source – spirit-ideas for Plato, and god for Christians. Both existed in a completely different realm. For most everyone the belief in such a realm was already strong, so they didn’t ask questions like how could they ever interact with natural objects like people, or how could they be tested. They were already felt to exist. Almost everyone already believed such spirit-objects were active in the natural world, and some friendly ones had revealed eternal ethical truth to a few holy people in the form of sacred writings. Most people normally felt such objects in fact kept all the eternal stars and planets in their constantly recurring and mathematically well-ordered harmonious rhythms and motions, while evil spirits created diseases, earthquakes, and floods on earth. Most felt such stars and planets were closer to god and thus higher up on nature's scale of values; their spirits could even direct life here at the earth.
Thus, astrology became a growing 'science' too, especially after Alexander’s armies brought the art back from Persia, called today Iran. After all, why didn't the stars and planets all fly off into space? They too must be controlled by some powerful spirit causes in nature who also revealed ethical kinds of truth as well. Even Aristotle felt because the stars were closer to the divine ether astronomy could, therefore, be an exact science. However, when Isaac Newton mathematically described a natural universal force called gravity, and showed how it accurately described celestial and earth-movements, not only did Aristotle’s ancient model of nature begin falling with a thud, but many of his ethical ideas based on such ideas also became more doubtful, like contemplation was the only way to produce the highest happiness. More people began asking, if one natural force controlled nature, then why shouldn't more people be able to democratically control their own lives and governments?
Centuries earlier, however, ancient Christian philosophers like Augustine (d. 430 CE) said love of god was the highest ethical good and so obedience to its ideas was ethical excellence; they were defined in the New Testament. So like Plato, he too suggested turning away from earthly pleasures as a useful tool for enjoying life and relieving its stressful tensions. Needless to say, such a turning away also negated personal and social kinds of ethical and political progress, like increasing one’s knowing and working for equal rights. For Augustine, the best natural good was converting more people to the only true model of life and nature – a Christian model. For him this life is only a brief testing ground where evil spirits keep offering pleasures to people. Thus, one of the first things Christians did was close all the empire’s public baths; they could only lure people to hellfire. In fact, such pleasurable ethical actions were why god was helping destroy the empire in the 400s CE! For decades barbarian tribes were turning Roman civilization into rubble, and the government’s ability to protect people and satisfy their needs was becoming more and more difficult. The Christian ethical solution, then, was to teach habits of obedience, and even force others to accept its ethical ideas and make the world more harmonious. If nothing else they gave people hope for a better life. So, with Augustine’s help ethics became highly negative and pessimistic. Jewish prophets blamed Jewish suffering on their sinful actions, and those ideas were embraced by the Church as another means of social control and power.
Such ancient and medieval conservative and moderate philosophers and theologians continued encouraging people to see religious habits as eternal ethical truth. People were told such ideas came from god itself, and so ethical duty became making everyone practice the same kinds of ethical habits: supporting the Church, fighting its wars, obeying its ideas of blessedness and sinfulness, and expecting an eternal reward. The greatest ethical excellence was love, or so churchmen said. Testing such ideas was thus impossible at best; they got their value from completely different spirit-objects. Only beyond all of nature's violence and bloodshed, beyond all of mankind's stupid wars, brutal violence, greed, diseases, and drunken revelry, beyond all its disruptive variety and constant changes were the most excellent ethical objects to lovingly caress and worship -- constantly true and excellent spirit-ideas. Practicing their ethical ideas, and they alone, are what people need to earn their heavenly reward. Once again, routine astronomical movements helped justify such ethical feelings still practiced by millions today.
Thus, Augustine's ethical Christian models were just as artificially dualistic as Plato's; there was no evidence such objects even existed! In fact Plato is often described as the first Christian. Also like Plato, Augustine too pictured the body and mind-soul as completely different objects, one natural, the other eternal spirit. As a result, Christian ethical models of value were artificially divided into one’s inner motives and outer results, with the emphasis on one's inner motives. Only they could make people feel sinful and repent, purify their soul, and make it righteous, while outer results of one’s actions were often ignored. Such motive feelings of ethical righteousness had been replacing ancient habits of sacrifice practiced for thousands of years. The prophet Isaiah had written how god hates routine sacrifices, but loves god-fearing righteous people.
Also important for Plato and Augustine was the idea of sinfulness. Although created by god, it gave an obedience test to Adam and Eve; they were not to eat of the tree of knowing good and evil. Evidently god wasn’t very scientific minded; science is the art of knowing good and evil. At any rate, after failing such a test somehow all of their descendants then became infected with an original sin. Such ideas of universal sinfulness were then used to help justified the Church's rituals and conversion ideas. Somehow or other everyone had inherited from Adam and Eve an original sin of disobedience, and so were already corrupt and in need of redemption. Added to that idea was the story about evil spirits always working to recruit more and more souls. Evidently some devils could get out of hell and roam the earth tempting people everywhere.
All such ideas helped build an ancient Christian model of ethical excellence. It was pictured as a kind of tightrope walk between salvation and sin which everyone takes daily. Work to support the religious hierarchy was encouraged; idle hands are the devil’s workshop; they might actually be used to make one feel the pleasure nature had been building into everyone for millions of years! For Augustine all fall short of god’s goodness, even though no one could really prove god even existed! It didn’t matter; most everyone already accepted the existence of such spirits, and wanted to obey their social superiors, rather than wonder how an all-good and merciful god could possibly create such a nature filled with evil. How could anything evil come from what was perfectly good? Most people simply wanted to go to heaven after they died rather than ask such questions. Because evil spirits were felt as swarming all through the natural world, they could overturn the good results of anyone's actions, but they couldn’t affect one's good will – one’s inner motive feelings. So, again, Christians celebrated morality's inner world of motives and desires; what mattered most ethically was one's inner motives. If I really loved a heretic then burning them at the stake was justified! If you really loved your slaves then whipping them was justified. Such models of ethical excellence helped keep a feudalistic status quo in place for centuries.
Like Plato, Augustine too believed all of nature's highest virtues and excellences already existed in a spirit-realm. For Augustine, however, ethical excellence couldn't be achieved merely with reason, but with a humble and accepting inner motive of faith in, and obedience to, the Church's ideas. However, although natural results were downplayed, such inner motive-feelings could only grow as a result of practicing and obeying the Church's ethical rules, like poverty and humility. Only such ethical actions could participate with divine goodness, and thus lead to salvation. Poor-as-a-church-mouse Socrates was Plato's model for such ethical excellence, Jesus was Augustine's model, and in China Lao Tzu was another similar type person, as were the Cynics in ancient Greece -- cynos is the Greek word for 'dog'. In short, forget about wanting natural goods like wealth, health, helping improve the wretched lives of slaves and peasants, or build excellent diet and exercise habits so you could know which topping might be best for tonight's pork-kabobs. Such habits only keep us anchored to the always changing and corrupting natural world, rather than atoning for our sins and getting ready for god's saving grace, even though god supposedly knew who would be saved before the world was even created! Thus, ethical excellence was reduced to loving god and obeying Church ideas. For us liberals, however, all such ideas were a natural response to living in a world where real useful technology and experimental knowledge as still almost non-existent.
What other ethical excellences did god supposedly will? According to the gospels Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount listed some of them: humility, compassion, peacemaking, repentance, not returning evil for evil, repenting, and even giving away more than what was asked for. Few bothered to ask what was the motive from which such ideas came? As the gospels show us, Jesus himself believed the End Times had arrived, and a new heavenly kingdom would be speeded up with such examples of ethical righteousness. From such motive-feelings came the radical nature of Jesus’s ethics, which evidently even he could not always conform to. His cleansing of the temple money-changers showed not even he could ‘turn the other cheek’! Within such motive-feelings why worry about any physical and naturalistic excellence, like becoming more educated and planning for a better future? God cares most about one’s righteous inner feelings and motives; repent, for the kingdom of god is at hand.
Such religious ethical models of excellence became a part of the conservative and moderate philosophic traditions too. Even in the late 1700s, when liberal Enlightenment thinkers were questioning and challenging all such spirit-models of ethical excellence, moderate philosophers like Immanuel Kant aimed once again to give people a way to know their ethical decisions were absolutely right. If someone acted with just the right motives, for example, then they could feel their actions and choices were always right, even if the results turned out to be tragic! For Kant our inner motive-feelings for ethical certainty were the only way to achieve ethical excellence; forget outer results and concentrate on creating excellent inner motives. Telling the truth, for example, can always be felt as ethically right, and so any results from such actions didn’t matter ethically, even if innocent people might be killed. We'll see more of Kant's ethical thinking in Book 4's Modern Models of Excellence.
Such an artificial separation of inner motives from outer results had already been part of the conservative Christian tradition for centuries. No doubt, feeling such ethical ideas were reassuring to people who wanted to feel some actions were absolutely right, and others absolutely wrong in all situations. However, to those wanting to actually keep improving life with science’s help, such ethical ideas were all but useless! In fact, they could be used to justify psychological and socially harmful results! They promoted the feeling people are really divided into mind and body, rather than body-mind, and they neglected all those actions which produced better living results for more people. Emphasizing only one’s motives and feelings as ethically important encouraged people not to think about actually improving our common and shared natural world! After all, even Hitler had defendable motives in wanting to make life better for Germans by acquiring more land for them, but who would argue the outer result of killing millions of innocent people wasn't morally monstrous? In the next section we’ll see how Dewey emphasized both motives and results for ethical excellence. Once again all such ideas will be neatly sum up with yet another landlubberly lame limerick.
Conservative Tom wanted to give ethics a shot,
About such ideas he had quite a lot.
So at his desk of wood,
He wrote what was good,
For everyone, whether they knew it or not.
3. DEWEY’S LIBERAL MODEL OF ETHICAL EXCELLENCE
In this and the following section we’ll look a little closer at Dewey’s liberal model of ethical excellence. As we’ve been seeing, it’s very different from conservative and moderate models like Plato’s and Aristotle’s. Like many ancient sophists and atomists, it placed ethical values like satisfaction, enjoyment, growth, intelligent learning, and happiness on a completely human level, rather than outside it in eternal natural forms or eternal spirit-objects. The highest ethical goods and excellence were human based, including democratic and educational excellence. Also, Dewey’s ethical ideas of excellent motives and duties were very different from conservative and moderate models, largely because modern behavioral models of psychology justified creating different satisfying habits for different people, and thus encouraged ethical diversity rather than social conformity with similar ethical habits.
Such a liberal ethical model simply assumes there really is no radical separation between our inner and outer worlds; body and mind are always organically connected both to each other and nature throughout life! With such an organic Behavioral model of psychological excellence, Dewey felt confident criticizing all conservative and moderate models of ethical excellence in which the highest ethical value was artificially reduced to one ultimate and eternal good or happiness. Not only does such a liberal psychology tell us life is always changing, growing, and evolving, but modern science too tells us nature is the same way. Thus, why shouldn’t one’s ethical excellence too be pictured as always growing and evolving, and where experimentally intelligent growth becomes very important? No doubt, if one wishes one may say intelligent growth is the highest liberal good, but such a generalization really tells us nothing about how to intelligent learn what’s good for us here and now. That habit-art can only be known with other ideas, like experimental testing. Such a learning habit-art encourages everyone to democratically build their own models of ethical excellence, and make their own lives more satisfying and enjoyable here and now! Finally, what's important for Dewey’s model of ethical excellence is BOTH inner motives and outer results! It doesn’t artificially separate the 2 into different objects, like Plato and Augustine usually did. For Dewey, then, each of us becomes a kind of ethical artist! With our experimental actions each of us builds our own ethical universe, just as painters paint pictures, and sculptors sculpt statues.
Thus, Dewey’s model of ethical excellence is both experimental and forward-looking. It uses intelligent experimentation to discover the future results of actions we make here and now; it doesn’t use mere reasoning or faith to discover goods and values already existing! In fact, no 2 ethical situations are ever exactly the same, and thus no 2 ethical actions are exactly the same. What ethical excellence means in one situation will not be exactly the same in other situations. Only talking about abstract generalizations like ‘ethical good’ makes us feel there really exists eternally unchanging ethical values. Honesty may generally be the best ethical choice, but it certainly isn’t excellent in all situations.
No doubt, some liberal ethical generalizations are similar to conservative and moderate ones, like intelligence, generosity, and kindness, but, again, there’s often another big difference between them; how widely should they be used in everyday life? Conservatives and moderates like Plato, Augustine, and Aristotle weren’t very democratic, so they often didn’t use their values across class, ethnic, or religious divisions. Aristotle’s ethical model of aristocratic nobility basically applied only to his own class; it defined ethical excellence mainly for it.
As a result, on a daily basis such liberal ideas help create a different kind of basic ethical challenge. They keep urging people to ask how can I make my actions here and now produce more satisfying and respectful results for myself AND others? So again, only when liberally humane ethical ideas actually produce such results do they become excellent, and not before. For Dewey, mere ethical reasoning or faith can’t really grasp absolutely unchanging ethical Truth, like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine wanted it too. Instead, liberal ethics aims to artistically build living and growing habit-arts useful in a great many different ethical situations, like truth-telling, honesty, respect for just laws, enjoyment, and so forth.
What aristocratic Plato and Augustine looked down on -- the intelligently practical habits of the lower classes -- Dewey celebrated if they produced more satisfying and helpful personal and social results! For him ethical ideas like virtues, motives, and duties are like plants; they keep growing all through life! So again, ethical excellent is the art of intelligently controlling the satisfying growth of our habits. Too much pleasurably harmful candy, for example, can rot our teeth and damage our bodies. Thus, another important ethical question is formed: What can stop us from keeping such control over our ethical growth? That question can perhaps best be answered with the words ‘excessive selfishness and disrespect!’ The more disrespectful we are of equal social laws and innocent people, and the more we practice greedy habits of selfishness, the more difficult it becomes to keep control of our freedom, growth, and ethical choices. Choose to rob a bank or someone’s car and you may lose your freedom for 5 years. In any case, however, like science's ideas, ethical ideas too are simply useful behavioral tools for intelligently guiding our actions and growth. Such an organic ethical model of excellence follows quite naturally from Dewey’s psychological model of excellence. Both use experimental testing on a daily basis.
What's ethically excellent is intelligently testing here and now our ethical ideas of, say, generosity and kindness, and then, where possible, see their results. We might think it’s okay to keep breaking some law or giving money to a homeless person because we have a motive-feeling of sympathy, but what are the actual results? Do we keep being disrespected by other people, or keep encouraging a harmfully addictive habit in a homeless person? In such an ethical model what’s important is working to make our actions produce better results. Even if you feel a new ball-peen hammer is the best tool for re-educating an abusive spouse -- Wham! -- it still needs to be tested; doesn’t each of us have the right to defend ourselves? In any case, however, both our inner motives and outer results are what give any idea its ethical meanings and value! Even Aristotle's ideas about excellent virtues, like art, science, and intuitive thinking need to be tested to see their results. Thus both motives and objective results of such testing help elevate any subjective ethical motive and action to the level of scientific knowledge. And only continued testing can keep them so elevated.
Again, there’s a long history of such liberal ideas. Ancient sophists and Skeptics often said much the same kinds of things about ethical excellence. The educational tragedy, however, is almost no one has been taught such a history. Education from ancient times to today has been basically conservative or moderate. However, with the growth of modern biological evolution such practical experimental learning habits can been seen as going all the way back to the beginning of life itself, with trial-and-error actions! Even some social animals act experimentally to help their kin, like wolves and dolphins, and naturally they go deep into 3 million year old human history as well. Within such a history many useful ethical motives and actions have been helping produce more satisfying results for others. Many ethical ideas go back to ancient Egypt, some 3,000 years before Jesus, and to the Indian Vedas 1,500 years later, not to mention ancient Greek liberals like Democritus and Protagoras. In them all there's a continuing emphasis on certain actions, but in a constantly changing world how can any ethical idea be anything but experimental? What’s ethically new on a human level, however, is the ability for making any routine idea more consciously controlled, and thus more intelligent! Talking about different actions and their results has greatly increased the range of our ethical actions; even burial arts increased life’s satisfactions and decreased life’s fears. So if, say, our courageous or truth-telling ethical habits are weak, if we’re afraid of many things and don’t have good speaking habits yet, then it’s up to us to make an intelligent plan to produce more enjoyable and satisfying results here and now? We can imagine the kind of self we’d like to be, and then practice to make that image a reality. In any case, in that process both motive-feelings and actions help create useful values and goods. In such ways, Dewey’s liberal model of psychological excellence as experimental testing blends rather naturally into ethical excellence as well.
Is There One Highest Ethical Good?
Obviously, Dewey’s liberal model of ethical excellence openly criticizes the assumption of there being one highest good for everyone at all times. In the last section we saw how Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine pictured one highest ethical good. Whether defined as spiritual or natural, we could at least feel some of its goodness, if not know it completely. What person can ever know god completely? Even Aristotle’s highest good of contemplative happiness could only be felt for short periods of time. Still, he said it existed, and thus opened himself up to some rather interesting ethical questions. For example, if only one action can produce the highest happiness, then why hasn’t everyone discovered it? Why doesn’t everyone feel happiness practicing thinking about nature’s eternal objects at least sometime during each day? Why do many, if not most, people find their highest happiness in joyful and respectful sex? That kind of sex seems to be the supreme happiness for many here and now.
Other obvious ethical questions can be asked. Because there’s really no universal agreement about such a highest good, then why not just accept ethical diversity as ethical reality? Why not just agree with the sophist Protagoras and say people are the builders of all ethical models of excellence? Why not just admit what nature shows us: There are, in fact, an infinite number of highest ethical goods all depending on how satisfying their results are for different people? And why not just admit the results of such actions again determine how excellent such ideas are? For many, money is the highest good, and they’ll do whatever they can to keep making as much of it as possible. For others it’s peace and quiet? Thus, in such an ethical situation what’re most important are the motives and results of our actions. The results of excessively greedy actions, for example, help show us how excessive and unhealthful they are, not only to individuals but to others as well. The more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, the more difficult life becomes for many. Such a liberal ethical model gives us an objective way to judge how excellent some actions are.
Again, everyone creates their own highest ethical good with their actions. The fairly new science of anthropology seems to verify such a naturalistic model of goods and values. It finds hundreds of different highest ethical goods around the world! So, why argue there really is only one highest ethical good? Doesn’t it merely reflect the inner motives of those who build such an ethical model? Life teaches us we all learn our highest ethical goods with practice, and the more they’re practiced, the more they feel like the highest good.
No doubt, for centuries many people were taught to feel there really is only one highest good, like pleasure, happiness, happiness for the greatest number, contemplation, or knowing, loving, and serving god, but certainly not everyone agrees. After all, why should a perfect and all-powerful god ever need anything outside itself? Dewey simply accepted ethical reality and said people have been experimenting with their ideas of a highest good for thousands of years, and still there’s no consensus on what it is! If nothing else, the highest good seems to be acting so as to increase our satisfying feelings of life, but even that idea quickly breaks down to all the different individual habits of satisfaction we have today. For some destruction of one’s self and others is the highest good.
For more democratically liberal Dewey, however, there are as many ethical virtues, motives, and duties as there are people on earth! Thus, life produces as many different models of ethical and religious truth as there are people, and they’re always growing and evolving. What is ethically excellent for young college women may not be ethical excellent for older retired men. Thus, in place of one highest ethical good Dewey substituted an evolutionary model of ethical growth. Ethical abstractions like goodness and excellence BECOME useful goods and values only after they’re tested; before that they’re merely abstract ideas. The same may be said for evil values like disrespectful dominance or brutality; they become evil for a person only after they’re felt! Such results are what help create forward-looking laws against such actions. In any case, however, such a liberal ethical model fuses our conscious inner motive-feelings to the results of our conscious actions, and thus promotes more natural feelings of ethical excellence.
In his Reconstruction in Philosophy Dewey has an entire chapter sketching his new liberal model of ethical excellence. In the following quote we can feel how ethical ideas are used as tools to keep creating an infinite variety of satisfying goods in our daily lives.
Moral goods ... exist only when something has to be done. (A problem) ... proves that there are ... (certain) evils in (a) situation ... (and) it never is an exact duplicate ...; the good of … (any) situation has to be discovered ... Yet it is the part of wisdom to compare different cases ... Health, wealth, industry, temperance, amiability, courtesy, learning, esthetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience, enterprise, thoroughness and a multitude of other generalized (values and) ends are acknowledged as goods. But the value of this systematization is intellectual ... Classifications (merely) suggests possible traits to be on the lookout for in studying a particular (challenge); they suggest methods of action to be tried in removing the ... causes of ill. They are tools of insight; their value is in promoting an individualized response in the individual situation. (169, additions are my own)
And speaking of courtesy and respect, who hasn’t yet realized it’s best to politely ask for someone else’s help, or permission to interact with them!? Should anyone merely assume a sexual partner and their universe of feelings is always ready for such interactions, or should we first see how they’re feeling? For Dewey such a question shows how one tests their motive-feelings courtesy with courteous actions. In certain situations, sometimes self-love becomes the highest ethical good.
Other Personal Ethical Challenges
No doubt, expanding and improving our ethical universe may feel strange and awkward at first. Many people like to feel they’re right even before they act; they’re doing god’s will, so they must be right. Such motive-feelings are common, but they merely reflect how conservative education has been. Even today, most everyone probably feels they don’t create their ethical values, they merely practice those already existing. Why bother improving any weak, excessive, or unhealthful ethical habit? Thus, an important ethical challenge goes practically unnoticed, when in fact most everyone’s ethical habits could be improved. Therein lies an important educational challenge for us Deweyan liberals.
Feeling one needs to improve a certain ethical habit is often a damn tough ethical feeling to have! Often it shatters the self-centered feeling we already know what’s good and valuable. It’s so easy to tell ourselves such work isn’t really necessary, or I'll start my more excellent diet or exercise habit tomorrow; never do today what you can put off till tomorrow, said one famous actor. Such feelings are natural in those who feel their actions are already excellent. In reality, however, becoming, say, more courageous can begin growing even around the house, and even more enjoyable if it becomes a playful game. How much fun can we have making a trap for that pesky house mouse, and once caught then take it outside? After all, it’s just a mouse, not the Lock Ness Monster! And why not try playfully enjoying only one piece of pizza and then leaving the table, rather than shoveling 9 pieces into your face as fast as possible? With such questions we return to the ethically excellent art of intelligent learning we’ve seen in Part 1.
Life is full of learning challenges, including the challenge to make learning as enjoyable and entertaining as possible! In fact, such a habit-art transforms all learning into a childlike playfulness, ethical values included! It helps focus our all-important attention onto our inner motive-feelings, our actions here and now, and the results of those actions. Such ethical playfulness makes it easier to smilingly ask do I really need that 10th cup of coffee or that second pack of cigarettes or that house mouse or that 15th beer or even more heroin just because it’s there? From Dewey’s behavioral model of ethics, such feelings represent bodily tensions that have been relaxed before with coffee, cigarettes, beer or heroin. Learning how to relax one’s tensions thus becomes another useful and liberating ethical tool. It helps us become the master of our motive-desires rather than remain a slave to them.
Therein lies one of the most challenging parts of Dewey’s liberal ethical model. Often learning such useful ethical habits reduces itself to simply learning how to enjoy more healthful and constructive actions, one step at a time and one day at a time! Such ethical excellence includes physically celebrating such actions and rewarding them too! They help build stronger inner motive-feelings for them. Such actions even make ethical improvements easier and more enjoyable. They make it easier to enjoy ‘killing and burying’ all those enslaving and unsatisfying routine ethical habits one step at a time, and one day at a time! What could be more playfully enjoyable and ethically liberating at the same time, except perhaps telling a petty and greedy supervisor where to go?
Such ethical challenges are present on a daily basis. They challenge us to see which of our ethical habits are weak, excessive, and unhealthful, and then make a game of becoming more courageous, wise, respectful, and honest. Such common situations like, say, staying within a shopping budget rather than going deeper into debt, or obeying a just law rather than breaking it, offers daily challenges for becoming more relaxed and psychically centered, and then enjoying the results of more intelligent actions. For example, playfully laughing at the impulse to buy that genuine artificial tiger-skin rug is one way such excellence becomes ethical will power. And at the same time such playfulness helps make everyday life a more interesting and satisfying place to be. For us Deweyan liberals, it’s the best way anyone actually builds their own little private ethical 'survival kit', so to speak. Not only can such ethical actions make our inner motive-feelings more courageous or honest, but also help make our shared social lives more courageous, respectful, and honest.
Successfully answering such challenges teaches us neither modern scientific nor liberal ethical ideas reflect and correspond to already existing static and unchanging objects. They teach us we ourselves can build the person we want to become. In that process even ethical ideas and motives are merely useful behavioral tools to help us make life here and now more rewarding and satisfying. For example, when a mean and domineering person violently abuses a partner for not obeying them, it's yet another chance to courageously build virtues like self-defense and justice, perhaps aided by educational tools like a full-sized crowbar -- Wham! Thus, ordinary daily life and its situations often challenge us to keep building our own set of ethically excellent habit-arts, especially creativity, justice, and enjoyment. After all, we're all just people faced with the challenge to keep making life more enjoyable and satisfying, aren’t we? Have you begun feeling your own ethical challenges yet? That kind of ethical first step is usually the toughest one to make when building a more excellent habit-art. If nothing’s bothering people physically, they normally feel everything’s okay.
Dewey’s Fluid Model of Excellent Motives
So much for organic and growing ethical goods and values;, but what about excellent motive-feelings? After all, such feelings are also an important part of liberal ethical excellence. Why stay ethical divided by, say, wanting to cheat someone, but not being able to do so? Isn’t it ethically healthier not to feel such a motive in the first place? Should we feel a motive of wanting to reduce those who don’t agree with us to second class citizens, or even kill them? Such questions about motives bring us to another important ethical question: how do we know when our motives are excellent; what inner motive-feelings can best help encourage ethically liberal habit-arts, and how can we grow such motives?
Such questions are fairly easy to answer for us Deweyan liberals. We build excellent motive-feelings with excellent actions. If our actions are helpful and respectful, then our motive-feelings become helpful and respectful. Along with creating ethically excellent habits comes the growth of excellent motive-feelings. It’s yet another reason why early childhood education is so very important for building all liberal kinds of values and habits. After all, conservatives have known such behavioral facts for centuries, and so built their schools to teach such habits and motives. If, for example, our actions don't help re-educate an abusive spouse, then our motive-feelings for justice and education remain mere feelings. However, when the result of our action is learning a more respectful habit, then both inner motives and outer actions become stronger for similar situations! And, because we don't know what situations will happen tomorrow, it also makes building ethically excellent motives an experimental art, just like scientists and doctors build their habits and motives too. So, the more we practice intelligently respecting just laws, the stronger our motive-feeling become.
Another way such motives can begin forming is internally. For example, reading about such motives can help build a model of motive excellence, as can seeing other actions. The more we see examples of courageous actions, the easier it is to feel their meanings. However, what makes such feelings even stronger and deeper is actually practicing those actions.
No doubt, many conservatives and moderates may feel such a model of motive excellence is far less than best; for them some motives are eternally good and worthwhile, especially those directed towards eternal and unchanging objects. To want to learn more about them is the best motive of all; so said both Plato and Aristotle. Dewey, however, kept the liberal tradition alive and growing after being suppressed and confined for thousands of years. For him, the more we keep experimentally feeling the active results of our actions, the stronger they become and the more they help us stay focused in the present and working creatively to improve its challenges! The more that happens, the further away we move from conservative and moderate undemocratic kinds of ethical excellence. As we’ll see more fully in Book 4, ethical models like moderate Immanuel Kant’s radically separated the results of ethical practice from ethical motives, and thus help freeze ethical growth itself. Such a separation helped people feel some of their actions would always be right and ethical.
So, the question becomes what motive-feelings did Dewey recommend building with our actions? Once again we can see how down-to-earth and commonsensical his ethical model is. For example, he too celebrates experimentally feeling motives like kindness, respect, and sympathy for others, and not just routinely but intelligently! Acting with such motive-feelings helps make many ethical decisions easier and more satisfying. Often such feelings help produce better personal and social results, and they help make one’s psychic life less stressful too. After all, who can't feel kindly about helping a greedy and heartless drug dealer go to jail for 10 to 20, or a rogue stock broker feel the same results, with, perhaps, a day or two off for good behavior? At one time Dewey said it like this “The insistence … that we must become aware of the moral quality of our (inner) impulses and states of mind on the basis of the results they effect … is a fundamental truth of morals.” (Ethics, 252) Thus, Dewey’s liberal ethical model aims at building kinder and more sympathetic motive-feelings for everyone, and not just for those in our social class or religious group. Once again, with such commonsense democratic motives it’s easy to see how very simple a liberal ethical model can look. No doubt, in some situations such motive-feelings are more difficult to feel, but the more they’re practiced the easier it gets.
Obviously kindness and sympathy aren’t the only useful motive-feelings Dewey talked about. He also recommends motives of wholeheartedness, honest integrity, energy, forcefulness, and sincerity. (Ethics, 399, 403) With those motive-feelings Plato and Aristotle would probably agree, but again, where they differ are the objects they felt forceful about. Plato, for example, felt just as forceful about slavery and religious conformity as any modern conservative, but again the personal and social results of such forcefulness is what makes them excessive in any democratic setting. He forcefully felt all religious heretics be isolated and even killed if they didn’t conform. In short, he often lacked kind and sympathetic motive feelings for everyone, as Aristotle often did. Dewey, however, was much more of a liberal democrat, and so feeling kindness for everyone was much easier for him. Such feelings would help make everyone's personal and social live that much more peaceful and enjoyable.
Conflicting Motive-Feelings
No doubt, in life -- existentially -- many ethical situations can become more complex and difficult. Sometimes we feel so tense we feel we hate our self; many people have such self-esteem conflicting challenges; they want to do their job well, but end up feeling conflicted about their self-esteem. In short, motive-feelings can sometimes be conflicting, and thus create ethical dilemmas. You may want to stay home and study for a test tomorrow, but also want to go out, party hardy, and feel like other people really want and love you. You may want to both see a movie tonight and also pass a calculus test tomorrow; want both that 5th piece of pizza and low cholesterol reading; want to feel someone wants to give you some excitingly healthful tender loving sex, but also want some sleep too; want that $100,000 Porsche and stay out of bankruptcy court too. Such conflicting motives are often the stuff of real ethical dilemmas. We may have 2 or more conflicting motive-feelings.
No doubt, most such conflicts are resolved rather quickly, but some aren’t. Some unhealthful motive-feelings are more difficult to improve. Sometimes we may want to marry someone else we also feel is wrong for us. Sometimes the choice is between the motive of doing the right thing and endangering our life; should we reveal some wrong-doing and perhaps lose our job? Sometimes experimentally harmonizing our conflicting motive-feelings is damn difficult, but again, seeing possible future results is the most intelligent way to resolve such motive conflicts. Can we live with our self if we don’t become a whistleblower? If we can’t afford the payments, then forget about that Porsche. The results of our own actions often help resolve such motive conflicts. What choice will help build the ethical person we want to become? Is it better to overcome our fear of the dentist and get that tooth fixed, or live with the pain a little longer? Is it better to keep acting self-destructively and feeling we’re not worthy of being loved, or start building a more useful self-esteem motive? Is it better to keep feeling life is just too overwhelming or to start building a more useful motive-feeling of relaxed enjoyment? Those kinds of ethical conflicts are often some of the more common ones we face. They go to the core of our motive-values, and help us build a model of the person we want to be.
In any case, however, we see the importance of such a forward-looking ethical model of excellence. Perhaps most important of all, it holds up a model of ethical excellence to practice here and now, as well as a learning model for such ideas. Liberal ethical models help us know better our inner motive-feelings and resolve their conflicts. We can realizing the movie will still be playing tomorrow, the pizza will still be there tomorrow, your overnight sex guest will understand, and you can shop around for a cheaper genuine imitation tiger-skin rug.
In any case, however, the ethical goal is to keep building more independent and kinder working motives useful for building a kinder and more independent person. Should we keep feeling it’s okay to deserve a beating from a partner from time to time, or feel such a motive encourages warped and painful actions? Should we feel it’s healthful to keep wasting our precious personal energies with angry actions when more healthful and relaxed motive-feelings can produce much more intelligent results? No doubt, sometimes seeing such future results can be more difficult than other times, and equally difficult to grow more healthful habit-arts, but who ever said all ethical choices and actions are easy? Just like anything else, some conflicting ethical challenges are more difficult to overcome than others; welcome to life! As we saw earlier, making ethical choices strengthens our ethical character.
An important ethical point to remember is this: focusing on future results and imagining the person we want to become can make it easier to resolve our ethical conflicts. If I feel my ideal self as a kind, generous, sympathetic, courageous, respectful, and honest person, then such motive feelings can help guide the growth of that ideal self here and now. If, say, my motive feeling is not being a thief, unless it promotes justice, then stealing what isn’t mine becomes easier. If my motive-feeling is to be a relaxed person in control of my actions, then all the inner feelings of worthlessness and self-hate become that much easier to relax and let go of. Such ideal inner motive-feelings thus also become a useful behavioral tool for helping resolve ethical dilemmas of all kinds, and help us become more ethically excellent.
In any case, who knows the results of our choices unless our motive-feelings are actually experimented with? Just because motives and results are two separate words doesn’t mean they’re two separate and distinct ethical objects. All through life motive-feelings and actions both flow and interact continuously, making ethical excellence a series of fluid, on-going, organic experiments. And the deeper we feel that reality, the more powerful our motives become for helping resolve our ethical challenges and conflicts! So, once again, to illustrate completely and clearly all these ideas, the following landslidingly lame limerick is either capaciously clear, or unctuously useless; I’m still motivationally conflicted.
Burt worked as a lobbyist in Washington D. C.
Wining and dining politicians for a rather high fee.
But whatever the cause
He took no ethical pause;
The best motive was growing his money tree.
4. SOME ON-GOING ETHICAL SOCIAL CONFLICTS
For Dewey any choice for which genuine alternatives are possible is an ethical situation. Such a broad definition of ethics thus extends far beyond one’s own personal challenges and problems. It extends to the entire outer world as well, especially to political and economic choices. As the long history of slavery and racial hatred teach us, inhumane and unjust social inequality remains a serious ethical problem in many parts of the world! All such situations have genuine alternatives and choices.
Such reasoning also helped Dewey justify another ethically liberal excellence – equality and equal rights. The more people learn that habit-art, the easier it becomes for all people to keep democratically growing and building their own ethical universe. And such a liberal ethical virtue shows again how important our public schools are for the ethical health of our nation. In liberal schools students will learn what such ethical virtues feel like, rather than just reading about them, thus making it easier to reduce hateful and arrogant racial actions still plaguing many people even in the US.
The on-going worldwide struggle for equal civil and human rights is yet another sign such schools are far from working everywhere. In so many places around our world such liberal ethical habits and virtues are still just emerging within a still medieval model of ethics in which many actions are still judged as sinful and evil. In short, making our social world more ethically liberal is still very much a work in progress. For example, about 90 years after the US Civil War helped outlaw slavery, one young African woman named Rosa Parks still needed to make an ethical choice to demand her equal rights while riding on public buses! She refused to obey an unjust law and give her seat to a white person. And as a result of her ethical choice a civil rights movement was ignited, similar to the one Martin Luther ignited in Europe after he listed 95 reasons why he could no longer support the Catholic Church. The result of Rosa’s ethical choice helped spark a civil rights explosion in the US, much of which is still echoing 60 years later! After all, how can the democratic ethic of equality built into the US Constitution become a reality unless people challenge all the ways life is still unequal? How else can social peace and harmony become a reality unless people keep making such ethical choices not to obey unjust laws? For liberals like Dewey, such choices are as much a part of ethics as are the choices to keep improving our own personal habits. Both kinds of choices help build one’s character.
For Dewey the road to a more peaceful, tolerant, and productive outer social world is where ethical choices are still important. All such ethical choices celebrate both intelligent experimental testing and equality, helping make both ethical and political excellence experimental and democratic. No two people will have exactly the same set of ethical habit-arts, just as no 2 countries will have the same political habits, but building a more democratic world where everyone has the same rights and freedoms remains an important ethical goal. Only such ethical experimentation can reveal the social results of our ethical choices. Only such results help make all such choices helpful or harmful.
Such ethical experimentation is yet another sign of modern liberal excellence. For example, because Tom Edison was an inventor he built a different set of ethical habits from social worker Jane Addams, but the results of experimental testing was common to them both, and strengthened their beliefs in building a better world for everyone. What good is merely thinking of an ethical choice and not testing the idea? Hitler often bragged to people he was treating Jews kindly and merely relocating them to better jobs, but the more people took the time to actually see that idea’s results, the clearer it became his ethical actions were light-years away from producing kind or sympathetic results; many liberals today are still fighting such ethical hypocrisy around the world!
Here’s a second example of how personal ethical choices affect the outer social world. Early in the 1900s bankers loaned ship builders the money to build a ship called Titanic. But to speed up its maiden voyage the ethical choice was made not to seal the ship’s bulkheads, and thus make it truly unsinkable. Owners simply chose to get it into service so they could start paying off their bank loans and start making some money. When such ethical choices were tested, however, the results were disastrous; over 1500 people lost their lives in its maiden voyage as a result of such ethical choices! So, once again, personal ethical choices are often more socially important than personal choices, as corporate choices often tell us.
A third ethical example happened more recently. The ethical choices of a few financial managers to keep selling home mortgages to those who couldn’t afford them helped cause one of the worst financial disasters in US history in 2008-9. How so? Such ethical choices helped increase peoples’ debt, and thus create yet another form of slavery, namely economic slavery, causing millions to lose their jobs and homes! The ethical lesson in such events might be this: if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. We may think our ethical choice to get such a mortgage will produce useful social results for us, but only as the choice is tested experimentally do we really know how excellent it was. And thus, for seeing the real value of such ethical choices everyone is on the same experimental level. John Perkins’s book Confessions of an Economic Hitman shows how such ethical economic choices are still causing social kinds of slavery in many nations around the world.
Without the liberal ethical idea of basing one’s choices on motives like kindness, sympathy, and love, and then testing their social results, life for many remains much like the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) once described it before civilization started -- “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Why should the value of ethical choices be any different any other kind of testing? Such testing in fact also helps liberate us from some old conservative ethical ideas and models, namely that some ethical choices are always good.
Probably for almost all of the last few thousand years, especially for women, social customs of inequality like obedience, routine sameness, not questioning anything, and restricting their choices were pictured as both inner and outer social excellence. To violate them was often to court social disaster. For some native peoples the entire universe might collapse if such habits weren’t practiced, and in the Middle Ages violating such ethical rules threatened people with eternal hell fire! As a result of such conservative ethical models, much of modern life continues producing similar social results. Life in much of the world still makes such ethical choices almost instinctive, rather than intelligently experimental. Thus even in the early 2000s we still have the social absurdity of scientific technology changing life almost daily, while many still practice ancient conservative forms of unequal ethical excellence. Many ancient ethical habits and their social results thus live on. One such result is to keep the female contribution to life much less than what it could be. Even in the US, only recently have more women become economically and psychically capable of making different ethical choices, like becoming professionals, voting, and even running for office. Who knows? Such liberal ethical choices may even keep growing if we can keep from allowing millions may die from global warming! In such an increasing liberal world people may learn to make more liberal ethical choices and test their social results. For Dewey, only such choices and testing can help build a more equal and democratic world for everyone. Thus, more and more people are feeling an ethically liberal idea: This is our world now, and it's up to each of us to keep using our ethical choices to make its opportunities open to everyone on an equal basis.
Needless to say, for Dewey, merely obeying old conservative and moderate models of ethical excellence is the main ethical challenge today; such status quo choices help keep life much as it was throughout most of human history. Probably for millions of years human ethical life was divided between those who allowed such freedom, and those who wanted to control as many people as possible – between liberals and conservatives. Young folks are especially eager for such experimentation; they haven’t learned adult ethical habits yet. Dewey’s liberal ethical model simply aims at giving everyone a chance to feel what experimental ethics and freedom is like. If some action is no longer satisfying, then another ethical choice and experiment is called for. Such an ethical model aims at helping people feel their ethical freedom all through life; what kind of ethical choice may produce more satisfying results?
In our growing democratic world such experimental choices are essential if people are to keep growing and learning, and if so, then once again it shows how important our public schools are to such ethical growth. If youngsters aren’t allowed to make and test their own intelligent and helpful ethical choices about, say, that they want to study, then how can we expect them to keep learning and improving all through life? No doubt, in some places such ethical educational choices will be difficult to teach; even today many conservative religious and secular rulers react violently against such democratically experimental ethical models. Such people want to selfishly keep controlling as many people as possible, rather than helping liberate their creative energies and making some real contributions to life. However, 2 World Wars, several minor ones, economic strangulation, dangerous nuclear weapons, continuing outbursts of violence on small scales, even multiply killings within many of our public schools, keep reminding us many people are still anchored to their traditional ethical choices and habits of violence and destruction! To a degree, habits make conservatives of us all, but for us liberals such facts merely teach us we still have great ethical challenges in front of us, namely to keep educating young folks about how to experiment intelligently with their own ethical choices.
Such liberal ethical habits as free choice and equal opportunities are becoming more important in today’s world. Because technology is increasing the rate of change in our world, such experimental ethical habits have become more important than ever. For example, as the Industrial Revolution continued growing in the 1800s, science and profit-hungry people began increasing new social tensions and stresses with their economic ethical choices; choices about wages and working conditions had to be made; in many places even children worked 12 hour days for mere pennies, as is happening in China and India. Such new social situations helped create a need to experiment with new ethical choices, in order to improve what liberal economist John Galbraith called the 'quality of life'. New parks and recreation areas became possible ethical choices, to help relieve the new stressful tensions of industrial society, as well as labor unions to improve dangerous working conditions and starvation wages.
New economic stresses demanded new ethical choices. As workers continued building many more useful goods and services, like autos and electrical inventions, only a few people become very rich while many struggled on the brink of starvation. Starvation wages helped create the need for experimenting with organized labor unions to help make work and wages better. New experimental ways of expressing one’s social kindness and sympathy began growing as well, helping people see new choices they could make. Many also felt the need for sharing more equally the great economic wealth science and industry were helping create. Capitalist owners and workers became great at producing many new goods and wealth, but not very good at sharing them equally. Such new ethical social challenges were felt even in the early 1800s.
Some Liberal Ethical Choices of Robert Owens
Liberal Scottish businessman Robert Owens (1771-1858) faced a number of new and challenging ethical situations as Britain’s Industrial Revolution was just getting started in the 1700s. The main ethical choice was between treating his factory workers kindly or harshly? Should he use them to make as much money as he could, keeping them enslaved in ignorance and poverty, or should he pay them a decent wage and even help educate them so they could keep themselves growing intelligently as people? What working rights should people have? Should he hire women and young children merely because they were passive, obedient, and worked cheaply, or help build a school so they could become more intelligent and keep making life more civilized and worth living? How long should they work? What kind of a world did he want to create for himself and them with his ethical choices?
Eventually he chose to experiment with what’s become known as Socialist choices, based on kind and sympathetic motives and actions towards workers. Fellow Scotsman Andrew Carnegie made some similar kinds of choices after selling off his steel company in 1900 for some $300 million dollars. He then choose to give away almost all of it to help create a more peaceful and educational society; the building where I took my first philosophy class was called Carnegie Hall.
With such liberal motives and actions Owens helped create a modern meaning for the word ‘socialism’; in Britain they helped create the liberal Fabian Society which Dewey eventually accepted as the best political choice. Rather than acting like many American business leaders, with greedy and selfish motives and actions, Owens experimentally liberated himself from such greedy choices and helped build what many today call socialist business ethics, eventually helping create a new liberal political model besides conservative and libertarian. He realized many new social problems could be more quickly solved with government help. At first political conservatives reacted against all such choices and ideas, but as more people got the right to vote, conservatives often led the way by choosing to use government resources more humanely. They became convinced socialized tax monies could help many more lead a much better life. In the 1800s England faced many new social challenges created by the new industrial technology, like bad public health, air pollution, increased economic crime, child labor, women's inequality, and many others. During his long and productive life Owens also helped liberate workers from many of their traditional habits of obedience and narrow thinking by making it easier for the government to make their own working and living conditions better, and even helping help them when they were injured or retired. Almost single handedly his excellent liberal ethical motives of kindness and sympathy, and his ethical choices, helped build the modern virtues of political Socialism, which Dewey eventually embraced during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as did millions of other kind people too.
Eventually Owens' kind and helpful liberal motives and choices became a model for Dewey’s own social morals and politics. Workers' unions, for example, were at first greatly resisted in both England and America, even by Carnegie, but eventually they formed and began working to counterbalance growing industrial greed and power. It didn’t stop a small wealthy class of so-called Robber Barons from growing, and greatly affecting the imperialistic ethical choices politicians made to make that class wealthier all through the 1900s, but life for many millions became easier and less stressful. Both Owens and Dewey celebrated workers forming unions to improve different industries and life in general; I wonder if they ever thought some unions would become just as one-dimensional and power-hungry as some corporations normally were.
As a result of such liberally humane ethical choices, new and different social habits began growing with the idea of using the government to help improve many social conditions. Such a liberal ethical model was much different from the old ancient ethical models of Plato and Augustine; they focused on making life better after death, as if they really knew there was one. In any case, such intelligent liberal ethical experimentation focused on improving life here and now. Such choices and actions used science and technology to keep giving people different ethical choices from conservative status quo ethical models. Obviously, all during the 1900s and into the 2000s, many conservative business leaders choose to limit the results of more liberal choices, and thus keep increasing their own wealth, but once such new ethical models were in place, and people saw the better results they produced, then it became more difficult to stamp them out completely. After all, what good is working to make wealthy folks even wealthier when life for millions remains just as stressful and painful as ever?
Building a Modern Liberal Individual
Such new economic and social conditions call for new intelligent ethical choices and questions. For example, how can I contribute best to making life more enjoyable for myself and others? Should I join a labor union? Should workers allow theirs to become just as greedy and focused only on increasing worker salaries, or should they also work for the public good? Should they also demand more decision-making power on corporate boards of directors, where all corporate decisions are made? Will that help workers avoid such stressful actions as bankruptcy, with the result of job losses, lower wages for workers, and less union power? Today in fact union membership has been steadily shrinking, as well as wages, thus calling again for more intelligent ethical choices and experiments. For example, will sit-down strikes convince owners to increase wages, or not? Some workers are experimenting with that idea these days.
Another fundamental social ethical choice has been growing too. Should government be used to tax wealthy folks more, and use the money to help those less well off, or should government be kept from working like that? It’s the old ethical choice between liberals, conservatives, and moderate libertarians. Can the government produce better social results for more people, or is government really the problem? Such ethical choices are faced by voters to this day! Conservatives and libertarians want as much freedom to keep taking as much of the public’s money as they can, while liberals say there are some things which should never provide profits for anyone, like healthcare, war, and environmental health and well-being. The more voters allow a small wealthy conservative class to become even more politically powerful, the more difficult it becomes to make our government keep working to increase the public good, even though millions may want their representatives to produce such results. The tension between such choices is more deeply felt at elections times, as different ads keep telling people how to vote. Voters too may ask should they vote at all, what difference would it make if they didn’t, and how can merely one vote change anything, and so on? It’s so stressful most people simply refuse to make such ethical choices. Many feel the wealthy control most everything and so what can they do to change it. As we’ve seen, such fatalistic and skeptical feelings and motives make it more difficult to actually make life better for everyone, and the more rigid those feelings become, the more difficult solving new challenges with different experimental choices becomes.
As we’ve seen, in the ancient world the ethical situation was much worse. For many, fatalistic motive-feelings were much stronger and widespread than they are today. With almost no science and technology most everyone relied on their spirit-habits to at least make them feel life would get better. What’s more, people didn’t get much help from conservatives like Plato or moderates like Aristotle; they both felt those in the lower social classes were meant to support the upper classes; nature had decreed it! Life for them was arranged in a kind of natural hierarchy of meaning and value, from slaves to rulers. As a result, people were much more vulnerable to huge marching armies than they are today. Nuclear weapons have all but eliminated the possibility for another world war, at least one lasting more than a few minutes. But only slowly have such fatalistic motive-feelings of natural inferiority and superiority grown more democratic. The following passage from Dewey and Tufts' 1908 Ethics describes some ethical results of that social situation. Much of the book and its 1932 2nd edition is still well worth reading for its pictures of modern social ethical challenges to each of us.
“… The Age of the Sophists in Greece (400s BCE), of the Renaissance of Italy (1400s-1500s CE), of the Enlightenment and Romantic movements in Western Europe (1700s-1800s), and of the Industrial Revolution in recent times (1800s) illustrate different phases of (ethical) individualism. … an individual may ‘go to pieces’ in … reaction against social authority and custom. … (However, those) who accept the new conditions and assume responsibility with their freedom, who direct their (ethical) choices by reason instead of passion, who aim at justice and kindness as well as at happiness, become moral persons and gain thereby new worth and dignity. … a (modern) movement of (liberal) individualism … demands … a reconstructed individual -- a person who is individual in choice, in feeling, in responsibility, and at the same time social in what he regards as good, in his sympathies, and in his purposes. Otherwise individualism means progress towards the immoral.
… The genuinely moral person … forms his plans, regulates his desires, and hence performs his acts with reference to the effect they have upon the social groups of which he is a part. … he will find his happiness or satisfaction in the promotion of these activities … (Ethics, 75-76, 298, additions are my own)
Once again we see Dewey’s liberal model of ethical excellence is both simple to understand, and yet challenging to practice. It’s based on a few simple motives like kindness and sympathy, and a few active ethical virtues, like helpfulness and respect. In fact, many people today simply call such ideas common ethical sense; they’re common to many religions too. On a personal level of making intelligent ethical choices it sometimes means turning off the sources of entertaining trivia now available all day every day, and focusing more on getting the information necessary for making important ethical choices, like who to vote for on local, state, and national levels. Sometimes it also helps increase one’s creative thinking. In short, all people have their ethical challenges, both trivial and important, and Dewey’s ‘reconstructed’ individual becomes better at knowing which is which, so more time and attention can be devoted to the more important choices in life, especially important economic, personal, and political choices. The more those kinds of actions are practiced, the more ‘reconstructed’ one’s ethical world becomes. For example, knowing some of the possible future dangerous results of global warming makes it much easier to start making those personal and social choices for delaying those results. How much is air pollution and water conservative still a serious social problem for millions of people, and yet many don’t take the time to make intelligent choices about them? The more such ethical excellence is ignored, the easier it is for those with social and economic power to better adjust to any major changes life may throw their way as temperatures keep rising. Sometime soon even life and death may depend on the ethical choices we make here and now.
In short, continuing to expand our social consciousness and their possible ethical choices is largely what Dewey meant by the words ‘reconstructed individual.’ The rest of it meant turning such intelligent choices into intelligent actions. With all the new communication technology there’s really no excuse for not becoming more aware of what’s going on out there. After all, how can we keep making better ice cream eating choices unless we keep learning about new ones like Frog’s Feet Fudge, Alligator a la Mode, or Rattlesnake Raison? You see how much there is to know? Since when isn’t humor, even humdrum humor, part of a reconstructed person?
Intelligent ‘reconstructed’ people also know how to help others out there; such liberal ethical choices and actions not only help improve our shared world, but our own inner motives and character as well! As Aristotle and Dewey said, those inner motive-feelings can be felt as their own reward; they can feel great in themselves; Confucius too said those who expect no rewards are the highest types of people. Just the act of creating a more healthful ice cream can be its own ethical reward.
In any case, for us Deweyan liberals, ethical excellence is always intelligent, experimental, never finished, always growing, and eternally evolving as life keeps creating new situations. Kind actions may be useful in most situations, but not always. For many in Hollywood too, helping others is still the highest good, as it is for liberal people everywhere; sometimes it’s even achieved regardless of who gets killed in the process! For us liberal Deweyans, however, the old Platonic and Aristotelian eternally closed and finished ethical models have thus become only 2 different models of ethical excellence, not the only 2. In Books 2, 3, and 4 we’ll see in more detail how such liberal ideas like experiment learning and ethics slowly evolved over time, due in large part because education systems were monopolized and controlled by conservatives and moderates. In the 1200s Aristotle became Catholicism’s philosophic foundation! As a result, Dewey noted how rapidly scientific excellence has evolved compared to both liberal ethical and democratic habits of excellence; those last 2 kinds of excellence depend on widespread educational habits. Even today in many places they still are not taught as they might be.
How Many Excellent Virtues Do You Have?
On a more abstract level, ethical virtue or excellence is another important idea. There’s a great difference between ancient conservative and Dewey’s liberal definition; they help create different ethical models of virtues itself. As you might have expected, Dewey's model of virtues are much larger, more fluid, evolving, and democratic than conservative models. For him ethical virtues, or habits, are infinite in number! A virtue is ANY constructive, socially useful habit-art! A virtue is ANY freely chosen action that's socially useful and helpful to people here and now! With such a model people can thus feel virtuous on a daily basis. Even when a homeless person collects bottles and cans to recycle them, they practice a kind of ethical virtue; they help solve the social problem of having too much waste material and not recycling as much as possible! In fact, the more you look down on such virtuous actions, as both Plato and Aristotle did, the more you feel nature has inbuilt levels of ethical worth and value. For them, many people were, by nature, slaves -- mere social tools -- and so just weren’t capable of feeling what they said was the highest kind of ethical excellence. Simply because many people today are still undereducated, they don’t feel an infinite number of virtues really exist. In fact, however, every intelligent solution to a problem helps create another virtue.
Dewey’s ethical work helped such liberal ethical ideas of virtue become much more common, even for ice cream makers. Imagine fat-free, sugar-free, mint-flavored champagne ice cream! I'll drink to that excellence! How about hot & spicy tangerine? Carumba! How about chicken gizzard-flavored mocha almond? Or how about even pig’s feet spumoni? Has my ice cream creating virtue become excellent yet, or what? Now really, is building those kinds of virtuous excellence any different from a philosopher building a virtuous study habit?
However, for Dewey what makes some virtues more valuable than others are the results they produce. In how many different situations are the same virtues useful? Dewey mentions three virtues in particular, and 1 of them wasn’t very important in ancient Greece. They are INTELLIGENCE, SYMPATHY, and DUTY. Certainly wisdom/intelligence and duty were important; in fact many Greeks thought wisdom was the highest virtue; it could improve any habit. For Plato wisdom was pictured as a harmonizing force within the psyche, moderating both conflicting emotions and desires like sex, growth, nutrition, and exercise; he visualized it as an intelligent chariot driver controlling 2 spirited and irrational horses. What’s more, for many like him wisdom’s power came from a spirit-realm. Dewey, however, simply defined intelligence experimentally. Every animal and plant has some wisdom of its own; how else could they keep living if they didn't practice some kind of experimental wisdom to keep satisfying their needs in changing situations? What makes some ethical choices and actions wiser than others is the kind and helpful results they help produce.
Whenever any animal or plant solves a problem of satisfying its needs and keeps living, then it’s the same basic kind of experimental wisdom people practice today; in other words, for Dewey intelligent and wise growth is the 'end' or purpose of life. Even single-celled animals and plants, like amoeba, have some intelligence! Granted it’s not much, but then again some people don't always have much either. Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, both wanted to feel only mankind had the highest virtue of intelligence, and so they pictured nature like an evergreen tree; virtuous people were pictured about halfway up the tree, like Christians later pictured mankind as the highest animal and the lowest spirit-being.
During the last 2 centuries such a biological model has become unacceptable. Biologists and philosophers have learned nature and our own ancestors have helped build a vastly different model of intelligence. Research has shown how even simple bacteria intelligently satisfy their food needs with trial-and-error experimentation, and almost certainly the virtue of experimental intelligence was practiced even by our early African ancestors over 2 million years ago! When our H. habilis ancestors built and used their stone cutting tools to make more food available, they practiced the virtue of constructive intelligence. In what way? Well, even their simple stone tools were artfully and intelligently built, and no doubt sometimes used in an ethically excellent way; when food was shared socially, others’ food needs and wants were satisfied as well! Thus virtues of generosity and kindness were also built on a daily basis! Had Aristotle taken the time to experimentally test even one octopus he would have seen they're highly intelligent experimental animals. His own experimental learning habit wasn’t a strong virtue.
Simply because we humans have built a virtue of talking, it felt right to say we're the only animals with such an intelligent virtue. Ideas help us see many more ways and options of acting, rather than just routinely, like many other animals. In any case, however, both animals and plants act intelligently. Even apes can reason, like when they put 2 sticks together to reach some food beyond the length of one stick. So, for Dewey everything alive has some intelligence for satisfying its needs. What often separates our intelligent virtues from all other animals is the larger range of our intelligent actions; talking gives us the ability to expand our choices no end. Thus, we have the possibility of growing an infinite numbers of virtues. Not only do our speaking and writing virtues help solve abstract ethical and mathematical problems, but practical problems too, like how much sugar people can have before their pancreas, prostate, and acne explodes? More virtuous than that it's tough to be.
Intelligent ethical thinking has thus become pictured as being much more widespread than ancient and medieval models of it. We humans too have become much more a part of nature. As we’ve begun seeing, even our speaking and writing virtues have evolved naturally, rather than being already in us at birth. Thus, a reasoning virtue can now help improve ANY habit-art when ideas are tested experimentally. If, for example, someone created an idea for, say Peppermint Hog Jowls ice cream, worked wholeheartedly, honestly, and energetically at testing it, and then kindly helped others become healthier, to Dewey that was another example of virtuous intelligence, or ethical excellence.
Here’s one way Dewey described excellent intelligence:
"This factor of forethought and of preference, after comparison for … one of the ends considered, is the factor of intelligence involved in every voluntary act. To be (always) intelligent in action however is a far-reaching affair. To (always) know what one is really about is a large and difficult (ethical) order to fill; so large and difficult that it is the heart of morality." (Ethics, 306)
As we’ll see later in the section about tribal games of freedom, knowing what one is really about in an always changing world has become a very challenging virtue to grow.
In ancient times, talkative Greek philosophers like Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle began feeling the depth of 'what one is really about.' Anyone who reads Plato's and Aristotle's work can easily feel their sense of how complex life can be. Aristotle described how difficult ethical virtue or excellence can often be. "Anyone can be angry; that is quite easy. Anyone can give money away or spend it. But to do these things to the right person, with the right amount, at the right time, with the right (motive) aim and in the right manner -- that is not what anyone can easily do..."(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk.2, Ch.9). Plato too often felt how difficult it is to really know even spirit-objects. As we’ve seen already, in the Parmenides he mentioned a few very serious problems about spirit-objects he could not answer! Who knows how much those unsolved problems helped Aristotle’s intelligent virtue focus instead on putting unchanging objects into the natural world, as Socrates seemed to do?
Today too, many ethical situations can be very complex and involve many different options and choices, as any parent knows who has raised children. However, if one begins facing any ethical challenge by first asking what might be the kindest, most respectful, and most sympathetic choice to make, then it might make the decision making process easier and more intelligence. If so, then it also seems some excellent ethical advice might be not to worry too much if at first our actions don't produce excellent ethical results; what's important is to keep growing one’s virtuous intelligence experimentally; how else can a virtue of wisdom keep growing?
In any ethical situation, for Dewey intelligent experimentation is the best way everyone learns any kind of virtue, or excellence. Just reading about it creates a rather shallow feeling for such a virtue. Imagine Picasso or Leonardo never choosing to experiment with different artistic ideas; Pablo's paintings might all be blue and Leonardo would've painted only angels. Isn’t it the same way with virtuous wisdom? Isn’t it capable of growing all through life, and thus making every day another learning adventure about life’s infinite number of virtues, and which ones we want to learn more about? If it weren't that way, then life would soon become routine boredom. What's important, then, is to keep learning more about the virtues we choose to learn about! For example, don’t eat too much of that peppermint hog jowl ice cream. Despite life's complexity and sometimes chaotic events, we can stay focused on learning more about the virtues we feel are best. Such ethical choices and actions are, in fact, the daily building blocks of our own virtuous wisdom, and they’re an important part of our ethical ‘survival kit’.
How can we begin growing the virtue of intelligence? Choosing to ask intelligent questions is one way. How much of my income should I use to help others help themselves; what’s the best way to go about it; how much should I enjoy such giving; what are my weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, and do I love myself enough to start enjoying better habits? Suppose one day I admit I get too tense and stressed at work; I quickly get tired, irritable, and sometimes angry. An intelligent question becomes how can I improve such weak virtues. Well, first I can imagine some stress-relieving ideas, like pushing away from my desk and taking a few minutes to relax, stretch out, and let go of such tensions; I might even choose to use public transportation rather than staying tense in traffic, or even begin building a more healthful walking virtue. Or I might have a physical reason for my fatigue, so a physical exam might help. In any case, however, such intelligent ethical questions do something important inside us: they help us create our highest ethical goods and evils! In that example excessive tension becomes the highest evil, and relaxing the highest good! Until then they’re just words and ideas. Only when I choose a virtue to intelligently improve a situation do I then create a highest ethical good for myself!
In such a liberal ethical model, another important result follows. With such choices and actions I become another artist in building ethical goodness and virtue! Within Dewey’s liberal ethical model anyone can feel different highest goods and greatest evils every day! For many people eating healthy foods has become the highest good every day, and junk foods the greatest evil! In any case, however, if building such ethical virtues is an art, and what else can it be in an always changing world, then aren’t we all artists of virtuous intelligence? For Dewey, ideas like Nirvana, the Kingdom of Heaven, ethical virtues and excellence -- call it whatever you want – all reflect the reality of ethical art! Most everyone is capable of artfully building such virtues WITHIN THEMSELVES! And the more they help liberate us from life’s unsatisfying routines, and make life more satisfying, rewarding, and meaningful, the more we make them our highest goods! Now, who wants to create another ‘highest’ form of ice cream -- Frog’s Feet Fudge? How much have you made humor an ethical virtue?
Motives Helping Make Intelligence an Excellent Virtue
Dewey also suggested artfully building 2 other useful ethical motive-feelings: sympathy and kindness. Together with a profit-motive conservatives have elevated to their highest good, they help define the basic differences between conservative and liberal economic and political actions too. Many conservative and moderate aristocratic Greeks like Plato and Aristotle ignored feeling kindness and sympathy for anyone in different social classes; it helped justify their feelings of natural slavery. Even Socrates could talk in Athens’s marketplace about the eternal meaning of justice while feeling no sympathy or kindness for slaves being sold nearby. It was mainly liberal Greeks, Atomists, Stoics, and Christians who talked of acting with motives of kindness and sympathy, even when practicing such virtues was often ignored. Many conservative Christians like Augustine made it their highest religious good by feeling only its ideas were Absolute Truth, and as a result acting kindly and sympathetically to those with different religious ideas became practically impossible. In practice, then, Christians often pictured ethical excellence as trying to convince others only Christian virtues were the highest ethical good, sometimes with the help of violence and killing! When that happened, they in fact made religious diversity the highest evil.
Eventually, however, as the Protestant Reformation blossomed in the 1500s, and democratic political habits started growing again in the late 1600s, more and more people began realizing all such religious models of virtue and excellence are merely habits themselves! The more those ethical feelings grew, the easier it became to treat others more kindly and sympathetically, and if not, then certainly with respect. About such liberal motives Dewey says this:
...What is required (for moral excellence) is a blending, a fusing of the sympathetic tendencies with all the other impulsive and habitual traits of the self. When interest in power (for example) is permeated with an affectionate impulse(-motive), it’s protected from being a tendency to ... tyrannize. ... This same fusion protects sympathy from (mere) sentimentality and narrowness.
... the only effective thought is ... the (kind and ) generous thought. Sympathy ... leads us to take into account such results as affect the welfare of others; ... To (sympathetically) put our self in the place of another ... is the surest way to attain universality and objectivity of moral knowledge. Sympathy, in short, is the general principle ... because it furnishes the most reliable ... intellectual standpoint. It supplies the (inner motive) tool, par excellence, for analyzing and resolving complex (ethical situations).
... The habits of character ... sustain(ing) and spread(ing) the rational or (social) common good are virtues; the traits ... which have the opposite effect are the vices." (Ethics, 299, 334-35, 399)
Such a liberally fluid, organic, and ever-growing blending of sympathetic motives into all our ethical situations better helps produce the results of peace, equality, and the common good. Such motive feelings help produce healthful personal and social results, and thus become ethically valuable and good. Again, however, liberal morality, like science, is an experimental human art; with kind and sympathetic actions we build such motive-energies into ourselves. The more useful results they are, the more virtuous our ethical motives and actions become!
No doubt, many people today still picture ethical motives and virtues as already existing eternal Truths, either inbuilt into nature or coming from a spirit-realm. Obedience to god has been used for thousands of years to maintain social control. To those kinds of conservatives and moderates Dewey's liberal ethical models may feel too loose, too free-flowing and variable, and thus too radical. However, these days it’s become more acceptable to say all such models of ethical virtues merely reflect different ethical ideas and habits, not eternal Truth. For such conservative ideas there’s simply no objective evidence. In short, just as experimental science aims at discovering nature’s highest goods and evils, so too Dewey’s liberal model of ethical excellence does for each of us.
For thousands of years many conservative philosophers and social leaders used ideas like moral law and highest good to describe their models of ethical excellence, as if only they already existed and were already known. As a result, in many parts of our world today such conservative ethical actions continue on, as if an undemocratic moral Ice Age has never ended. For example, until fairly recently even in democratic America many people treated Africans and other minorities quite unsympathetically, as many still do for gay and lesbian people. Sometimes they literally take their lives in their hands outside their own communities. Such conservative ethical actions are yet more signs we’re still just emerging from practicing ancient and medieval models of ethical excellence based on social control rather than democratic kindness and sympathy.
However, just because some conservative ethical habits remain strong doesn't make them ethically excellent for everyone! Just because everyone at one time believed the earth was the center of the universe didn't make it so; it was just a commonly held highest religious belief. Besides, all of Western civilization’s 3 main religious traditions have been evolving themselves, and often painting different pictures of ethical excellence. What Jew in Jesus' day would ever imagine a liberal Jewish Reform ethical movement could ever evolve from their beliefs? So again, what’s ethical important for us Deweyan liberals is making our public educational systems teach such liberal ethical ideas on a wider scale than they do today. In fact, the same kinds of evolution happen with any subject, even economics. How many of Karl Marx’s or Adam Smith’s ideas are now useless? Obviously, those who elevate conservative ideas to the highest good still exist; feeling their ethical models somehow reflect nature’s Absolute Truth produces a secure feeling. But for many liberals today, ethical excellence has become much more naturalistic, individualistic, democratic, kind, and sympathetic. How many times have conservatives called us Deweyans bleeding heart liberals, as if their profit-motive and corporate monopolies are the cure for every social ill and weakness that exists? Now really, how much do you agree when you don’t have enough money for your favorite ice cream just as your favorite TV show starts?
So much for the virtues of intelligence and sympathy; what about Dewey's ideas of moral duties? How might they be seen and what are they? Once again, his answer is almost too obvious, showing yet again how simple and practical even advanced philosophic ethical thinking can be. Once we realize how useful sympathetic and kind motives are for helping resolve many of our ethical choices, then dah, simply acting kindly and sympathetically becomes our moral duty! Now that’s what I call philosophic simplicity. For us Deweyan liberals, our moral duty is simply to keep experimentally fusing kind and sympathetic inner motive-energies into all our actions! Such a fusing helps produce health-promoting results, like peace, democracy, respect, lawfulness, and generosity! Even for those who are dangerous to others we can still feel kind and sympathetic to them, and thus work for better kinds of early education to reduce such actions. After all, no one is born with dangerous and disrespectful habits. Everyone learns such habits, even those who want more Frog’s Feet Fudge ice cream.
With such an idea of duty, learning to feel and practice kind and sympathetic actions in our daily lives becomes a liberal duty. They help produce positive and constructive personal and social results. What’s more, learning them experimentally puts such ethical duties on the same level as doctors who build a duty to prescribe helpful medicines to patients. Both won’t know how useful their ethical duties really are until after they’re tested. Again, from Dewey’s Ethics:
"Complete morality is reached only when the individual recognizes the right and chooses the good freely, devotes himself heartily to its fulfillment, and seeks a progressive social development in which every member of society shall share. ... to promote and safeguard progress … (we) ... encourage ... the worth and happiness of the person and of every person." (335-336, 160-161, 465, 299, emphasis my own)
Such useful ethical actions become the duty of all liberals everywhere.
A Few Final Ethical Comments: Democracy
With the last quote, written at the early 1900s, Dewey justified one way of attacking the social challenge of crippling and unjust racial hatred, as well as unequal political and human rights. His solution was to help create more liberal democratic educational and political institutions so people could more easily learn such democratic virtues and duties. Many states passed laws allowing voters to directly choose laws their representatives either would not or could not pass. It was a logical conclusion of his democratic ethical ideas. When everyone artfully builds their own moral universe, then democracy becomes the best political system for growing such ethical diversity.
For many thousands of years now, unjust and undemocratic conservative political institutions have been dividing people into separate and different social classes, as well as denying basic human rights and freedoms to all law-abiding people. Such an undemocratic political status quo has been in power almost everywhere for thousands of years, largely because people were taught more liberal democratic habits. Some of the social results were continuing disease, poverty, ignorance, pain, and suffering. Physical slavery was another such result. Western civilization’s liberal tradition, dating back to Greeks like Solon, Protagoras, Democritus, and Pericles began feeling more sympathetic towards all people, but again, lack of liberal education and its ethical values soon ended such liberal political experiments. Conservatives to this day still work to restrict voting rights as much as possible.
Dewey’s educational and political work simply aimed at counterbalancing all such conservative models of ethical and political authoritarianism. Along with many other practical-minded liberals his duty and highest good became working to improve America's democratic institutions, based on equal rights for all! At the height of America's Progressive Era -- the early 1900s, he helped build counterbalancing institutions like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Essentially their mission was to keep improving undemocratic, hateful, and intolerant ethical actions wherever they were found. For example, they helped test unequal and racist 'Jim Crow' laws in court, unequal voting and workers' rights laws, and 1st Amendment freedoms of speech too. Decades after the US Civil War such laws allowed millions to keep denying equal rights to others, and so their power needed to be balanced to make the growth of more democratic ethical values of equality easier. Worker unions too helped counterbalance the socially harmful and unhealthful results of conservative corporate power; such results were, and still are, causing much personal and social stress in many peoples' lives. Rather than feeling kindness and sympathy towards their workers, their highest ethical value became making as much money as possible, and their own bankruptcy their highest evil. Merely because such a model of economic virtue continued producing stressful social results, another more humane democratic model was needed, one in which profits were strictly controlled or eliminated for some areas, like healthcare, public institutions like libraries, parks, and schools, and utilities like water and power. Why should anyone make money from someone else’s suffering, or lack of education? Thus, the liberal ethical virtue of democratic intelligence began challenging the unequal conservative and greedy status quo.
Today, almost no one realizes such liberally humane counterbalancing ethical models began growing in ancient Greece. However, it wasn’t allowed to last very long. In fact, most of our modern economic corporate structures, with decision-making power being in the hands of just a few board members rather than democratically in the hands of the many. That conservative model was quite similar to the ancient and medieval feudal aristocratic social model. In that world a few powerful families and religious officials usually controlled most of a country’s land-wealth, and also most of the political decisions the government made. Largely because there weren’t many counterbalancing democratic institutions it was easy to keep organizing religious war after war, sometimes lasting many decades like the Hundred Years War. Also, many Crusades over 3 centuries are another example of how such undemocratic institutions were used to control most everyone’s ethical decisions and choices. Such concentrated aristocratic power was so strong even a Children’s Crusade was organized, sending thousands to their death. According to economist John Galbraith, in many ways modern corporate money model has simply replaced the old concentrated feudal and religious land-power, controlled by a few but affecting many. Also, education and training in conservative schools taught people to merely accept that political and economic status quo. The political results can be seen even today in election results; only about 35% of eligible voters bother voting at all! Such numbers are yet another triumph of conservative educational systems.
Dewey’s liberal ethical model was meant to offer people a different model of ethics, a model based on democratic equality, as well as motives of kindness and sympathy for other people. It thus helped build a more liberal socialistic economic model, aimed at make life more enjoyable for as many as possible. For him the old model of people controlling their economic fate with their spending habits had become obsolete; about 2,000 large corporations and unions now control about half the world’s economic products and services, and their quest for ever-growing profits continue taking as much of the peoples’ socialized tax money as possible. Many public non-profit schools have become for-profit charter schools, and worker wages have been fairly level for decades now. According to one daily California newspaper, the prison guard’s union has helped increase the cost to taxpayers of housing and feeding one prisoner to about $50,000 a year! For-profit prisons have thus been growing in many parts of the country! And why not? It seems taxpayers are so busy working to pay their rents, mortgages, and fees banks keep tacking on to homeowners, they have neither the time nor energy to build more liberal schools where habits of democratic character excellence like voting and debating are as important as learning a useful skill. In fact, universities and colleges have become much more profit oriented. College costs have been growing much faster than most people can afford, and thus increasing the debts young folks needs jobs to pay off. Such undemocratic social institutions and their actions are now helping produce the need for new ethical choices and actions, thus creating the need for some new creative thinking. Such actions like voting and experimentation have become the duty for many liberals around the US.
Women's equal rights are another fine example of how new liberal ethical virtues are affecting the very democratic fabric of our country. For many thousands of years women were usually treated as de facto slaves -- slaves in fact and sometimes even by law -- de jure. Inheritance laws were often male-dominated. Almost always women were very low in society’s fixed hierarchy; they were routinely treated as lowly, inferior, and second-class people, and even that may be saying it too nicely. They made up a large part of the slave class. What’s more, for many ancient peoples women were pictured as the source of all evils, as the story of Adam and Eve and Pandora’s Box describe it. For many centuries women were controlled and treated by men as mere baby factories, producing more soldiers for yet more wars. Even in culturally advanced ancient Greece they were usually married off in their teens, kept from almost all kinds of education, and thus dependent on men. The social results were unhealthful too; their intellectual talents were almost always neglected, underdeveloped, and kept weak with housework, like making clothes, cooking, and raising children. Even though in ancient and medieval times Catholic convents helped develop some women’s talents for nursing and teaching, modern women have only recently gained more civil and political democratic rights in the 1900s than probably any other ten centuries combined!
As a result, many new social situations have grown. Many men have become more tolerant, sympathetic, kind, and respectful towards them and other minorities! In many places women have finally become liberated from old conservative ethical and political models; many have finally gained crucially important educational, voting, and especially reproductive rights in particular, as long ago Plato recommended they should. However, we’re still a long way from complete equality for women. In the US, they’re still often paid less than men, charged more for their clothes, and still often kept out of the highest levels of political power. A modern ethical problem remains: how can we continue including more women in our public and business systems, so their motive-feelings of kindness and sympathy can keep producing better socially useful results?
Today such macro-ethical situations continue evolving from the interactions between conservatives and liberals. Such democratic equal rights always depend on educating people to feel more liberal ethical ideas like kindness and sympathy, and to help make their actions demonstrate such feelings. An important liberal good is helping everyone develop their own unique set of talents if they want, and become the person they want to become! Why shouldn’t our liberal, kind, and sympathetic civil rights movements continue patiently, wholeheartedly, forcefully, and perhaps even joyfully improving dangerously intolerant and unjust hateful actions against anyone, whether it's women, gays, Africans, Asians, lesbians, or Native peoples. If they're law-abiding, then why shouldn't they all learn to feel what equal rights are like, and keep enlarging their own ethical choices?
Today, a most important result of liberal ethical excellence is helping build more democratic decision-making power into all our economic and political institutions, helping them produce more helpful, respectful, and constructive results. Such liberal kind and sympathetic feelings are helping create a democratic world almost all our ancestors could only dream about and wish for, but at the same time it’s still far from complete. Feelings of human equality are, as I write, becoming stronger in many places in the world, but building the liberal institutions to continue their growth is still as challenging today as it was in ancient Greece. As our news media remind us daily, there’s still much work to do in building such liberally democratic ethical virtues, but at last it’s no longer considered just a fantastic ideal. Without such a liberal ethical models like Dewey suggested, our world will remain unnecessarily and overly dangerous, clannish, tribal, narrow, confined, and slavish.
For continuing to build such a liberally democratic ethical model, all our political, economic, educational, religious, artistic, and domestic institutions have a role to play even on a daily basis. When they do they become the highest good for us Deweyan liberals, and when they don’t they become the greatest forms of social evil. In fact, each one of us can ethically choose to help encourage and celebrate such models of political and ethical equality for all, even if it’s just talking to our children as well as demonstrating what such ideas can mean. The more people who help work for such results, like everyone's freedom to pursue happiness in their own peaceful way, the more those habit-arts will become the highest good. They can, with wholehearted and sincere use, continue producing a more peaceful world for us all, but only if they're actively and forcefully practiced here and now. Believe it or not, even some conservatives and moderates can choose to act a little more kindly and sympathetically to those less well off than themselves. Stranger things have happened, right? If not, however, they too might find it difficult to have their Frog’s Feet Fudge ice cream and eat it too. Such thinking has inspired me yet again to write yet another languidly lame limerick.
Billionaire Smythe was the toast of the town,
Never mixing black clothes with anything brown.
Years ago his ethical ‘shoulds’
Made personal profits his highest goods,
Thus, raking them in and playing the clown.
5. ETHICAL AUDACITY, 101
In this and the following section I continue describing a liberal model of ethics with words like constructive audacity and respect. Is it really necessary? Nowadays it seems more necessary than ever, given the relentless audacity of greedy wealthy folks to keep doing whatever they can to make and keep ever greater amounts of money, and disrespectful people to keep controlling as many people as possible! Such wealthy folks have often encouraged politicians to keep using public funds to make our world more dangerous than it’s ever been; nuclear weapons are just one example. Within such a world liberal kinds of ethical audacity have become more necessary than ever before. They may be the only tools for growing the still young democratic spouts of peacefulness, self-determination, and respect now growing around the world.
As we’ve been seeing, for thousands of years now greedy conservatives have used their religious, economic, and political power to continue endangering and controlling all liberal democratic systems of equal rights and opportunities, including modern labor unions and local, state, and national political systems. What’s more, few people realize we already have a very rich history of such liberal ethical audacity, challenging all such concentrated forms of power. No doubt, a separate book would be needed to list even most of them, but even a few examples can be educational. Liberal kinds of ethical audacity are often useful against those people who still don’t respect other peaceful and lawful ethical models of excellence, and that includes many US presidents and corporate CEOs.
Luckily, once again, I’m inspired to offer yet another lynchingly lame limerick to make all such ethical situations perfectly clear from the very start, or at least as clear as mud; you make the call. After all, isn’t there some room in philosophy's history for a mad limerick-writing philosopher? I mean, why take life so seriously; shouldn’t there be a place for some philosophic fun and enjoyment? You might even think of it as a rare case of incurable limerick fever; it might be one for the psychology (or sorcery) textbooks, I'm not sure which witch is which. After all, from Dewey’s liberal point of view there’s already far too much obsessive madness in our world! In any case, I’m still hoping at least one of these limericks will be a little useful. I’m referring of course to the limericks; many witches are already audaciously useful. Who knows, limericks about chicken soup may even help cure limerick fever! What other medicinal properties could beak-clauses and claw-phrases possibly have anyway? The one below shows the ignorant arrogance many even educated people sometimes show.
There once was a judge with plenty of loot,
Who went off to Madam's to ring his root.
She said over a beer,
What happens here stays here,
To her such audacity was really a hoot!
What’s so audacious about that? Well, in today’s highly interactive world where millions are literally connected to each other around the world, what happens anywhere can quickly become known everywhere! Thus madam’s ethical audacity is needed in a world where many people still show little or no respect for good laws or good people.
Today in civilization's seemingly ethical free-for-all, where greed and violence often are the rule, and where even human life is still sacrificed for some unseen god, many traditional ethical models of blind and unquestioning obedience have simply become useless and even dangerous. Sometimes ethical lunacy may often be a better description of such actions. Besides fundamental religious leaders, politicians too often have no conscience about distorting reality for their own benefit and their wealthy supporters. In such a world liberal kinds of ethical audacity is needed to confront such actions wherever they occur.
What’s more, religious fanatics still seem intent on burning everything down they see as evil and starting all over again, with themselves as the dictatorial leaders of course, as if the feudalistic Middle Ages is still firmly in place around the world. Those kinds of destructive audacity are definitely what we liberals need less of; though greatly diminished, they're still obstacles to neutralize on the road to a more respectful and tolerant democratic world, where all people are free to build their own audaciously helpful actions and thus keep guiding their own growth. It’s sometimes described in this rather audacious way: peace above all else, no matter whom we have to kill to get it! Welcome to our first liberal principle of constructive ethical audacity! In fact, some people are so dangerous they should be controlled as soon as possible. Such an even more dangerous world needs more constructive kinds of ethical audacity, to keep fanatics from getting even one atomic weapon. So, these days people are facing a rather important ethical choice: What am I willing to do to stop the destructive audacity and madness of merely making more and more money, controlling our tremendous destructive power, and promote the sharing of equal rights with all law-abiding people?
More Audacious History
Fortunately, both history and current events offer many different example of such ethical audacity. How many people today realize liberal kinds of ethical audacity have been a part of philosophy since it began in Greece in the early 500s BCE? As we’ve already seen, constructive and peaceful kinds of ancient liberal audacity were demonstrated by people like Solon and Thales. How audacious was Solon to build a political model where more people controlled more of their own lives, or Thales to ignore the entire conservative spirit-model of nature and, instead, build a completely naturalistic model based on real events like water? And not only that, but inspire others to audaciously build other models based on natural events like air, fire, some kind of indefinite material stuff, and finally atoms. In fact, the entire liberal tradition in Western civilization depended on such ethical audacity, commonsense, bravery, and courage. They all began audaciously challenging the widespread conservative spirit-models most people believed were absolute Truth. Such liberal ethical audacity began teaching people they have a real choice for building their own models of life and nature. Both conservative Plato and moderate Aristotle accepted that challenging freedom.
With such actions liberal ethical audacity has remained a major form of reform for thousands of years; it’s been the mother of all audacious arts, from liberal philosophy to ancient and modern science to today’s liberation theology now practiced by Pope Francis himself! More importantly, however, such examples of ethical audaciousness usually began with the help of audacious questions: what is nature; do we need spirit-objects to keep improving it; what’s the best learning art; and what’re the best political and educational systems for promoting more kinds of helpful human arts? Such questions helped people examine their own unsatisfying ethical routines and start building better ones. What is creative audacity, and how can it help more people build more satisfying habits here and now? Such audacious questions have helped keep people growing and experimenting for thousands of years; modern science and technology was merely one result of such questioning. Even many conservative thinkers like Plato were audacious enough to question a lot of traditional ideas about religion, for example, to see how logical and useful they were for making our few short years of life even more satisfying and enjoyable. Such an ethical action-reaction system between liberals and conservatives has been going on for thousands of years, often based on new scientific discoveries. For example, as natural evolution was becoming a more acceptable biological model of life, conservative philosopher George Hegel (d. 1831) audaciously built a new conservative evolving model of spirit-objects, including an always evolving and changing spirit-god! For him the old eternally constant Christian god was dead.
In a sense then, an always changing nature helps make ethical audacity a valuable habit-art; the more things change, the greater the need for more ethical audacity to prevent forms of power from becoming too dangerously concentrated. The Protestant Reformation in the 1500s was another example of such audacity. So again, perhaps more than ever before, such audacity is needed as new forms of concentrated economic and political power have evolved. As a superrich class continues growing and increasing their political power, there’s an increased need for new audacious forms of rejection and non-compliance with such a feudalistic system. Why should people continue meekly accepting such a wealth-based system where legally taking more of peoples’ money and increasing their debt is the status quo? For many it’s become an ethical duty to experimentally find new audacious ways of diluting and diffusing such concentrated forms of power with more democratic actions!
For example, should university students begin audaciously demanding more decision-making power on their boards of regents, just as ancient Greek farmers demanded more democratic political power to make life easier and more debt free? Such democratic student power might better preserve educational excellence without increasing student debt through ever-higher tuitions fees? Such democratic audacity helps insure educational excellence and helps students learn what they want to learn? Until students have equal decision-making power on those boards, almost certainly they’ll continue being enslaved to ever-increasing amounts of debt. Also, a doctor shortage is predicted for the near future, so what new kinds of medical education can be used to help train more medical specialists, lower doctor debt and the need for charging outrageous fees, and at the same time increase general health? Such audacious educational questions can help create new systems to better serve the public and make life less stressful.
For almost all of the last 10,000 years, give or take a weekend or two, it seems people were encouraged not to practice ethical audacity, but rather unintelligent and routine social habits; only rarely were new inventions created. People weren’t taught how to keep improving many of their habits or institutions, but rather merely keep fearing what unseen spirit-objects could do to them if they didn’t obey traditions; the result was the creation of thousands of different spirit-rituals around the world. Such routine habits began growing in prehistoric times, and were encouraged to keep growing throughout ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Intelligently audacious liberal thinking and testing of such ideas was far from normal behavior. In fact, such audacious ideas like testing ideas for their results were almost always actively suppressed; it taught people practicing such liberal audacity might endanger one's life, even for rulers. Equally dangerous was intelligent ethical audacity – openly challenging old routine authoritarian pockets of power with kinder and more humane democratic ideas and actions. Often such people like Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama , Socrates, and Jesus of Nazareth were seen as 'boat-rockers' and dangerous social threats, as was even one of history's first truly audacious individuals, Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (d. 1336? BCE). Many Egyptian priests, like many priests today, loved and cherished their routine habit-arts; anyone audaciously suggesting anything else could put their lives in danger. Egypt's priestly caste, for example, resented Amen's idea to move the nation’s capital from Thebes to about 175 miles north. They feared what the gods might do to punish such ethical audaciousness, and what disasters it might cause? Much later, even the Homeric poems taught Greeks to fear what their spirit-god’s might do to them; the Indian idea of Karma worked in much the same way.
Confucius too was often seen as another one of those suspicious characters that occasionally caused people to wake up and see some more of life's useful possibilities. Within a world seen as still controlled by a great many animistic spirits, such people became dangerous; they audaciously kept challenging old ethical habits in one way or another, and thus increasing human freedom and diversity. In that respect, many of today’s reactions to liberal ethical audacity have changed only a little. Today many audacious activists become social reformers and public speakers, but for many today, life is still controlled by spirit-powers, and any kind of ethical audacity is to be feared. As a result, many today still feel such audacity is a grave sin; in ancient Greece it was called hubris -- the sin of pride. Today, however, it’s often called the art of creative thinking. Conservative Plato even did his share of it, but from within a spirit-model of nature. For him no one should do anything unless told to do so; that’s how much he cherished his feudalistic social system.
Fear Helped Maintain a Conservative Status Quo
Such routine conservative ethical habits often rested on fear. The Bible too tells us true religion begins with fearing god. Conservatives have been using ideas of fear for thousands of years to help maintain their social status quo; raw fear ruled most peoples' lives, rather than liberal audacious thinking and testing. The great Greek historian Thucydides tells us mostly out of fear Spartans started the Peloponnesian War against Athens around 430 BCE, and Pericles too used fear to help mobilize Athenians; they should fear the Spartans wrecking their empire. As a result, unintelligent actions based mostly on fear have kept people obedient and accepting of their social status quos.
For many thousands of years such conservative kinds of ethical actions worked, as they continue working for millions today. They were often justified with the fearful idea of disaster if people didn’t obey; god might punish everyone with another plague or earthquake. Even in the 1950s and ‘60s white conservatives often feared what life would become if Africans were allowed to vote and go to the same schools as white kids. Many felt god had chosen them to rule over inferior races. For decades Protestants in Northern Ireland feared Catholics in the south, and much the same things can be said about Arabs and Jews. Often liberals suggesting such fears were helping cause death and violence were often silenced and kept from even talking publicly about their ideas, must less testing them. Just imagine how much more dangerous it was to practice liberal democratic kinds of ethical audacity in ancient times, where rulers were seen as the earthly images of great spirit-powers, or picked by them! Imagine how much more frightened people were to audaciously question anything they were told, or even improve anything; such ethical actions might upset the spirit-powers. As Dewey notes, there obviously were a few new inventions here and there, but they were few and far between; destructive barbarians too often kept such liberal ethical audacity and testing to a minimum, unless of course it was creating better killing weapons.
No doubt, one of the most audacious liberal inventions of the 1400s was the movable printing press, again inspired by a similar Chinese invention. It not only challenged more people to become better readers, but to start learning new and different civilized ways of thinking and acting. Before that invention people regularly saw life and nature from within Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian models of it. For Christians most people were destined to merely satisfy their own animal urges and desires, most of which were sinful. Even useful inventions like shipbuilding, coin making, and building corporations often made warfare that much more widespread; large corporations made it easier to build larger armies and more destructive weapons. No doubt, for a few people who were making fortunes from such actions, it made life much more exciting, but for most everyone else it often meant a short, grubby life before being trampled into the dust, in which case it would, once again, definitely ruin another perfectly good day.
Fear of spirit-caused disasters and diseases have probably done more to depress people’s naturally constructive and intelligently audacious energies than any other feeling. It's one thing not to practice a habit; in that situation it can still be learned and practiced. But it's another thing to actually fear such actions, and for almost all of the last 10,000 people have feared such ethical audacity. Even in ancient Greece it became the highest sin! During that time almost everyone believed angry spirits could cause anything from personal sickness to catastrophic earth-wide flooding. Thus, the more audaciously someone merely changed some routine or part of nature, or didn’t worship exactly the same as everyone else, the more fearful people became about spirit-caused disasters! Ethically audacious actions might anger powerful spirits and produce dangerous results even for an entire nation; the Bible has several examples of such collective feelings of guilt. Even the ethical audacity of building useful dams and irrigation in ancient Iraq was sometimes seen as tempting the gods and their wrath; river-spirits must be kept flowing and happy, and if not could become angry. And even in supposedly enlightened Athens many people still believed a plague around 430 BCE was caused by an angry spirit-god, perhaps the goddess Athena herself, angry with them for fighting other Greeks in the Peloponnesian War. Most likely, however, it was caused by cholera-infested water as people crowded into Athens's city walls to escape Spartan soldiers on the war path; Pericles himself was merely one of its victims.
No doubt, early in civilization rulers and priests saw how powerful a fearful feeling can be for controlling people. State religions soon became a normal part of everyday life. Socrates himself was charged with not worshipping Athens’s state gods. No doubt, such fearful religious actions had a long history before Socrates, as we’ll see a little later; such ideas and habits probably went back into Neandertal cultures as well. After all, what Neandertal hunter didn’t want animal-spirits to provide more tasty mammoth-kabobs for diner? Thus, early forms of ethical audacity revolved around fear of spirit-objects, in order to keep making life satisfying and enjoyable; the result was the thousands of superstitious habits practiced in the native world. Such fear helped restrict intelligent audacity to only making spirit- objects friendlier, as anthropologists have been reporting for the last 100 years within native cultures around the world. As a result, in many nations today more liberally audacious ethical questions have only recently begun teaching people how to build much less fearful feelings about life and nature.
In such a fearful world, the very engine of both personal and social progress itself, intelligent and constructive ethical audacity, remained a rather rare and precious habit-art until around 1850. No doubt, conservative Socrates was a fine example of how philosophically audacious questioning could be used educationally. If young Greek men wanted to audaciously test any of their excellent ideas, he was more than willing to help. After all, he had seen the idiocy of war for himself, and even at its worst -- between Greek men themselves, while weapons makers continued making money from their deaths. That was perhaps the worst kind of economic audacity. However, the great weakness of his conservatively audacity was searching for objects that might not even exist, namely eternal and unchanging objects.
In his early adulthood Socrates began seeing how some liberally audacious humanist sophist-teachers were helping young Greek men become more focused on learning more useful skills for practicing democratic arts. To him such skills were definitely a philosophic improvement compared to learning different theories about how the universe got started and what it's made of, but to him such liberal audacity went too far. Audacious Sophist humanists ignored knowing unchanging objects altogether; conservative Socrates wasn’t psychically ready to go down that road. Soon, he too began seeing a more conservative type of questioning audacity, perhaps hoping it might help young Greeks stop killing each other just because they were told to. Feeling their own ignorance about their ideas like justice, friendship, and courage just might be the first step for learning more humane ethical actions here and now. Who knows, such audacious questions might even help make Athens's democratic system work better; for him democracy was the height of liberal audacity and believing any citizen would intelligently choose the best policy to test. For him that political audacity should be challenged; after all, they voted to force other city-states to remain part of the Athenian empire, rather than respecting their independence.
Still, as Athens's democracy grew, young men were audaciously given the chance to start practicing different political habits. Political debates were open to them, as well as voting powers for policy. Not surprisingly Socrates sensed a real danger, one that conservatives continue feeling to this day. The more people are involved in a decision-making process, the more power is diluted and shared with other people, thus taking power away from those who really deserve it, namely the educated few. If decisions are based on audaciously liberal democratic feelings of kindness and equal rights, then they can easily take more power away from those who should have it, namely the wealthy and prosperous. To this day such anti-democratic feelings continue motivating many conservatives. In ancient Athens, however, the clash of liberal and conservative models of ethical audacity helped set the stage for one of philosophy’s most dramatic events -- Socrates audaciously choosing to drink a cup of poison hemlock. That audacious ethical event will be described more fully in Part 3's Ancient Models of Excellence.
Unfortunately for Western civilization, conservative kinds of ethical audacity were the only models taught for thousands of years. Liberal Sophists and Atomists both had their own naturalistic models of ethical audacity, based largely on promoting intelligent kinds of pleasure. During Plato's lifetime, in fact, one charming example of ethical audacity involved a poor and destitute Cynic philosopher named Diogenes. Like Socrates, Cynics too chose to audaciously 'drop out' of the money-making rat race and with their actions question any other model. For them ethical audacity began by asking why make life more complicated and stressful than it need be? After all, we all live for just a few decades at best, so why not relax and enjoy it as much as possible? How audacious was that?
One story in particular has survived. One day Alexander the Great was said to be strolling through Athens and heard about the famous Diogenes, so he went to talk with the homeless hermit; a bathtub barrel was his home and his quest was to find honest people. Cynic, by the way, is a Greek word for dog, so the Cynics audaciously lived like dogs, some even fornicating publicly. Plato called him a-Socrates-gone-mad! But after Alex talked with him for a while he was evidently impressed with his wisdom and audacious disregard for every civilized art except talking; nevertheless, he tested him anyway. He told Diogenes he’d give him anything he wanted; what did he really want most? Diogenes sensed another chance to demonstrate his ethical audacity, and thus help teach people even poor folks can live honest and honorable lives free of material goods. So without thinking too much about it, he simply asked Alex to step to one side; he wanted to get warm and he was blocking his sunlight.
Truly, not all ethical audaciousness need be dramatic protest or tragically dead, like Socrates, but remaining true to one’s basic feelings often encourages audacious ethical choices to be made. In fact, as many humorists show us even today, their art can be just as educationally audacious as protest, and in some ways perhaps even more-so. I don’t mean to start a Greek-Jewish controversy about who really invented audacious chutzpah first -- Greeks or Jews? I don’t think it would have made any difference to Diogenes though; the important thing was one’s audacious ethical practice. No doubt, if he were alive today Diogenes would probably still tell people like President Bush 2 not only to step aside but keep walking as well.
In the Middle Ages liberal ethical audacity remained rare, just like food other than sheep-kabobs. Even though idiotic violence was still a very common fact of life, even though religious and political leaders too often actually burned to death many thousands of women and children as witches and heretics, women too sometimes made some audacious ethical choices and gained some social power; such actions showed people not just men could practice intelligent audacity.
Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc are 2 medieval examples. Before she was burned alive as a devil-possessed witch in 1431, Joan's audacious military actions for France helped rally dejected troops into kicking the occupying English back to England. Before they left however they captured her and burned her as a witch. Centuries earlier England's Queen Eleanor (d. 1204) was perhaps the finest medieval female example of ethical audaciousness! She not only lived to 82 and bore 10 children, but became so powerful in the 1100s her second husband, England’s King Henry 2, locked her in a castle so she couldn’t raise another army to throw him off the throne. Incidentally, if you get the chance maybe you'd like to see a fine Hollywood film about Eleanor starring Katherine Hepburn; it’s called The Lion in Winter. It certainly doesn't tell all of Eleanor’s story, or even half of it -- what film could? -- but it’s still a wonderfully powerful educational film about independent ethical audacity in the 1100s and the 1960s. When it was released during the Vietnam War many people still had conflicting ethical feelings about the war; should they support or oppose it; were the Vietnamese a real threat to the US, or just another opportunity for a few wealthy arms makers to make millions more from yet another war? The film gave liberal Katherine an opportunity to audaciously tell the world her views; she was against the war and the leader who kept fighting it. No doubt, it helped motivate many anti-war protesters to act even more audaciously, like burning draft cards and refusing to be inducted, as heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali did! So a film about events 800 years earlier helped promote modern kinds of ethical audacity.
In the 1590s another dramatic example of ethical audacity was committed by a scientist named Giordano Bruno; it was comparable to Socrates himself. To protest how his church was unjustly restricting scientific growth and research about the earth's position in space, he resigned his professorship and membership in his Dominican order! And as if that wasn't audacious enough, he then became first a Calvinist Presbyterian and after that a Lutheran! It didn't stop there either. He publicly declared the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, as Aristotle and the Church said, and said it circles the sun once a year!
For the Church such audacity was too unbearable. Eventually he was convicted of heresy and in 1600 publicly burned in Rome. Many conservative Catholic officials felt such audacity just could not be tolerated by anyone under any circumstances. Thankfully, however, he didn’t die in vain. Since then the Church has become much more tolerant of different ethical models, no doubt as a result of many other audacious actions by scientists like Galileo and Newton. I like to think Bruno did more than his share to help educate people about the Church’s brutality, and its weakness in not practicing its highest excellence, namely love and charity. When people see others audaciously sacrifice their lives to promote different ethical models, it can be very inspiring. To me people like Eleanor and Bruno, along with thousands of others like them, are mankind's true saints. Hundreds of years later the Church finally declared Joan a saint too.
Because most everyone's ethical habits during medieval times were ethically passive and obedient to their social and religious leaders, many believed people like Bruno were not only sinful but socially dangerous as well. Bruno attacked the very foundation of conservative philosophy, namely, there exists only one model of eternal and unchanging Truth. Such people still feared god might send more plague to everyone as a punishment for allowing such sinful audacity? As a result, social fear remained a common feeling, whether it was about deadly plague, earthquakes, famines, fires, or heretics!
In short, most everyone’s inner psychic survival kit of ethical feelings was greatly different from today. Often in the Middle Ages anyone could simply accuse someone of sinfulness and it was reason enough to cause violent actions against them. Often someone might just accuse, say, some local Jews of being devil-possessed. Today such accusers in industrial states would no doubt be quickly whisked off to the nearest mental hospital, but back then it often led to Jews' wholesale slaughter and murder, and then taking their possessions. Such conservative kinds of ethical audacity were often justified in the name of religious purity and social stability; it was in fact legalized murder and robbery, as is modern warfare, and part of audacity's dark side. After all, the more people see such actions, the easier it is to make them fearful, thus keeping them controlled and obedient to the social status quo. Even audacious kings like Henry 2 (d. 1189) were sometimes damned to eternal hell-fire -- excommunicated. The social result, however, was to keep liberal audacious actions like equal rights and democracy all but useless, even though many early Christians audaciously defied the Roman emperor himself.
Democratic Audacity: An Important Liberal Value
The lesson for us Deweyan liberals seems obvious. If we’re to continue growing the democratic values of equal rights for everyone, then ethical audacity should remain an important habit for all liberal democrats. Even in the early 2000s such liberal audacity is still very new for millions of people who’re just emerging from medieval psychic feelings. Hopefully, such examples will help readers begin feeling what a useful tool such audacity is for building a more liberated world for everyone, liberated from greedy conservatives who want nothing more than more power for themselves and their class. As we’ve been seeing, today’s social forms of power have begun shifting from religious to economic forms. People are much better educated today than ever, but in many ways many of their actions are still controlled by those few with huge amounts of economic power, as are most political leaders too. Most people still don’t feel how audacious their votes can be for building a more democratic world. New scientific communication tools may help more people connect with many others, but unless people vote to build a more democratic society, one where intelligent growth is most important, then our largely feudalistic political and economic systems will continue controlling much of life for the benefit of wealthy folks. What good is being more aware of how economic power is audaciously being used to serve its own ends, unless people audaciously vote to tax the wealthy more, and thus share their economic power? What’s important is how easily money circulates, not how concentrated it becomes.
Such liberal ethical audacity can take many different forms. For example, the more presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon acted unlawfully and unethically audacious about the Vietnam War, the more audaciously they were mocked and ridiculed even on TV, making it easier for people to take away their power. In ancient Greece the comic playwright Aristophanes stayed connected to current events, mocking everything from war to Socrates, and since the 1960s intelligently audacious comedy has become another powerful tool for helping people laugh at those who are greedy for power more than anything else. Again, however, unless people audaciously express more constructive liberal feelings with their votes, and help educate others to build such habits, the powerful will continue working to make themselves even more powerful. History tells us that’s just a fact of life. Who hasn’t yet realized the quest for more power, like anything else, can become addictive, and satisfied only with more power. The art of liberal ethical audacity may still be alive and well for many, but unless such habits keeps growing, a largely feudalistic status quo will continue on. When is the last time you told a religious leader, all their actions are just another form of personal habits, or conservative political leaders many of their ideas are no longer justified or acceptable?
A Liberal Movement
Today, thanks to a much more enlightened and informed public, passive and accepting ethical actions are often seen as much less than excellent, as is unjustified violence. With Dewey's intelligent democratic and educational forms of audacity, it’s become much easier to challenge all such conservative actions, and thus help build a more liberal world, one voter at a time. Sometimes it may mean audaciously testing political leaders to see their responses. Sometimes it may mean audaciously testing educational leaders to see how much they really allow students the freedom to learn what they want to learn, and thus begin feeling intelligent kinds of democratic freedom itself. And as we’ll see later in the section Tribal Games of Freedom, it may mean audaciously testing peoples’ greediness, to see how much they’ll keep of what they earn. In fact, such kinds of ethical audacity are already happening on a daily basis, and often they’re best answered with equally audacious acts of kindness and generosity! As the old saying goes, to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
As we’ve already seen, agnosticism is another liberal audacious idea helping to build a more peaceful and tolerant world. Millions of people are still taught to accept the assumption of different spirit-objects, even though they can’t even be objectively proved to exist. These days millions of people have accepted experimental learning as producing the best kinds of knowledge, and so they’ve audaciously applied that learning habit to even spirit-ideas. They’re not afraid to audaciously say they need to see some proof such objects exist before believing in them. As a result, compared to life in ancient and medieval times, new audacious humanistic impulse-instincts for peace, kindness, and equal rights among all human tribes has become much more important than it’s ever been. No doubt, sometimes such audacious religious ideas may be dangerous to talk about, but a large part of wisdom itself is learning when such ideas can be safely talked about, and when they can’t. Also, democracy and Behavioral psychology are also encouraging such liberal audacity. In fact, these days such liberal actions continue actively threatening many conservative habits, especially political ones. Recently laws in conservative controlled states have restricted voting power, or at least have tried too. To us liberals, however, such actions objectively prove conservatives continue battling the growth of audacious liberal actions like equal rights for all, in the quest to maintain a conservative feudalistic status quo.
The recent withering of labor union power to demand better wages and a fairer share of corporate profits is yet another example of how conservative corporate power can be used to weaken democratic power. Over the past 40 years union power has shrunk dramatically, decreasing worker economic power and freedom to support more liberal candidates while, at the same time, increasing corporate profits and power to new levels. As a result, new forms of unionizing audacity are now called for, forms that again challenge workers to gain more control of their lives with better wages. Why should CEOs make over 300 times what their workers make? That system merely preserves conservative power.
Even so, many European and US unions have discovered there's a difference between intelligent and unintelligent union actions? When, for example, unions focus mainly on their own growth and power, rather than the public good, they too can act counterproductively. When, say, the economy goes into a slump and unemployment goes up, public unions can sometimes make the situation worse by not lowering their own wages to keep budgets balanced and members working. Again, audacious flexibility is another important part of ethical audacity. How flexible are we when conditions change? Healthcare benefits for workers are another example. For years their cost was routinely passed on to auto consumers at the dealership, but eventually such costs helped make less expensive foreign cars more attractive. How intelligent was it for auto unions to keep demanding better healthcare coverage, than it was to help build a better healthcare system for everyone, one in which everyone helps cover everyone else? It’s called a public single payer healthcare system, now working in many countries.
Also, with better communication tools, there are many more chances for audacious consumer actions! Such tools make it much easier to organize public power. Sometimes it can help balance the corporate audacity for more and more profits regardless of the public’s health.
In the liberal conservation movement too, audacious direct confrontation has become much more common against big corporations who often ignore the environmental damage their actions produce. Whale hunting is merely one such example, and coal mining is another one. No doubt, some environmentalists sometimes act too audaciously and try to protect all life forms. How intelligent is that when most life forms on earth have gone extinct over the past 3 billion years? Isn’t there a line between intelligent and destructive audacity people should be aware of? Should we try to preserve all of our earth’s 1 million insect species?
Obviously, such questions can become a part of ethical audacity. Where is the line between the conscious art of intelligent audacity and the routine practice of it? Mahatma Gandhi’s helping peacefully expel the British from India soon after I was born is intelligent audacity on a national scale! With such audacious actions like fasting he helped millions of people feel their own power not to support a small oppressive ruling class! He helped people feel the difference between routine obedience and intelligently peacefully disobedience against unjust and unequal laws. Who knows? Thanks to the democratization of our electronic tools, and their great educational potential, one day consumers may become more flexible than they are now, and become more capable of peaceful and constructive acts of audacity.
How far should it go? I mean, is there only one definition of ethical audacity capable of applying to all ethical situations, so we can always know how to act audaciously in all situations? Are there such universal definitions of audacity like Socrates and Plato assumed existed? For us liberal Deweyans, that assumption is as useless in an always changing world as the search for one chemical way to change lead into gold. It represents yet another attempt to make nature bend to our ideas, rather than always adjusting our ideas and actions to the current situation. Sometimes running like hell away from a dangerous situation is intelligent ethical audacity!
Dewey's joyful news about the art of intelligent audacity is this: Almost everyone can experimentally start building, honing, and energizing their own forms of it, even at the everyday level. How? Merely by taking the time to audaciously ask how life can be improved in some way, and perhaps even work to invent a new tool or method for improving it! Such questions about ethical audacity can help create new and possibly useful actions. For example, many people still have irrational hatreds even about the way other people even look and sometimes act, even if they're peaceful actions. I’m thinking about all those protest actions. Millions of people still see protesting gays and lesbians as evil and sinful. Thus, audaciously testing others to see their re-actions is an intelligent form of ethical audacity. How dangerous might some people be? Are they democratic or dictatorial, tolerant or dominating, violent or peaceful? Such intelligent questions and audacious testing help people become an experimental artist in audacity. How audaciously generous are you? Can you afford to keep only 10% of your income, and donate 90% to help better educate others, and if not, then what percentages can you use? Here’s another audaciously ethical question. What will someone do FOR $20,000 and what will they do WITH $20,000? Have you taught yourself to ask, and answer, such intelligently audacious questions yet?
Educational Audacity
Life is literally full of such audacious ethical questions, but only if we make the asking of them a working habit. Again, there’s a line between growing such a healthy habit, and obsessing about such questions; where do you draw that ethical line? For Dewey, the line about educational audacity should be drawn on the other side of intelligent educational questions. For him all conservative book-centered forms of education need some audacious kinds of questions to start making them better, like, for example, what are the weak and unhealthful social results of such an educational system? Is it helping produce excessive unemployment results, weak character habits, more criminal activity, and even more drug use? Is it producing more useful political and economic skills for living intelligently in an advanced democratic republic? Such audacious educational questions helped him ask if even kindergarten kids can start building intelligent experimental habit-arts, rather than just be make to focus on silently reading more and more textbooks, or merely playing more computer games? To those Deweyans like myself, we need more of such educationally audacious questions, not less. Why shouldn't even young primary age students begin learning how to intelligent use school-money to start building the useful habit of spending money wisely, and helping those less fortunate, or for running useful businesses in school? In such audacious educational experiences, where all students are free to build the skills they want, students can begin feeling how their extra monies can best be used to keep making their schools and neighborhoods more exciting and enjoyable places to be, not only for themselves, but for their children as well.
How many people today feel they have the power to build such liberal kinds of schools in their own neighborhoods? Audacious educational questions can help improve education below the university level. In many new charter schools public monies are often used for continuing a conservative textbook model of education already in place in our public schools. Is it too educationally audacious to ask if such schools are helping liberate students to intelligently learn the skills they want to learn, or are they merely enslaving students psychically to learn what they have little desire and need to learn? What social results are made more likely in such book-centered schools? Is such a stressful and boring educational system helping produce the growing number of violent shootings we’re seeing around the country? Are they telling us our traditional schools becoming more unacceptable to more and more students? Whether public or charter, such book-centered schools help keep students passively enslaved and obedient to what others say they should be learning, rather than teaching them the useful skills they want to learn. Even as Plato shows us, in ancient Greece educational audacity was a large part of the conservative philosophic tradition; social harmony and peace were much easier to achieve when children were trained to learn certain habits. But in his democratic world, liberals were asking what habits should we teach young folks? History teaches us, conservative habits have helped keep authoritarian feudalistic political and religious systems in place for thousands of years! For us Deweyan liberals, few human institutions are more important than our public schools. Within them are encouraged the habits adults may practice for the rest of their lives.
Another audacious educational question is this: Can the habits of joy and happiness be more easily learned when students have the freedom to choose and actually learn the skills they want to learn? Such liberal democratic schools will actively teach such useful habits, making it easier for students to like school, rather than endure it. Such liberal schools would actively help students learn how to joyfully resist many of the dangerous drug and gang temptations now becoming more available than ever before? For much too long conservative schools, homes, and churches have ignored joyfully teaching such useful skills, thinking liberal habits were too audacious. The harmful social results, however, continue showing up in outrageously expensive prison costs and drug-deaths each year, drug-gang warfare, and in all the homes where women and men become hooked on drugs to merely relieve their stressful tensions and fears. Such results are helped if our public schools continue neglecting teaching young folks how to make their own lives more joyful and happy. Book-centered schools help keep people vulnerable to all those greedy and destructive habits and hustlers out there who love to take other people’s freedom in exchange for their money! In fact, on a daily basis, ignorant and greedy people audaciously test others to see how unintelligent and selfish they are, and how dangerously they live. Such people who break the law and disrespect others often become the object of Underground kinds of ethical audacity and justice!
Here’s a little example of sexual audacity from my own life. Into my 20s I was still almost completely unaware such audacious games were being played, and so I was easily talked into investing $200 in some stock. Then over the next several months some ‘free-spirited’ women offered themselves for my pleasure and of course my egg fertilizing services. Then, about a year later, I cashed in on my investment and much to my surprise got $400 back! In other words $200 was my audacious payoff for services rendered. However, because I wasn't ethically audacious about helping others, I failed that character test. Instead of using at least the $200 to help others, like a dummy I kept it and let those audacious women pay me off. Live and learn eh? Years later, however, I became audacious enough to donate all of a small inheritance to help fight the AIDS epidemic, and so kept the freedom to keep learning what I wanted to learn.
Is it really necessary to teach and reward children for intelligently practicing ethical audacity, like joyful exercise and healthful diet habits? It is if you want to help protect them from endangering their own lives with poor character habits. There’re a lot of glitzy and dangerous temptations out there, money, drugs, and sex being perhaps the 3 most powerful ones. Such potentially dangerous temptations can be better controlled educationally with generous and helpful habits. If not, then we all pay in one way or another for allowing such habits to continue being ignored.
Intelligent audacity, whether liberal or conservative, helps direct the glitz to where it might help the most people, and thus build useful kinds of character excellence! To us liberal Deweyans, the sooner children of all ages are encouraged to learn such ethical audaciously like joy and happiness, the sooner they become inoculated against all those out there who are offering destructive and harmful kinds of actions. So, if you’re that kind of liberal parent, why not begin encouraging your kids to practice such ethical audacity? Who knows? One day they may even become audacious enough to realize how helpful you were, and even thank you for it!
As you may already know, the average teenager is especially vulnerable to such ethical audacious destruction. Neighborhood drug gangs often try recruiting even pre-teens to work for them. It’s another reason Deweyans like myself say we should be teaching more intelligently joyful ethical habits to even primary-age students. Because such training is still neglected in many homes and schools, many teens are almost completely unprepared for intelligently responding to such temptations. For example, many young girls take taunting and ridicule personally, rather than joyfully smiling and giving back the same kinds of talk! Such students have already learned to feel good about themselves, and give to people what people give to them. What goes around, aye? Isn’t such a liberally audacious response better than banging someone’s head with a 2x4? After all, you might break a perfectly good 2x4! Those little splinters are annoying, aren’t they? Are learning such useful character habits much more useful than reading lots of useless information or playing video games at schools? Caring parents can even help children learn such intelligent audacity at the dinner table every night.
Often in the Middle Ages many in the Church helped build hospitals and kindly cared for others less fortunate; in a world brimming with controlled violence and disease, and where robber-gangs were much more common than today, that was ethically and medically audacious. Now I’m certainly not saying we should all become poor monks, but the audacious ideal of living simply and satisfying our needs, rather than all our greedy wants, makes life easier and less stressful. Believe it or not, almost certainly, many in Hollywood already practice that audacious ethical art. However, don't just take my word for it. Why not do some research and find out for yourself? How many of today's biggest 'stars' live like monks and nuns? Just because people wear colorful clothes, jewelry, and lots of make-up for awards shows doesn't mean they're all wealthy! Is that another audacious thought, or what? Many in fact audaciously dedicate their lives to helping those less fortunate and creating a more peaceful world!
What the world may need now more than anything else is more kinds of such liberal educational audacity! What else can love mean? How else are we going to start better controlling our populations and environment pollution so that life can become more enjoyable and less stressful? Unless we start teaching more intelligent reproductive and energy habits, life will only become worse for most everyone. How many parents, teachers, preachers, and politicians are ready to help teach such liberal kinds of ethical audacity? There are in fact limits to how many people can live well on our planet, as well as how much carbon the atmosphere can absorb before a warmer world starts kills us all.
Obviously many teachers and parents still aren't ready to build such schools, but why let that stop you from audaciously experimenting on your own? Such educational audacity can help keep making life more interesting, productive, and useful. Or would you prefer your children and mate continue stumbling through life, afraid of most everyone or everything, and living as many do now in parts of India and Africa? Doesn’t our world already have far too many undereducated people who haven’t learned what intelligently joyful audacity feels like? Don’t we already have far too many people who’re almost hypnotized by glitzy jewelry, money, cars, military power, or even using people as sex objects, rather than audaciously focusing on helping those less fortunate? To me the more I continue helping others, even if it's only donating a few dollars each month to help feed the poor, the more I feel my own character audacity growing STRONGER; it’s another great inner result from experimenting with Dewey's kind of naturalistic excellence.
1. SOME EXCELLENT RESULTS OF INTELLIGENT ACTIONS
In Part 2 we move on to Dewey’s new liberal model of nature science has been building over the last 150 years. This section, then, can be seen as a bridge between the new inner world we’ve been looking at, and the outer world we’ll begin describing.
As we’ve begun glimpsing already, thousands of years ago a new liberal evolutionary model of life and nature formed one of Western civilization’s 3 main philosophic models. In ancient Greece, for example, the Atomist Democritus, the Sophist Protagoras, and a few other Ionian thinkers like Anaximander helped build such a liberal model. In fact, it was so different from what conservatives and moderates had been seeing for thousands of years, people like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine reacted strongly against it. For them nature definitely has some eternal objects within it and they are the best objects to know, mainly with reason or faith and reason. In fact, their conservative political and educational models were so dominant, a modern liberal model of life and nature reached a scientific level only after Charles Darwin brought biology to its modern evolutionary stage with the publication of Origin of Species in 1859, the same year Dewey was born. Since then, however, that liberal model has continued challenging conservative and moderate models of nature as never before! In Part 2 we’ll look at some evolutionary evidence and briefly outline some of their developments.
In this section, however, we begin looking at some important everyday results Dewey’s liberal model of life and nature can produce. In it intelligent work and practice has been elevated to a much higher place in life than Plato and Aristotle ever thought possible or desirable. Dewey’s model of constructively intelligent work thus helps bridge the new inner and outer models of psychological and ethical excellence; it will show how intelligent work can produce some rather interesting dynamic and organic results. So, our first question naturally becomes: What kinds of inner and outer results can intelligently constructive work help produce.
S. Morris Eames, in his book Pragmatic Naturalism, mentions 4 such results. What are they and how might they work? As we’ve seen, Dewey believed anything we build can be either routinely unhealthful or intelligently healthful, whether it’s a habit or a new object. But what did he mean by the word ‘intelligent?’ Eames mentions 4 kinds of useful results from such work; they also show the kinds of ideas Dewey placed at the heart of his educational model of excellence. After all, what's the sense in knowing about excellent work-habits if we don't teach them to our young folks?
For Eames and Dewey intelligent work helps build 4 different kinds of useful habits. They’re listed as:
1. intellectual
2. moral
3. social, and
4. esthetic
We’ll look briefly at how each one can be produced in our daily lives.
Excellent Intellectual Feelings
Suppose, for example, I'm a woodworker and I want to expand my routine woodworking habits, and make them more creatively intelligent. How can I go about it? Basically those 4 ideas are useful. For example, as I plan to build something -- a message table for example -- I can begin playing creatively with some new intellectual ideas and meanings for the table. As we’ve seen, experimental learning uses the idea of reasoning conservatives and moderates have talked about for thousands of years; for Dewey, however, it become the 2nd stage of experimental learning. Before I draw the table’s blueprint I can playfully experiment with some different ideas of wood, metal, and other materials as well as table designs. How do I want it to look and operate? How might I improve on the standard message table shape? To imagine such creative ideas is the art of intellectual excellence! I can begin imagining how different materials and shapes might fit and relate to each other, how they'll all look and feel, what size table will be best, and a whole host of other ideas. Leaning to playfully enjoy experimenting with those kinds of ideas IS intellectual excellence!
Simply intellectually experimenting with different table ideas begins expanding my old routine building habits into something more creative and intelligent. Merely mentally experimenting helps expand and strengthen my intellect; it also helps me see how ideas relate to each other – another important part of intellectual excellence. In short, such actions help me feel different meanings and ideas. Whenever a person creates a plan to solve a problem, and thinks about how different meanings and ideas relate to each other, then an intellectual habit-art grows stronger. Even when someone thinks about creating an evening meal and how some foods will relate to each other and their health, then they’re strengthening their intellect! In any case, however, we see again how practical and simple Dewey’s thinking is about an important philosophic idea, namely intellectual excellence. Within the past 150 years such imaginative and practical intellectual actions have helped create the modern world we all live in today, with all its weaknesses and strengths. Greedy capitalists keep thinking of ways to take more of the public’s money, and progressive liberals keep thinking of ways to make life more equal for everyone.
Again, it should be clear, there’s really nothing very new here. Long ago even conservative Socrates helped others, Plato included, see how their routine ideas RELATED to other ideas, and when they were criticized then new ideas were called for. He would critically test an idea about, say, the eternal meaning of courage, and if it didn’t conflict with other ideas he accepted the definition. Such critical thinking is the work of intellect; Plato would eventually say a life without criticism is not worth living. If there was a contradiction between 2 ideas, or the results of an idea were unacceptable, then the first idea was rejected and different ideas were tested. If, say, someone defined ethical goodness as pleasure, and criticism produced a contradiction, they he simply asked for another idea to test. In that way, he challenged people to exercise their creative intellect and examine their own ideas and, if they could, then creatively think of an idea to produce better results. Most of the time such ideas weren’t discovered, but he thought it worth the effort.
As we saw earlier, building useful definitions is one of philosophy’s 2 most important intellectual arts; the other being comparing and contrasting ideas to one another, to see the results they produced. Such thinking is called critical thinking too. Many times such ideas became assumptions, and philosophers have been critically examining them and their results for thousands of years. So, for Dewey too, mentally enjoying thinking about how different ideas of, say, a message table relate to each other, and even playfully creating new ideas when some produce unacceptable results, is his pragmatically practical definition of intellectual excellence. When we don’t actively use our intellects critically to build either a new habit or object, then it’s simply called day-dreaming, or sometimes worrying. Now really, what about those philosophic ideas are too difficult to understand?
Excellent Moral Feelings
So far so good; such ideas are fairly straightforward and simply. They’re more or less obvious. However, not very many people go on to see how building something also helps build one’s moral excellence, whether it’s an inner habit or an outer object. That idea might be new to many people. So, it calls for a little explanation; Dewey’s moral model of excellence hasn’t been talked about much, but perhaps here’s a good place to start. In the following sections more will be said about it.
What did Dewey mean by excellent or intelligent morality? Early in the 20th century Dewey helped write an entire book called Ethics, in which he compares and contrasts other conservative and moderate ethical models with his own liberal pragmatic one; how are such ideas the same and how are they different? Those interested should read more about it, but here I’ll just mention a few of his basic ideas while still using our table example to help describe his ideas.
If I think first, say, of making a message table, routine building says just go ahead and reproduce someone else's ideas. Don’t bother about criticizing different ideas, just choose someone else's plan. Intelligently pragmatic morality, on the other hand, says wait a minute, why not enjoy experimenting a little with our imaginative choices to see what results they might produce? Basically, then, pragmatic morality is the habit-art of JUDGING AND CHOOSING intelligently between different ideas, and then of course testing them. So, naturally, after looking at different kinds of wood, metals, and the results they might work, I eventually make a choice from all my ideas. Simply intelligently choosing what we feel is best then becomes the first step towards building an intelligent morality, or moral excellence! The second step is then having some fun with testing our choices. In any case, however, it's fairly simple to see how merely making my own choices, and testing them, strengthens my own moral habit-art! Simply making any choice and then testing it for its results is Dewey’s pragmatic model of morality. In that way we can begin taking some control of our moral growth. Who knows? You might even become a moral moron, and elevate mere testing others to the highest good.
Something else should be mentioned here too about Dewey’s pragmatic moral model. Many modern philosophers, called Logical Positivists, have said morality can’t really become a science; it’s always based on personal choices and they vary from person to person. Dewey’s experimental model of morality, however, challenges those kinds of ideas. For him experimentally testing our choices for their results is what can make morality as scientific as physics or chemistry. Just because everyone has their own set of moral rules doesn’t mean they’re not objective. All such rules are based on objective results! Such a pragmatic model then elevates mere personal choice to a more scientific level of knowledge as I test my choices to see if they actually produce the results I want -- a beautiful and useful message table or whatever.
Again, intelligent morality begins by simply choosing among different ideas, and ends with actually testing my choices to see the results they produce! The more we test our moral choices, the more scientific our moral habits become. The more we choose, say, to respect others and just laws, and then feel their results, the more scientific our moral habits become. In fact, such testing over centuries has helped elevate those ideas to moral laws. In some situations they may not work, but in general they produce useful results. For us Deweyan liberals, then, a moral choice is any choice one makes between 2 or more genuine alternatives. When I, say, choose between building a wooden message table or a metal one, that’s a moral choice! With such a definition of moral excellence it’s easy to also see how most everyone tests their moral choices every day! When real alternatives are available, even choosing which foods to eat is a moral choice; and the objective results they produce are the same kinds of results helping make diet a scientific study.
With such a model of moral excellence Dewey has made it not only easier to feel moral excellence, but also to practice it. Comparing different ideas is intellectual excellence, and then moral excellence starts growing as we enjoy CHOOSING AND TESTING ideas! What’s more, such habits can begin growing even in young children who have begun growing their talking skills! We’ll see more about such an educational model of excellence later on.
We've already seen many times already how important it is to test our choices, but it’s also an important part of moral excellence. In fact, most people probably make and test many moral choices every day, and yet never consciously feel, much less enjoy, making such choices! Routine habits encourage routine actions. For many people life is a series of worrying about one thing after another. They don’t feel how their daily choices can become more enjoyably excellent. Such a pragmatic habit-art helps make any choice less stressful and more enjoyable.
Also, such a practical model of individual moral excellence helps build a conscious feeling of responsibility for the choices we make and the results they produce! If I, say, freely make a choice about how the table should look -- no one else, just me -- then only I’m responsible for the results of that choice! Such responsible feelings are another important part of Dewey’s moral model. They allow me to take both the credit as well as the blame for my free choices. No doubt, such choices often depend on prior choices, but in some sense I’m responsible for the results they produce when I test them. In short, for my own free choices and their results I should blame, or praise, no one else but myself! Of course, one’s already formed habits greatly influence the choices we make, but still if people aren’t held responsible for their own choices and actions, then learning how to make more intelligent choices becomes that much more difficult.
One other result should be mentioned, a rather obvious one. When my moral choices are, in fact, free, and when they’re not forced by someone else or an addictive habit, then excellent morality also encourages the growth of a moral will, or moral habit-art. The more I practice enjoying an intelligent morality, the more I keep growing and learning about moral excellence. And the more that happens, the more I help transform old and rather grotesque conservative and moderate philosophic status-quo models of morality practiced for literally thousands of years!
A Little Moral History
Since at least ancient times many philosophers have taught themselves to believe every moral choice and result was controlled and determined by some kind of outside forces, usually spirit-forces. In ancient Greece a determinist model of morality was commonly felt. As we’ve seen, conservatives like Socrates and Plato felt the gods controlled all human choices and actions; all people are merely the puppets of the gods! Even liberal Democritus felt atomic movements determined peoples’ ideas and actions. As we'll see in Book 2, Native Models of Excellence, such feelings were probably common for thousands of years before them, and they were passed on throughout the ancient and medieval worlds. For pious Christians and Muslims god's knowledge of past, present, and future events in effect control every event; a common phrase of Muslims is ‘god willing.’ As we've seen with Augustine too, feelings about god’s predestining people to their social roles and actions became an important part of Christian theology, even though it created the problem of free will: how can anyone have a free will if god knows all things? The idea's called determinism, predestination, and sometimes fatalism, and it’s also been at the foundation of many Hindu and Buddhist models of life and nature, with the idea of Karma. It’s a force in nature determining everyone’s actions; disease was commonly described as past-life Karma.
After Aristotle, however, the idea of free choice began growing with the liberal Atomist Epicurus (d. 270 BCE). Even though his philosophic teacher Democritus believed atoms’ necessary movements determined everyone’s actions, Epicurus said sometimes atoms are knocked off their usual courses and 'swerve'; sometimes atoms can change course and thus create real choices in life. No doubt, he was being honest about his own feelings of choosing freely.
Today, Dewey’s liberal pragmatic model of morality confidently wages philosophic war against all such grotesquely mythical fatalistic ideas. Such a moral war is waged with the idea of self-determination! In India, for example, the idea of Karma has been used for centuries to maintain and justify a rigid feudalistic class structure, called castes, and even in the early 1900s some wealthy Western conservatives said god had chosen them to be wealthy. For Dewey, however, such ideas merely justify a modern feudalistic social structure based on wealth or racist ideas. For Dewey, then, the more such conservative moral ideas are seen as merely different organic habits, the easier it becomes to better control wealth and racist brutality with more liberal educational ideas and laws. In short, the more moral feelings of self-determination continue growing, the more liberated people can feel from all such traditional moral models. Even though we all build habits to help satisfy our needs and wants, we still have some freedom to choose the kind of actions we want to practice. No doubt, not everyone always chooses intelligently which ideas to test, but such moral growth and freedom can continue being enjoyed all through life!
Again, for Dewey intelligent morality is a self-determining process of growth! Obviously there are reasons why people make the choices they make, my previous habit-energies affect my choices today; there are reasons why I choose my table to look and work one way rather than another. Still, for Dewey, the more we feel the freedom to choose one action rather than another, the more our sense of moral freedom grows and expands. Such growth is important. The more a pragmatic model of morality grows, the more each of us feels some freedom to determine what we want to learn. So, if we intelligently practice a pragmatic model of morality, our freedom of choice increases and becomes more self-determined, in spite of what some economists and physicists want to believe. Karl Marx, for example, was an economic determinist; people are determined to make the choices they make by their economic status. And it seems Einstein felt the same about physics; all movements can be known exactly. Dewey’s moral model is different. For him the more we learn to mentally see and test genuine alternatives, the larger our moral freedom of choice grows! And what's more, our choices BECOME morally excellent when their outer social results actually make life more satisfying, peaceful, healthful, and enjoyably meaningful. In fact, such results help elevate morality to an objective science! The more we wisely choose to produce such results, the more intelligent our moral habits become, like personal freedom, responsibility, and self-directed will power! All such naturalistic ideas and results can start growing while enjoying the simple moral art of consciously choosing and then testing our choices.
Excellent Social Feelings
Objective social results, then, also play an important role in Dewey’s liberal model of excellence. Such social results help promote liberal kinds of growth and knowledge. If, say, we’re frustrated with the social results of some habits, like allowing too much political corruption or overly conservative public schools, where students have little freedom to learn what they want to learn, then we can playfully create some new ideas to test for better social results! We can begin working for more democratic schools in our own neighborhoods. Such social results also help define Dewey’s liberal model of morality. We can also see how such ideas about social results can apply to the building of a message table.
No doubt, one social result will be its use by others and so the table should help produce some positive social results for them! They should feel more relaxed afterwards, as are those who work at the table. Such social results also become important in Dewey’s moral model. In short, pragmatic morality is much more than just one’s inner habits; it’s also about the social results too. If a table is being built to help torture innocent people, then such social results help make such work much less than excellent. For Dewey, then, more positive and constructive social results are important. How socially satisfactory will those results be? Will the table help promote the goods of life and make them more meaningful, abundant, and shared, or frustrate and narrow such results? Will the table help make people more intelligent, independent, confident, knowledgeable, and more helpful to others, or will it simply help keep people subservient and obedient to others’ ideas? Such social uses of the table also help determine how excellent our moral choices are.
Down through history, as we’ll often see, social institutions like schools and governments have often neglected to produce democratically constructive social results with their moral choices. In fact, almost the entire moral history of civilization has been to delay and ignore such democratic social results! They the more they did the less HUMANE life remained; the poor were used mainly to create more wealth for those ‘above’ them socially. Especially for conservatives, the quest for, and the holding of, political and educational social power has been an important part of their moral model of excellence. Deus vult; god wills it! For many thousands of years now such social results helped keep life dangerous and feudalistic for almost everyone, and often when more liberal moral democratic habits were talked about, they were quickly put down with brute force.
However, with the more recent growth of better communication tools, it’s become more difficult to keep such social results from growing. No doubt, we liberals are still a long way from producing better social results everywhere, but at least such ideas keep growing. For example, even in the US, conservative politicians still work to keep producing beneficial social results for their wealthy supporters. Liberals, on the other hand, say the best social results like healthcare and increasing wages should benefit as many people as possible! Such social results help make life more satisfying and enjoyable for many, and so should be worked for. Such results can affect many millions of people, and so our daily moral choices not only can, but should, help produce better social results for others. In short, Dewey’s liberal pragmatic morality is much more than what happens to us; it’s also about what’s happening to others out there too.
Such a liberal moral model has been helping make life more humane and caring for centuries now. At the core of it lies the idea of equal social rights, and all the democratic results it produces. No doubt, it’s certainly not the social result of choice everywhere, even in much of the US, but still such social results seem to be growing and that’s what’s important. Climate change and global warming, for example, is another important social result that could affect millions of people in just a few years. So again, even everyday choices about reducing such results become moral choices. Should I drive to the grocery store or walk and get some good exercise? Should I use my message table to make others feel less stressful and more relaxed? Such questions show us how important social results are to everyone. Even for, say, ex-convicts what’s important is organizations helping them grow a stronger law-abiding social habit. Such important social results keep growing within a constructive liberal moral model; more intelligent habits are just as important socially as they are personally. Thus, such a pragmatic and practical moral model can help people produce more intelligent social results for everyone, and help make life more socially creative, kinder, tolerant, and helpful. How much are your neighborhood schools helping promote or obstruct such social results?
Excellent Esthetic Feelings
Finally, the last moral idea is called esthetic excellence. No doubt, it’s a word almost no one knows about, but that everyone feels each and every day! The word esthetic merely refers to the feeling half of our consciousness. For Dewey, feelings and ideas make up the human body-mind. Philosophers, however, have usually referred to such feelings as esthetic experience or qualities. The word esthetic, however, comes from a Greek word -- what word doesn't? The pain killing drug Novocain, for example, is an anesthetic; it numbs our feelings, so intelligent esthetic experience heightens our sense-feelings. Paintings can often heighten and intensify our visual feelings, while music can heighten our auditory feelings; they’re both examples of esthetic feelings! And just like ideas, esthetic feelings too, like enjoyment and fun, can be positive and help promote intelligent kinds of results, or negative and unintelligent ones. In short, esthetic feelings can be expansive or limiting, but in any case they’re an another part of Dewey’s pragmatic moral model. For example, for me some of Beethoven’s music esthetically feels enlivening, enriching, stimulating, and life-affirming; to me it’s constructively esthetic; it not only feels good to hear, but its results are positive too. They remind me of how elegant and stimulating some art can be.
Because we're all feeling creatures, and have been since life began over 3 billion years ago, they’ve played an important part of moral growth for all that time. Still, most people don’t usually feel esthetic enjoyment is an important part of morality? An exception to that rule was many ancient Greeks; many often felt children should learn to enjoy and play music, thus including its practice in many of their educational models of excellence, Plato being one of them. In fact, one of his religious heroes was probably a Dionysian priest called Orpheus whose music was said to tame wild animals.
In any case, however, every conscious second of everyday we have sense-feelings about what’s going on. Such feelings are the esthetic part of our moral life. Positive esthetic feelings of enjoyment, for example, help us accept or avoid much of what’s going on out there, and thus help build all our habits. Our esthetic feelings of parents, too, help form our habits of interacting with them. Such esthetic feelings thus play a very important part in our moral development; children who aren’t allowed to enjoy life are said to be morally disabled; they weren’t allowed to have much fun thinking of different ideas, choosing some to test, testing them, and producing useful social results. How much do our pleasant esthetic feelings of sweet foods nurture and build our food habits? In fact, for Dewey esthetic feelings anchor us to nature's energies and so become an important part of any learning situation. As he said, our feelings reach down into nature and learn more about it. What we feel is beautiful or ugly, elegant or gross, colorful or bland helps build our model will power. In fact, liberals, moderates, and conservatives have used pleasant esthetic feelings to build the habits they think are important. In the 1800s some gases like ether were invented to help make people unconscious – unfeeling -- during surgery. In fact, some feelings are so frightening many people regularly use drugs or alcohol as anesthetics; they want to produce other feelings.
In the 1930s Dewey wrote a book called Art As Experience. Human feelings are another one of those ideas that’s evolved tremendously since ancient times. As we’ve seen, Plato especially celebrated a reasoning habit-art above all other human skills, and so he felt sensual feelings -- esthetic experience -- of the natural world were in fact dangerous for knowing eternal truth; for him only reasoning could produce excellent knowledge. And for centuries after him, conservative Christians helped deny the pleasant feeling half of human nature. Moderate Aristotle made a larger place for feelings in his philosophic model, but he too felt only reasoning could behold and reveal nature’s highest truths.
In our modern era, however, sensually esthetic feelings have been re-elevated to a place of importance; our strongest knowledge now depends on feeling the results of our testing actions! Pleasurable and enjoyable feelings, for example, became much more important to those liberal like Dewey who wanted to build a more naturalistic model of learning and ethics. Even ‘Shakespeare’ felt how important pleasant feelings are: No profit grows where no pleasure’s taken. The more the results of ideas were felt, the more important became esthetic experience. How many parents today quickly learn how important feelings are to their children who haven’t yet grown strong talking habits? In fact, our esthetic feelings about the results of our actions help guide the growth of our habits, and they then help guide the growth of more feelings. Within such a liberal organic model of learning, feelings of enjoyment and pleasure have become much more important for us liberals. Dewey didn’t see them as the only moral good; for him healthful growth was the best moral good. But for many hedonists today, pleasure have been elevated to god itself; you can then well imagine what’s going on when you hear your neighbors yelling ‘oh my god, oh my god!’ On the other hand, for many religious conservatives today, pleasure is the devil’s best bait.
No doubt, everyday experience is full of esthetic feelings, even while building a message table. The moral challenge, however, is to make such work as pleasant and enjoyable as possible! Such feelings can help make all the other 3 parts of pragmatic morality better. On an intellectual level they help us enjoy the creation of ideas we feel might help solve our current problem; on a moral level they can help us enjoy making the choices we feel are best; and on a social level they can help us keep working to produce the social results we feel are best. With a little practice we can enjoy thinking of different ideas for our message table; choosing what ideas to experiment and test, and the social uses we think are best. Such enjoyable esthetic feelings teach us pine wood has a different odor than other woods, hammering and sawing teach us their feelings too can be experimented with, but in either case our feelings are esthetic. They keep us connected to our work and world every minute of every day.
In short, then, esthetic feelings can help promote more positive and enjoyable experiences. The challenge of liberal esthetics, then, is to keep encouraging such pleasant and enjoyable feelings, especially in young children who are still forming many of their psychic habits. Such constructive activities can also teach children how both their feelings and ideas are really important parts of any learning experience. Both feelings and ideas promote feelings of organic wholeness; they’re always united and organically fused together in one on-going process of growth. In fact, building such esthetic habits is an artistic creation itself, felt in everyday experiences like building an evening meal or voting for a candidate.
The more we learn to make our esthetic actions produce more satisfying and enjoyable feelings, the more we feel what liberal esthetic excellence is. Productive esthetic experience is where new and unexpected feelings are felt, and the better the personal and social results, the more valuable the feelings become. No doubt, for most everyone such feelings exist mostly on a subconscious level throughout the day; when they’re brought to a conscious level of awareness, however, they can become useful for more intelligently directing our growth. For example, while building anything sometimes we may feel the pieces just aren’t fitting together like they should, and sometimes they fit wonderfully. Sometimes a relationship just doesn’t feel right, and sometimes it does. That’s what Dewey seems to mean by esthetic experience; it's a kind of fusing and growing of our old feelings with the new feelings we learn with new experiences. Sometimes we get new feelings when we meet someone new, and so our old feelings are changed. Normally it’s simply called learning, but again, for most everyone it all happens on an unspoken and subconscious level of awareness. Making our actions more consciously directed towards feeling, say, what a new relationship might be like, would be a conscious esthetic experience.
Some Conservative Esthetic Feelings
Part of Dewey’s liberal philosophic reconstruction is learning how to better sense and use our enjoyable esthetic feelings to make life more satisfying and less stressful. That art too is another new liberal educational challenge. In his book Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey described how people like Plato and Aristotle felt constructive building work was really quite petty and unproductive of True Knowledge. For them all excellent knowledge had to be known with reason, universalized, and felt as eternal and unchanging, like the gods themselves were often pictured. Menial constructive work was seen as the domain of lowly slaves and artisans – what many Hindu aristocrats called the very bottom of nature’s 'untouchable' social castes. Such negative esthetic social feelings were widespread in the ancient world, thus making it almost impossible to build more democratic systems of government and education. To such people, using one’s feelings to learn how to make, say, a better kind of shoe, or build a better sanitation system, could only produce the lowest level of knowledge – practical knowledge. Aristotle liked looking at animals and plants so he could behold their eternal species-form, and thus discover nature’s eternal truth.
As a result, however, their philosophic models of life and nature helped protect the status quo feelings their feudalistic social systems were producing; life and nature was thus felt as a fixed feudal ladder of worth and value. To feel any other model of nature was often not allowed or even encouraged. Such esthetic social feelings then helped guide the building of similar philosophic models of nature; all through the Middle Ages nature was felt as a closed, eternal, and fixed hierarchy of meanings and values! Plato called his highest Spirit-Idea the Form of the Good, and Aristotle called it the Prime Mover or God, as did Christians after them. Dewey’s point, however, is to say it’s not just ancient history, or the only way to feel life and nature! People can be felt as having equal rights and freedoms, just as they can be felt as part of a feudal model of life. Many conservative Republicans today continue feeling many people are worthless and should be ignored except to work and make them wealthier.
Thanks to modern science like Darwin's work in evolution, and a Progressive political movement in the early 1900s, it’s been much easier to keep challenging such conservative feelings about people and nature. Today we liberals are encouraging people to better feel what’s going on in their own neighborhoods, states, and nations. Can you feel all the ways people are out to take as much of their money as possible, and keep them in debt as well? Have you begun feeling we’re all just human, all too human, and all law-abiding people deserve the same political rights and freedoms? Such esthetic democratic feelings are now helping challenge conservative politicians, criminals, abusive spouses, and many more to build different feelings, with the help of different actions. The more we learn to produce such feelings, the more our esthetic feelings help build a more democratic world. In short, liberal esthetic excellence helps us feel more comfortable in such a world, as well as keep working to make it more respectful and democratic.
In Book 2's Native Models of Excellence, we’ll see a great example of how esthetic feelings were used to build the first stone tool. In that process new feelings about building such a tool were clarified and connected to older feelings of merely finding and using such stones. What’s more, using such tools increased one of the most enjoyable feelings of all – tasting nutritious food! For Dewey such esthetic experience is as valuable today as it was 2.5 million years ago, give or take a Super Bowl Sunday or two. In both cases new feelings are added to old ones, thus expanding one’s moral universe. When Socrates, for example, helped young men feel their ideas of justice, courage, or goodness weren't very logical and reasonable, then he helped them experience a new esthetic feeling, namely, they didn’t know what they thought they knew! Socrates used his questioning art to promote such new feelings and ideas. No doubt, it made some people uncomfortable, especially those who felt they really knew what an idea meant, but he also saw how that new feeling of ignorance helped people think more about such ideas. Today, such ideas of eternal truth are largely ignored by many people, but feelings are still used in much the same way to keep learning about natural kinds of practical knowledge. In fact, such feelings are infinite in number. How enjoyable and fun can you make all your actions feel?
Summarizing…
We can briefly summarize all these ideas about pragmatic morality. Everyone has esthetic experience, from birth to death. Everyone feels their world with their senses, but what’s important is how we use and guide our feelings to enjoy more of life! In particular, 3 areas are singled out as morally important. We can use esthetic enjoyable to keep increasing the feeling of our intellectual, moral, and social actions!
Enjoyable intellectual feelings begin with creating ideas to satisfy a need or want; they then continue with enjoying choosing and testing ideas, and also increasing the constructive social results of our choices. Such actions also increase feeling responsible for our choices, and feeling free to make other choices if we want. Atomic energy, for example, has already produced some tragic social results, but other results like cheap energy have been constructively useful. The moral challenge then becomes building safer, atomic forms of energy. The social result would help make life more satisfying and healthful for as many as possible. Liberal social actions also help produce feelings for democracy, equal rights, intelligent experimental knowledge, respect for just laws, and of course the freedom to openly discuss any and all social values, to name only a few. Even parents who treat their children as friends, rather than as people to dominate, promote such feelings. Such work also promotes intelligent esthetic experience -- feeling how old and new feelings help create better working feelings and ideas about life. Such experience can often lead to new and possibly other more usefully enjoyable habit-arts. Many now feel controlling a fusion energy generating process will help unlock the huge amounts of energy locked in our oceans, and will thus solve our energy challenges for billions of years! However, such inventive feelings can only become reality with intelligent work and experimentation, just as they helped build the first stone tool millions of years ago.
No doubt, all this may still sound far too complex at first, but the more we use and feel such possibilities in our own little daily constructive projects, the more familiar and useful they'll become. Sometimes even daydreaming can create a new idea worth testing. In any case, however, using our enjoyable feelings and ideas together will help make every experience that much fuller and richer. The results of asking food questions, for example, can help promote more enjoyable intellectual, moral, and social results. How quickly will putting hot sauce into my morning coffee relieve constipation? Will the social results be anything worse than stopping up my plumbing system again? And do I really want to esthetically feel those results? In short, any of our unsatisfying and stressful routine habit-arts can be improved with the help of intelligent esthetic experience; how deeply can we enjoy asking humorous questions? What might happen if I added some prune juice to the guacamole? Would it really solve my constipation problem or just keep me in the bathroom all morning? Now who says pragmatic knowledge is useless?
The liberal art of enjoyable esthetic experience can become stronger in any normal everyday activity. In fact, its field is infinitely large, and the sooner young folks learn how to feel what’s it like, the more chances they’ll have to continue making their own lives enjoyably meaningful as well. Only our own imagination limits such growth! When we substitute any event for ‘the table’ in our earlier example, then we can also begin feeling how esthetic experience can apply to anything built, anything from other habit-arts to food dishes to relationships to fine art to interstellar space craft, and even to better indoor plumbing! Sadly, however, because of routine educational systems in many of our public schools and universities, too many young folks never even begin consciously feeling such possibilities! To us Deweyan liberals that is indeed a tragic educational situation. Even kindergarten kids who build flower nurseries for beautifying their neighborhoods can begin consciously feeling all 4 kinds of esthetic excellence if their teachers will merely talk about them! Thus, educating both teachers and parents remains an important social challenge.
Slowly, then, by beginning to feel such new possibilities in our daily lives, and playfully enjoy practicing them, the feeling of Dewey’s pragmatic moral model will continue deepening the meanings of life itself! To us Deweyan liberals such a moral model is a powerful educational tool. It helps make any stressful and frustrating experience a potential enjoyable work of learning art! What’s more, we can build such esthetic habits of experience just like any painter or sculptor builds any painting or statue – with practice! No matter what work we do in life we can increase its enjoyable meanings with the help of intellectual, moral, social, and esthetic feelings. It’s yet another beautiful result of Dewey's Naturalistic Humanism. Instead of feeling life as eternally closed, fixed, and determined in its structure, like Plato and Aristotle often did, liberal esthetic experience helps open up our unsatisfying feelings to ever-new possibilities, even for kindergarten kids. In fact, the more young students are encouraged to feel intelligent building projects, the easier it becomes to consciously enjoy all 4 moral ideas! Oh what a creative and enjoyable work of art even daily experience can become with the help of Dewey's naturalistic ideas of moral excellence, experience as a creative art. Have you taught yourself how to feel philosophically ‘higher’ on life yet?
Perhaps once again another lamely lame limerick can sort the whole thing out; I however remain skeptical.
Harold was used to running with thugs,
Thinking he was better than other mugs.
So, in a courtroom he basked,
And quizzically asked,
You mean intelligence doesn’t mean dealing more drugs?
2. ANCIENT MODELS OF ETHICAL EXCELLENCE
In case you just flipped open the book to this page, this section describes some important ancient models of ethical excellence, while the following 2 sections focuses on Dewey’s liberal models of ethical excellence. What are some of their important similarities and differences, and what active habit-arts do they celebrate? We'll also look in particular at 3 old and useful ethical ideas -- virtues, motives, and duties -- and also at some of the social results different ideas helped produce. For us Deweyan liberals the most important ethical question is this: Have our actions helped make ourselves and our common social world more intelligent, humane, creative, kind, and peaceful for more people, or have they discouraged people from growing those habits?
In this section we'll compare some personal and social ethical results of conservatives like Plato and Augustine, moderates like Aristotle, and liberals like Democritus. You may be surprised at some of their results. If nothing else, it’ll teach us many other people have been thinking about ethical excellence for thousands of years, and thus offering people real ethical choices to make. Another important ethical question was this: are there already existing objects useful for directing our ethical actions, or is each of us left to intelligently experiment and discover what’s good for us and the world we live in? In general, conservatives and moderates have experimented with the first ethical alternative, while liberals have said the second alternative was a wiser choice in an always changing world where no 2 ethical situations are ever exactly the same.
A Little Ethical History, If You Please...
Western ethical philosophy begins in Greece; where else? In much of his public life conservative Socrates loved to ask some interesting ethical questions in his search for ethical certainty! For example, it seems he felt there really existed some eternal and unchanging meaning of ethical ideas like courage, wisdom or intelligence, friendship, and justice? He also asked what makes such ideas so valuable? Is it because the gods said they are valuable, or is it because they are already valuable?
However, he certainly wasn’t the first to offer his ethical opinions about the nature and meaning of ethical ideas like value, goodness, and excellent actions. In fact, as we’ve already seen, more liberal ethical models were already forming while Socrates was alive. Answering their challenges of ethical relativity became his main goal in life. Liberal sophists like Protagoras had challenged all conservatives and moderates with his famous say: Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, and are not. Obviously, this included ethical ideas as well. At the same time, liberal Atomists like Democritus wrote down many of his ethical ideas, many of which have been preserved, as we’ll see in Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence. Both of them were interested in defining more clearly ethical excellence in an always changing democratic world. Incidentally, the Greek word for excellence was 'arete', a word later Romans and Christians translated as the more mild-sounding word virtue. Socrates felt quite differently about nature, and so launched the conservative quest for ethical certainty. Thus, he assumed there were eternally constant forms or meanings of ethical excellence. Another question was do such virtues come from natural or supernatural sources, that is, are they something already existing and imbedded in nature itself, already set and eternally the same, as also Plato and Aristotle often felt; or are such ethical forms merely examples of habit-arts useful in a great many different situations, like honesty, and obeying laws applying to everyone? Said another way, does, say, justice have an eternal and constant meaning for it, or is it merely a word those with social power use to justify their own actions? In short, is there only one meaning for important ethical ideas, or are there as many different meanings depending on the person experimenting with them, like liberal sophists like to say? Do such ethical ideas have only one meaning, or should they be seen merely as behavioral tools for making our way through all the many different situations life offers us?
In general, Socrates, Plato, and even Aristotle believed some ethical ideas like happiness have only one eternal meaning, while liberals like Democritus and Protagoras were much more fluid and diverse with their ideas of ethical excellence. They knew no 2 situations are ever exactly the same, and so ethical excellence would always tend to vary from one situation to the next. Truth, honesty, and respect might be useful ethical habits in many different situations, but not all situations; sometimes acting dishonestly to dishonest people might be a more intelligent ethical response. Also, if, say, lying was the only way to save someone’s life, then why not lie and save someone’s life? If lying was the only way to make an upset person feel better, then why not lie? In short, for many ancient liberal sophists and Atomists, the human level of both motives and results was where all ethical excellence should focus, rather than on any untested ideas about eternal unchanging objects. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and moderates like Aristotle reacted to such ethical relativism in their own ways. Incidentally, the word ethics comes from the Greek work for customs -- ethos.
Both conservative Socrates and Plato experimented with basing their models of ethical excellence on exactly such unchanging objects. Socrates, for example, wanted to reduce some ethical ideas to only one eternal meaning; he felt justice, for example, has only one eternal meaning and we can learn it by simply asking ourselves some intelligent questions. Plato, for example, said justice was a certain kind of harmony among different people. In any case, however, they assumed and experimented with the idea nature itself already has eternal ethical values built into it. Aristotle tells us Socrates didn’t separate such ideas from nature itself, whereas for Plato such ideas are eternal spirit-objects, and thus exist in a completely separate realm of nature. In order to combat humanistic relativism both he and Socrates believed such eternal ethical Truth can be known only by experimenting properly with one's reasoning faculty; the road to knowing such ethical ideas was paved with the proper questions leading to their eternal Truth. Once known, then, a person would automatically act more ethically; his famous saying was Knowledge is Excellence, and Excellence is such Knowledge. Sophists agreed, but they had much different definitions of knowledge.
In many early dialogues, Plato describes Socrates questioning other Greek men about such ethical knowledge. No doubt, his feelings about their having only one eternal meaning were already part of a much older conservative ethical tradition, and so it was easy to get many Greeks to talk with him. However, as those dialogues also show us, discovering such ethical meanings was much more difficult than it felt; in fact Plato himself was much more focused on talking about political ideas than ethical ones. He never really could describe clearly what he felt was the highest spirit-object -- the Form of the Good. At any rate, Socrates spent many of his days questioning Greek men about ethically excellent ideas, trying to discover the eternal meanings for words like wisdom, justice, and courage. For him, Plato, and Aristotle wisdom was the highest excellence. When someone would suggest some definition of it he was quick to show how it contradicted some obvious natural facts. Thus was born one of conservative ethical thinking's main problems: what exactly is the relation between eternal ethical ideas and natural facts? How exactly can they relate to each other? We'll see Dewey's answer in the following section. Stay tuned.
With such feelings Socrates made another ethical assumption: Virtue, or excellence of any kind, was learned only with the help of asking the right questions and reasoning. If, say, such contemplative reasoning remembered what courage eternally was, then you would always act courageously. Obviously it wasn't the only kind of excellence, but it was the highest kind of ethical knowledge, eternal and unchanging. What’s more, even though shoemakers and clothes makers could begin feeling courageous excellence with their actions, but it still wasn’t the highest kind of knowledge; that could only be achieved with the right kind of philosophic reasoning. Because all such workers existed on a low and vulgar intellectual level in an always changing natural world, they were continually distracted from using their reasoning skills properly, and so denied themselves the chance of knowing nature’s highest kinds of ethical truths. The result was the world he saw about him, a world in which everyone seemed to act only for their own benefit, rather than reasonably, and where people generally blindly obeyed what their elders told them to do. Most people, then, could only feel excellence rather than know it; only true philosophers like himself could discover such ideas. Thus, Socrates also believed only those aristocrats who had the leisure to build a contemplative habit and think about such ideas could best know what any kind of ethical or political excellence really was. In any case, however, Socrates probably wasn’t ready to make the leap of faith his more religious-minded student Plato did make; he didn’t want to see all such abstract ideas like ethical good merely as spirit-objects. Aristotle tells us Socrates felt it was best to view all such ethical absolutes as natural objects, as Aristotle usually did himself.
As we've seen, for about the last 30 years of Socrates’s life a Greek civil war kept Greeks killing other Greeks. His participation in some battles seems to have deeply affected his kind and gentle nature; today it’s called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. At any rate, the great questioner spent many of his last years criticizing others’ moral and political knowledge of excellence, perhaps to help them make more intelligent choices before they acted, rather than just routinely obeying orders. Perhaps knowing the eternal meaning of courage would prevent more people from merely throwing away their lives in war. Weren’t such destructive actions really the height of foolishness, rather than acting wisely and courageously? Maybe his questions might help more people know more intelligent ethical ideas, and thus act more intelligently. No doubt, he was saddened by the fact of Greeks killing other Greeks. Many Greeks believed they were superior to all other nations. During the war (431-404 BCE) his world was, as Dewey said, going to pieces, so Socrates encouraged some aristocratic young men to use their reason more than their impulses for obedience, violence, and their own personal good. If they would ask better questions, they might be able to grasp and behold eternal ethical Truth! It would then help them act more intelligently and courageously, not to mention save more Greek lives. As he talked and criticized others’ ethical ideas he also showed them what questioning excellence can sound like. Also, however, with such political questions he attacked the Athenian form of democracy itself; to him it was mainly responsible for the war in the first place. Its ruthless quest to maintain its empire provoked Sparta and its allies to attack, and it also allowed ordinary people to have a voice in government.
After the war, then, Socrates was brought to trial by democrats. By that time, however, he had had enough, and provoked the jury into sentencing him to death. One of his students, Plato, went into a self-imposed 10 year exile, but when he settled in Athens once again he began experimenting with spirit-models of both ethical and political excellence. As a result, his models of ethical and political excellence became divided from the natural world, the world liberal sophists and atomists said was the most important world. For example, like Socrates before him, he saw bodily pleasures as creating serious distractions in the quest to know eternally unchanging ethical ideas, the same kinds of idea Socrates felt were natural objects. Centuries later, Christian hermits would live much the same kind of life, or try to. For Plato, then, only when philosopher kings and queens mentally grasped and beheld the real divine natures of ethical and political excellence could they then use the knowledge properly to bring order and harmonious justice back to their own city-states and peoples' lives. These were important ethical assumptions for him. How could anyone possibly know such completely different objects and their meanings? That was easy; all such ideas were already within us at birth; questioning-asking merely served to reveal what those deeply buried ideas really were. It seemed like commonsense reasoning to him; if such ethical spirit-objects didn't exist, then where did we get the abstract ideas of courage, wisdom, and reasonableness? Mustn’t such universal and abstract ideas really correspond to and reflect some kinds of unchanging and eternal ethical and political objects? The important point is this: given such assumptions and feelings, those other ideas felt normal and natural. Only as such assumptions were shown to produce some very serious problems did his optimistic feelings change. And when that happened it showed how strongly he felt about an important ethical value, namely the truth. It was honored and respected above all other ideas.
Where did he get such assumptions and feelings for a spirit-realm? No doubt, Plato's early education and his religious habits helped him feel such objects really existed. Eventually he would say at the top of that realm was what can be called the Form of the Good. He felt it somehow gave goodness to all objects having some goodness within them. In early adulthood he was quite hopeful such meanings could be learned, and once they were, then one could simply deduce an exact and certain science of ethics, just like mathematicians had done with geometry. During his 10 year exile he probably visited some Pythagorean colonies in southern Italy, and even met a leader who became the model of his philosopher-king described in the Republic.
As we’ve seen, however, such spirit-ideas eventually created their own kinds of unsolvable problems. For example, if ethically excellent objects exist in another realm, then how could such ideas ever be tested to make sure our ethical ideas are absolutely certain? Wouldn't we have to test them each time we used them? There’s a story he eventually defined the Form of the Good with the number 1, but exactly what he meant wasn’t made clear, probably because it still wasn’t very clear to him.
Another ethical idea he used was the word ‘harmony.’ Personal justice is always a harmony among all a person’s parts, and social justice is a social harmony. If a city-state was just, then everyone would be happy with their social roles. But again, what is right, and what is good? Was it just to keep enslaving people to serve a small aristocratic class of people who spent their days leisurely thinking about life and nature? Even Aristotle seems to feel a little guilty about producing knowledge which has little social value at all. No doubt, such generalized ideas like harmony sounded good, but again, if all people have difference kinds of harmony and ideas of goodness, then in what sense can harmony create a just society? Won’t different classes of people be continually disrupting social harmony? That certainly seems to be the case even today.
Little wonder, then, as Plato grew older he turned more and more to politics and describing all the different ways people could learn about his highest ethical idea, a Form of the Good. His dialogue Laws describes hundreds of different ethical ideas, but it also describes a small group of rulers, called the Nocturnal Council. Its job was to make sure everyone complied and acted harmoniously with their ideas. If not, it might mean death to those who didn’t obey such ideas.
In short, Plato too celebrated many traditional Greek ethical ideals: moderation in actions aiming at courage, wisdom, reasonableness, and justice would promote both personal and social harmony, that is, the status quo. For him slavery was an acceptable and necessary ethical idea. Maybe he even thought the gods just wouldn't allow him to clearly see and behold nature's highest ethical truth. In any case, today conservatives like Plato have the same kinds of educational problems? If they don’t like some idea, like equal rights, then they work to merely stop such people from gaining more political power. Thus, social dis-harmony seems to be the general result of Plato’s ethical thinking. If there is only one meaning for ideas like ‘the good,’ then there must be ways of negating all forms of dissent! Even today we still see wealthy conservatives working daily in many different ways to control as much as they can the information people get, so dissent is reduced to a minimum and they can keep working to make themselves even wealthier. In today’s world money has become the form of the good. So, if all moral excellence must promote social harmony, then controlling all dissent can be justified, one way or another. Both medieval and recent history teaches us it’s often been brutally enforced. In any case, much more humane models of ethical excellence continued growing within Greece’s more liberal democratic political systems.
Ancient liberal models of ethical excellence, as Protagoras practiced it, saw it as a form of lawfully intelligent growth, no doubt guided by intelligent feelings of pleasure and pain. Pleasurable actions become unintelligent when they produce pain. Drink too much alcohol and you’ll feel the pain later. Always seeking unintelligent and risky pleasure would increase the chances of pain later on. Plato too respected and portrayed the great liberal sophist himself, and such humanistic models of ethical excellence were common in the 400s BCE, as Athenian democracy was achieving its most developed form. For a few centuries liberal thinkers like Democritus and Protagoras were free to build much more naturalistic, humanistic, and practical models of ethical and political excellence. For them such excellence all started and ended with the individual, rather than the state, as Plato imagined.
For such liberals, the meanings of excellent ethical habits were capable of growing and becoming wiser all through life. For example, Democritus said he'd rather discover another natural law than be the absolutely powerful king of Persia, so you can see the whole liberal ethical foundation had shifted to the good for individuals, rather than state good. On the whole, then, liberal Greek ethical models were much more pleasure-pain based, practical, and down-to-earth, so to speak. Ethical excellence was like a set of practical and useful habit-arts based on respect for others and just laws; such habits usually helped make social life less stressful for people, rather than for just a few powerful leaders. What’s more, for such practical kinds of ethical excellence not only was some intelligent reasoning required, but also active experimental practice was also required to feel what our weaknesses and challenges were, and then build a plan to test our ideas for improving them. If someone felt a law was unjust, then it was an ethical duty to work for its change. Even Plato felt such excellence required actions as well as knowledge.
Moderate Aristotle's Ethical Model
Aristocratic Aristotle’s model of ethical excellence was a compromise between conservative Plato and liberal sophists and atomists like Democritus. As mentioned earlier, he had carefully redd much of Democritus’s and Plato’s work, and wanted to build an ethical model using some ideas from both. Like Dewey said, he wanted to have his ethical cake and eat it too. He wanted to make a place from practical kinds of ethical excellence, but he also felt there existed one highest good; that was ethical cake for him. Thus, the great philosophic moderate celebrated both intellectual and practical kinds of ethical excellence, while also saying the intellectual was higher and better than practical kinds of excellence. After all, he felt mankind is a reasoning animal, and so only reasoning and contemplating nature’s eternal truths could produce the highest happiness. It was the ultimate fulfillment of human nature, and the most god-like as well; god eternally contemplates its own eternal absolutes. However, because it’s not practiced universally, it can best be seen as Aristotle’s highest happiness.
His moderate ethical model also told him there are natural habits of ethical excellence, like all those learned with practice; shoe makers and clothiers could become honest and honorable people by practicing those habits. But they couldn’t really grasp nature’s highest ethical good and happiness until they contemplated nature’s highest and eternally unchanging truths -- until they became godlike philosophers. Practical habits could only produce changing practical knowledge, not the highest happiness. Obviously, such an ethical model assumed there existed some eternally constant objects to contemplate and correspond to. Such Platonic-like reasoning fulfilled mankind's eternal nature as the highest reasoning animal. Because we alone have a reasoning skill it alone can lead us to our highest and most lasting happiness -- to imitate god itself, which was also eternal and unchanging! Thus, like Socrates and Plato, Aristotle too artificially divided ethical excellence into roughly 2 kinds, the lower natural and the higher intellectual.
Such a moderate ethical model celebrates many values of an aristocratic Greek gentleman; slavery was natural and normal, women should be kept out of public life, men should only associate with those of equal classes, and so on. He also wasn't very interested in liberal humanistic models like those of Democritus and Protagoras, or a very creative thinker like, say, Anaximander who created an evolutionary model of biological life over 2,000 years before Charles Darwin, as did the Sicilian Empedocles! Aristotle felt much more comfortable defending the conservative Greek philosophic and social status quo. His ideas of slavery, for example, were even accepted by Thomas Jefferson, who talked much about equality, and yet did very little to actually promote such equality. No doubt, history has shown the harmful social results of Aristotle's thinking about slavery, but if nothing else, it shows how even great philosophers and theologians, all have their habits and mental limits. Still, many of his practical ethical ideas about, say, philanthropy would be accepted by liberals like Dewey, and some similar ideas were embraced by Confucius in China, who may be called an oriental pragmatist. Even though such practical character habits can't produce certainty in an always changing world, or produce the highest kind of happiness, ethical actions like generosity and kindness to certain people are still very important for living an excellent social life.
So again, like his teacher Plato, Aristotle artificially divided ethical excellence into 2 kinds, intellectual and practical. With ideas about practical excellence he too celebrated what were very widespread and common habits among educated Greeks; they celebrated a common ethical status quo expressed by the phrase Nothing Too Much. Confucius too painted practical ethical excellence as a so-called Golden Mean between extremes; Aristotle would have agreed. For example, between acting like a coward and impulsively throwing your life away, was courage's best meaning; sometimes it’s wise to retreat and sometimes it’s wise to attack. Between having too much and too little was having the best kind of wealth. Such ethical ideas were reasonable, but Aristotle also agreed with Plato about true happiness; it’s reserved only for those philosophers who practice reasoning about nature’s eternal objects, like god. No doubt, such ethical dualism also shows how Greek society was quite divided on both physical and mental levels; today it’s often described as the difference between the haves and the have-nots.
For most people the Greek idea of moderation was already the common rule for ethical excellence. The best kind of justice, for example, could easily be described as being midway between lawlessness and dictatorship. In any case, however, the best kinds of practical ethical excellence meant building a number of useful habit-arts, like choosing moderate pleasures rather than excessive or weak ones; the best diet, for example, would be one midway between gluttony and starvation; it was a value Buddhism’s founder learned too. However, such a moderation test for ethical excellence didn’t always work; a few actions had no moderate amounts, like adultery for example, or rape. As far as we know, out of all Greek philosophers only he and Socrates ever married and Aristotle obviously took the institution seriously. For most ethical situations, however, moderation was a useful rule for practicing ethical excellence.
Within such an ethical model Aristotle also found a place for pleasure and pain; they were seen as useful learning tools for building practical habits. Like so many educators after him, he felt it was sometimes necessary to bop a child or young person on the head to remind them to act more respectfully. Even at the Catholic high school I went to, such physical punishment was a daily event. As a result, ethical education was seen as merely a preparation for adult life. Liberal Dewey would help build a rather different goal for education; he saw it as learning how to intelligently guide a student’s own growth of democratic ideas like equal rights, rather than merely teaching them how to fit in to the existing social and economic status quo. In any case, Aristotle’s ethical ideas help us see how in ancient times there was almost no social mobility between classes; most everyone stayed in the same class they were born into, and so practiced the ethical habits they learned. In India such a status quo was cemented into an eternal caste system.
Another rather modern ethical idea Aristotle celebrated was using both inner motives and outer actions to achieve ethical excellence; Dewey too celebrated that idea very much. Healthy, kind, and helpful inner motives, as well as useful outer results, were ethically important for both of them. After all, what's praiseworthy about wanting to hurt someone and yet actually helping them? Motive-feelings like generosity and kindness make it much easier to actively produce those kinds of results. And so Aristotle says to feel such emotions properly, at the right time, on the right grounds, towards the right people, for the right reasons, helps make ethics one of the most challenging of all philosophic studies. For us Deweyan liberals, however, the weakness of Aristotle’s model is the narrow range of such actions. Only to those of equal class and social status should one interact with such motives and actions. So, don’t bother feeling contempt for a pizza delivery person arriving with cold food when there's a blizzard outside and it's 200 below zero. Why not just tip them and put the pizza in the microwave, rather than put them in the microwave? What’s more, outer results are ethically important too; to give a donation at the right time, in the right amount, for the right cause, and to produce the best results is at least as important as having the right motives. In fact, for Dewey such outer results are more important.
Aristotle also mentioned another rather noble ethical idea Dewey liked -- feeling our actions not merely as a means for getting some reward, but just because such actions build a noble character! Nobel character development was important for both Aristotle and Dewey. For example, why not just feel how good it is to help those who're trying to help themselves, rather than always expecting some reward from it? To many young folks today that idea may sound a little too idealistic, but philosophers call it making an action an end-in-itself; it’s good just for itself. Such actions also celebrate the important ethical idea of staying in the present, feeling its excellent energies, and enjoying them for own sake. In China Confucius too felt such actions were a sign of a 'superior person'. In other words, our generous, kind, and law-abiding actions can be felt as ends-in-themselves as well as helping produce useful results. With such ideas Aristotle too celebrated another idea Dewey liked -- being in the present; the great Sicilian Sophist Gorgias too celebrated it. How can we possibly learn if our motives are right for the situation we're in if we don't take the time to feel what's happening here and now? After all, it's one thing to feel we should help educate others, but wisely putting that ethical excellence into action should be guided by feeling what's going on here and now; such feelings might help us see what the best size hammer would be to teach an obnoxious person better manners. Or, in a different situation, what good would yelling at a delivery person do when they’re trying mightily to return the feeling to their fingers, toes, and nose?
Christian Models of Ethical Excellence
Ancient Christian models of excellence often used Plato as their model. With the help of Augustine of Hippo, much of Plato’s work became part of the West’s conservative religious tradition. Eventually, for thousands of years, Christians too pictured the highest virtues and excellences as coming from a spirit-source – spirit-ideas for Plato, and god for Christians. Both existed in a completely different realm. For most everyone the belief in such a realm was already strong, so they didn’t ask questions like how could they ever interact with natural objects like people, or how could they be tested. They were already felt to exist. Almost everyone already believed such spirit-objects were active in the natural world, and some friendly ones had revealed eternal ethical truth to a few holy people in the form of sacred writings. Most people normally felt such objects in fact kept all the eternal stars and planets in their constantly recurring and mathematically well-ordered harmonious rhythms and motions, while evil spirits created diseases, earthquakes, and floods on earth. Most felt such stars and planets were closer to god and thus higher up on nature's scale of values; their spirits could even direct life here at the earth.
Thus, astrology became a growing 'science' too, especially after Alexander’s armies brought the art back from Persia, called today Iran. After all, why didn't the stars and planets all fly off into space? They too must be controlled by some powerful spirit causes in nature who also revealed ethical kinds of truth as well. Even Aristotle felt because the stars were closer to the divine ether astronomy could, therefore, be an exact science. However, when Isaac Newton mathematically described a natural universal force called gravity, and showed how it accurately described celestial and earth-movements, not only did Aristotle’s ancient model of nature begin falling with a thud, but many of his ethical ideas based on such ideas also became more doubtful, like contemplation was the only way to produce the highest happiness. More people began asking, if one natural force controlled nature, then why shouldn't more people be able to democratically control their own lives and governments?
Centuries earlier, however, ancient Christian philosophers like Augustine (d. 430 CE) said love of god was the highest ethical good and so obedience to its ideas was ethical excellence; they were defined in the New Testament. So like Plato, he too suggested turning away from earthly pleasures as a useful tool for enjoying life and relieving its stressful tensions. Needless to say, such a turning away also negated personal and social kinds of ethical and political progress, like increasing one’s knowing and working for equal rights. For Augustine, the best natural good was converting more people to the only true model of life and nature – a Christian model. For him this life is only a brief testing ground where evil spirits keep offering pleasures to people. Thus, one of the first things Christians did was close all the empire’s public baths; they could only lure people to hellfire. In fact, such pleasurable ethical actions were why god was helping destroy the empire in the 400s CE! For decades barbarian tribes were turning Roman civilization into rubble, and the government’s ability to protect people and satisfy their needs was becoming more and more difficult. The Christian ethical solution, then, was to teach habits of obedience, and even force others to accept its ethical ideas and make the world more harmonious. If nothing else they gave people hope for a better life. So, with Augustine’s help ethics became highly negative and pessimistic. Jewish prophets blamed Jewish suffering on their sinful actions, and those ideas were embraced by the Church as another means of social control and power.
Such ancient and medieval conservative and moderate philosophers and theologians continued encouraging people to see religious habits as eternal ethical truth. People were told such ideas came from god itself, and so ethical duty became making everyone practice the same kinds of ethical habits: supporting the Church, fighting its wars, obeying its ideas of blessedness and sinfulness, and expecting an eternal reward. The greatest ethical excellence was love, or so churchmen said. Testing such ideas was thus impossible at best; they got their value from completely different spirit-objects. Only beyond all of nature's violence and bloodshed, beyond all of mankind's stupid wars, brutal violence, greed, diseases, and drunken revelry, beyond all its disruptive variety and constant changes were the most excellent ethical objects to lovingly caress and worship -- constantly true and excellent spirit-ideas. Practicing their ethical ideas, and they alone, are what people need to earn their heavenly reward. Once again, routine astronomical movements helped justify such ethical feelings still practiced by millions today.
Thus, Augustine's ethical Christian models were just as artificially dualistic as Plato's; there was no evidence such objects even existed! In fact Plato is often described as the first Christian. Also like Plato, Augustine too pictured the body and mind-soul as completely different objects, one natural, the other eternal spirit. As a result, Christian ethical models of value were artificially divided into one’s inner motives and outer results, with the emphasis on one's inner motives. Only they could make people feel sinful and repent, purify their soul, and make it righteous, while outer results of one’s actions were often ignored. Such motive feelings of ethical righteousness had been replacing ancient habits of sacrifice practiced for thousands of years. The prophet Isaiah had written how god hates routine sacrifices, but loves god-fearing righteous people.
Also important for Plato and Augustine was the idea of sinfulness. Although created by god, it gave an obedience test to Adam and Eve; they were not to eat of the tree of knowing good and evil. Evidently god wasn’t very scientific minded; science is the art of knowing good and evil. At any rate, after failing such a test somehow all of their descendants then became infected with an original sin. Such ideas of universal sinfulness were then used to help justified the Church's rituals and conversion ideas. Somehow or other everyone had inherited from Adam and Eve an original sin of disobedience, and so were already corrupt and in need of redemption. Added to that idea was the story about evil spirits always working to recruit more and more souls. Evidently some devils could get out of hell and roam the earth tempting people everywhere.
All such ideas helped build an ancient Christian model of ethical excellence. It was pictured as a kind of tightrope walk between salvation and sin which everyone takes daily. Work to support the religious hierarchy was encouraged; idle hands are the devil’s workshop; they might actually be used to make one feel the pleasure nature had been building into everyone for millions of years! For Augustine all fall short of god’s goodness, even though no one could really prove god even existed! It didn’t matter; most everyone already accepted the existence of such spirits, and wanted to obey their social superiors, rather than wonder how an all-good and merciful god could possibly create such a nature filled with evil. How could anything evil come from what was perfectly good? Most people simply wanted to go to heaven after they died rather than ask such questions. Because evil spirits were felt as swarming all through the natural world, they could overturn the good results of anyone's actions, but they couldn’t affect one's good will – one’s inner motive feelings. So, again, Christians celebrated morality's inner world of motives and desires; what mattered most ethically was one's inner motives. If I really loved a heretic then burning them at the stake was justified! If you really loved your slaves then whipping them was justified. Such models of ethical excellence helped keep a feudalistic status quo in place for centuries.
Like Plato, Augustine too believed all of nature's highest virtues and excellences already existed in a spirit-realm. For Augustine, however, ethical excellence couldn't be achieved merely with reason, but with a humble and accepting inner motive of faith in, and obedience to, the Church's ideas. However, although natural results were downplayed, such inner motive-feelings could only grow as a result of practicing and obeying the Church's ethical rules, like poverty and humility. Only such ethical actions could participate with divine goodness, and thus lead to salvation. Poor-as-a-church-mouse Socrates was Plato's model for such ethical excellence, Jesus was Augustine's model, and in China Lao Tzu was another similar type person, as were the Cynics in ancient Greece -- cynos is the Greek word for 'dog'. In short, forget about wanting natural goods like wealth, health, helping improve the wretched lives of slaves and peasants, or build excellent diet and exercise habits so you could know which topping might be best for tonight's pork-kabobs. Such habits only keep us anchored to the always changing and corrupting natural world, rather than atoning for our sins and getting ready for god's saving grace, even though god supposedly knew who would be saved before the world was even created! Thus, ethical excellence was reduced to loving god and obeying Church ideas. For us liberals, however, all such ideas were a natural response to living in a world where real useful technology and experimental knowledge as still almost non-existent.
What other ethical excellences did god supposedly will? According to the gospels Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount listed some of them: humility, compassion, peacemaking, repentance, not returning evil for evil, repenting, and even giving away more than what was asked for. Few bothered to ask what was the motive from which such ideas came? As the gospels show us, Jesus himself believed the End Times had arrived, and a new heavenly kingdom would be speeded up with such examples of ethical righteousness. From such motive-feelings came the radical nature of Jesus’s ethics, which evidently even he could not always conform to. His cleansing of the temple money-changers showed not even he could ‘turn the other cheek’! Within such motive-feelings why worry about any physical and naturalistic excellence, like becoming more educated and planning for a better future? God cares most about one’s righteous inner feelings and motives; repent, for the kingdom of god is at hand.
Such religious ethical models of excellence became a part of the conservative and moderate philosophic traditions too. Even in the late 1700s, when liberal Enlightenment thinkers were questioning and challenging all such spirit-models of ethical excellence, moderate philosophers like Immanuel Kant aimed once again to give people a way to know their ethical decisions were absolutely right. If someone acted with just the right motives, for example, then they could feel their actions and choices were always right, even if the results turned out to be tragic! For Kant our inner motive-feelings for ethical certainty were the only way to achieve ethical excellence; forget outer results and concentrate on creating excellent inner motives. Telling the truth, for example, can always be felt as ethically right, and so any results from such actions didn’t matter ethically, even if innocent people might be killed. We'll see more of Kant's ethical thinking in Book 4's Modern Models of Excellence.
Such an artificial separation of inner motives from outer results had already been part of the conservative Christian tradition for centuries. No doubt, feeling such ethical ideas were reassuring to people who wanted to feel some actions were absolutely right, and others absolutely wrong in all situations. However, to those wanting to actually keep improving life with science’s help, such ethical ideas were all but useless! In fact, they could be used to justify psychological and socially harmful results! They promoted the feeling people are really divided into mind and body, rather than body-mind, and they neglected all those actions which produced better living results for more people. Emphasizing only one’s motives and feelings as ethically important encouraged people not to think about actually improving our common and shared natural world! After all, even Hitler had defendable motives in wanting to make life better for Germans by acquiring more land for them, but who would argue the outer result of killing millions of innocent people wasn't morally monstrous? In the next section we’ll see how Dewey emphasized both motives and results for ethical excellence. Once again all such ideas will be neatly sum up with yet another landlubberly lame limerick.
Conservative Tom wanted to give ethics a shot,
About such ideas he had quite a lot.
So at his desk of wood,
He wrote what was good,
For everyone, whether they knew it or not.
3. DEWEY’S LIBERAL MODEL OF ETHICAL EXCELLENCE
In this and the following section we’ll look a little closer at Dewey’s liberal model of ethical excellence. As we’ve been seeing, it’s very different from conservative and moderate models like Plato’s and Aristotle’s. Like many ancient sophists and atomists, it placed ethical values like satisfaction, enjoyment, growth, intelligent learning, and happiness on a completely human level, rather than outside it in eternal natural forms or eternal spirit-objects. The highest ethical goods and excellence were human based, including democratic and educational excellence. Also, Dewey’s ethical ideas of excellent motives and duties were very different from conservative and moderate models, largely because modern behavioral models of psychology justified creating different satisfying habits for different people, and thus encouraged ethical diversity rather than social conformity with similar ethical habits.
Such a liberal ethical model simply assumes there really is no radical separation between our inner and outer worlds; body and mind are always organically connected both to each other and nature throughout life! With such an organic Behavioral model of psychological excellence, Dewey felt confident criticizing all conservative and moderate models of ethical excellence in which the highest ethical value was artificially reduced to one ultimate and eternal good or happiness. Not only does such a liberal psychology tell us life is always changing, growing, and evolving, but modern science too tells us nature is the same way. Thus, why shouldn’t one’s ethical excellence too be pictured as always growing and evolving, and where experimentally intelligent growth becomes very important? No doubt, if one wishes one may say intelligent growth is the highest liberal good, but such a generalization really tells us nothing about how to intelligent learn what’s good for us here and now. That habit-art can only be known with other ideas, like experimental testing. Such a learning habit-art encourages everyone to democratically build their own models of ethical excellence, and make their own lives more satisfying and enjoyable here and now! Finally, what's important for Dewey’s model of ethical excellence is BOTH inner motives and outer results! It doesn’t artificially separate the 2 into different objects, like Plato and Augustine usually did. For Dewey, then, each of us becomes a kind of ethical artist! With our experimental actions each of us builds our own ethical universe, just as painters paint pictures, and sculptors sculpt statues.
Thus, Dewey’s model of ethical excellence is both experimental and forward-looking. It uses intelligent experimentation to discover the future results of actions we make here and now; it doesn’t use mere reasoning or faith to discover goods and values already existing! In fact, no 2 ethical situations are ever exactly the same, and thus no 2 ethical actions are exactly the same. What ethical excellence means in one situation will not be exactly the same in other situations. Only talking about abstract generalizations like ‘ethical good’ makes us feel there really exists eternally unchanging ethical values. Honesty may generally be the best ethical choice, but it certainly isn’t excellent in all situations.
No doubt, some liberal ethical generalizations are similar to conservative and moderate ones, like intelligence, generosity, and kindness, but, again, there’s often another big difference between them; how widely should they be used in everyday life? Conservatives and moderates like Plato, Augustine, and Aristotle weren’t very democratic, so they often didn’t use their values across class, ethnic, or religious divisions. Aristotle’s ethical model of aristocratic nobility basically applied only to his own class; it defined ethical excellence mainly for it.
As a result, on a daily basis such liberal ideas help create a different kind of basic ethical challenge. They keep urging people to ask how can I make my actions here and now produce more satisfying and respectful results for myself AND others? So again, only when liberally humane ethical ideas actually produce such results do they become excellent, and not before. For Dewey, mere ethical reasoning or faith can’t really grasp absolutely unchanging ethical Truth, like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine wanted it too. Instead, liberal ethics aims to artistically build living and growing habit-arts useful in a great many different ethical situations, like truth-telling, honesty, respect for just laws, enjoyment, and so forth.
What aristocratic Plato and Augustine looked down on -- the intelligently practical habits of the lower classes -- Dewey celebrated if they produced more satisfying and helpful personal and social results! For him ethical ideas like virtues, motives, and duties are like plants; they keep growing all through life! So again, ethical excellent is the art of intelligently controlling the satisfying growth of our habits. Too much pleasurably harmful candy, for example, can rot our teeth and damage our bodies. Thus, another important ethical question is formed: What can stop us from keeping such control over our ethical growth? That question can perhaps best be answered with the words ‘excessive selfishness and disrespect!’ The more disrespectful we are of equal social laws and innocent people, and the more we practice greedy habits of selfishness, the more difficult it becomes to keep control of our freedom, growth, and ethical choices. Choose to rob a bank or someone’s car and you may lose your freedom for 5 years. In any case, however, like science's ideas, ethical ideas too are simply useful behavioral tools for intelligently guiding our actions and growth. Such an organic ethical model of excellence follows quite naturally from Dewey’s psychological model of excellence. Both use experimental testing on a daily basis.
What's ethically excellent is intelligently testing here and now our ethical ideas of, say, generosity and kindness, and then, where possible, see their results. We might think it’s okay to keep breaking some law or giving money to a homeless person because we have a motive-feeling of sympathy, but what are the actual results? Do we keep being disrespected by other people, or keep encouraging a harmfully addictive habit in a homeless person? In such an ethical model what’s important is working to make our actions produce better results. Even if you feel a new ball-peen hammer is the best tool for re-educating an abusive spouse -- Wham! -- it still needs to be tested; doesn’t each of us have the right to defend ourselves? In any case, however, both our inner motives and outer results are what give any idea its ethical meanings and value! Even Aristotle's ideas about excellent virtues, like art, science, and intuitive thinking need to be tested to see their results. Thus both motives and objective results of such testing help elevate any subjective ethical motive and action to the level of scientific knowledge. And only continued testing can keep them so elevated.
Again, there’s a long history of such liberal ideas. Ancient sophists and Skeptics often said much the same kinds of things about ethical excellence. The educational tragedy, however, is almost no one has been taught such a history. Education from ancient times to today has been basically conservative or moderate. However, with the growth of modern biological evolution such practical experimental learning habits can been seen as going all the way back to the beginning of life itself, with trial-and-error actions! Even some social animals act experimentally to help their kin, like wolves and dolphins, and naturally they go deep into 3 million year old human history as well. Within such a history many useful ethical motives and actions have been helping produce more satisfying results for others. Many ethical ideas go back to ancient Egypt, some 3,000 years before Jesus, and to the Indian Vedas 1,500 years later, not to mention ancient Greek liberals like Democritus and Protagoras. In them all there's a continuing emphasis on certain actions, but in a constantly changing world how can any ethical idea be anything but experimental? What’s ethically new on a human level, however, is the ability for making any routine idea more consciously controlled, and thus more intelligent! Talking about different actions and their results has greatly increased the range of our ethical actions; even burial arts increased life’s satisfactions and decreased life’s fears. So if, say, our courageous or truth-telling ethical habits are weak, if we’re afraid of many things and don’t have good speaking habits yet, then it’s up to us to make an intelligent plan to produce more enjoyable and satisfying results here and now? We can imagine the kind of self we’d like to be, and then practice to make that image a reality. In any case, in that process both motive-feelings and actions help create useful values and goods. In such ways, Dewey’s liberal model of psychological excellence as experimental testing blends rather naturally into ethical excellence as well.
Is There One Highest Ethical Good?
Obviously, Dewey’s liberal model of ethical excellence openly criticizes the assumption of there being one highest good for everyone at all times. In the last section we saw how Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine pictured one highest ethical good. Whether defined as spiritual or natural, we could at least feel some of its goodness, if not know it completely. What person can ever know god completely? Even Aristotle’s highest good of contemplative happiness could only be felt for short periods of time. Still, he said it existed, and thus opened himself up to some rather interesting ethical questions. For example, if only one action can produce the highest happiness, then why hasn’t everyone discovered it? Why doesn’t everyone feel happiness practicing thinking about nature’s eternal objects at least sometime during each day? Why do many, if not most, people find their highest happiness in joyful and respectful sex? That kind of sex seems to be the supreme happiness for many here and now.
Other obvious ethical questions can be asked. Because there’s really no universal agreement about such a highest good, then why not just accept ethical diversity as ethical reality? Why not just agree with the sophist Protagoras and say people are the builders of all ethical models of excellence? Why not just admit what nature shows us: There are, in fact, an infinite number of highest ethical goods all depending on how satisfying their results are for different people? And why not just admit the results of such actions again determine how excellent such ideas are? For many, money is the highest good, and they’ll do whatever they can to keep making as much of it as possible. For others it’s peace and quiet? Thus, in such an ethical situation what’re most important are the motives and results of our actions. The results of excessively greedy actions, for example, help show us how excessive and unhealthful they are, not only to individuals but to others as well. The more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, the more difficult life becomes for many. Such a liberal ethical model gives us an objective way to judge how excellent some actions are.
Again, everyone creates their own highest ethical good with their actions. The fairly new science of anthropology seems to verify such a naturalistic model of goods and values. It finds hundreds of different highest ethical goods around the world! So, why argue there really is only one highest ethical good? Doesn’t it merely reflect the inner motives of those who build such an ethical model? Life teaches us we all learn our highest ethical goods with practice, and the more they’re practiced, the more they feel like the highest good.
No doubt, for centuries many people were taught to feel there really is only one highest good, like pleasure, happiness, happiness for the greatest number, contemplation, or knowing, loving, and serving god, but certainly not everyone agrees. After all, why should a perfect and all-powerful god ever need anything outside itself? Dewey simply accepted ethical reality and said people have been experimenting with their ideas of a highest good for thousands of years, and still there’s no consensus on what it is! If nothing else, the highest good seems to be acting so as to increase our satisfying feelings of life, but even that idea quickly breaks down to all the different individual habits of satisfaction we have today. For some destruction of one’s self and others is the highest good.
For more democratically liberal Dewey, however, there are as many ethical virtues, motives, and duties as there are people on earth! Thus, life produces as many different models of ethical and religious truth as there are people, and they’re always growing and evolving. What is ethically excellent for young college women may not be ethical excellent for older retired men. Thus, in place of one highest ethical good Dewey substituted an evolutionary model of ethical growth. Ethical abstractions like goodness and excellence BECOME useful goods and values only after they’re tested; before that they’re merely abstract ideas. The same may be said for evil values like disrespectful dominance or brutality; they become evil for a person only after they’re felt! Such results are what help create forward-looking laws against such actions. In any case, however, such a liberal ethical model fuses our conscious inner motive-feelings to the results of our conscious actions, and thus promotes more natural feelings of ethical excellence.
In his Reconstruction in Philosophy Dewey has an entire chapter sketching his new liberal model of ethical excellence. In the following quote we can feel how ethical ideas are used as tools to keep creating an infinite variety of satisfying goods in our daily lives.
Moral goods ... exist only when something has to be done. (A problem) ... proves that there are ... (certain) evils in (a) situation ... (and) it never is an exact duplicate ...; the good of … (any) situation has to be discovered ... Yet it is the part of wisdom to compare different cases ... Health, wealth, industry, temperance, amiability, courtesy, learning, esthetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience, enterprise, thoroughness and a multitude of other generalized (values and) ends are acknowledged as goods. But the value of this systematization is intellectual ... Classifications (merely) suggests possible traits to be on the lookout for in studying a particular (challenge); they suggest methods of action to be tried in removing the ... causes of ill. They are tools of insight; their value is in promoting an individualized response in the individual situation. (169, additions are my own)
And speaking of courtesy and respect, who hasn’t yet realized it’s best to politely ask for someone else’s help, or permission to interact with them!? Should anyone merely assume a sexual partner and their universe of feelings is always ready for such interactions, or should we first see how they’re feeling? For Dewey such a question shows how one tests their motive-feelings courtesy with courteous actions. In certain situations, sometimes self-love becomes the highest ethical good.
Other Personal Ethical Challenges
No doubt, expanding and improving our ethical universe may feel strange and awkward at first. Many people like to feel they’re right even before they act; they’re doing god’s will, so they must be right. Such motive-feelings are common, but they merely reflect how conservative education has been. Even today, most everyone probably feels they don’t create their ethical values, they merely practice those already existing. Why bother improving any weak, excessive, or unhealthful ethical habit? Thus, an important ethical challenge goes practically unnoticed, when in fact most everyone’s ethical habits could be improved. Therein lies an important educational challenge for us Deweyan liberals.
Feeling one needs to improve a certain ethical habit is often a damn tough ethical feeling to have! Often it shatters the self-centered feeling we already know what’s good and valuable. It’s so easy to tell ourselves such work isn’t really necessary, or I'll start my more excellent diet or exercise habit tomorrow; never do today what you can put off till tomorrow, said one famous actor. Such feelings are natural in those who feel their actions are already excellent. In reality, however, becoming, say, more courageous can begin growing even around the house, and even more enjoyable if it becomes a playful game. How much fun can we have making a trap for that pesky house mouse, and once caught then take it outside? After all, it’s just a mouse, not the Lock Ness Monster! And why not try playfully enjoying only one piece of pizza and then leaving the table, rather than shoveling 9 pieces into your face as fast as possible? With such questions we return to the ethically excellent art of intelligent learning we’ve seen in Part 1.
Life is full of learning challenges, including the challenge to make learning as enjoyable and entertaining as possible! In fact, such a habit-art transforms all learning into a childlike playfulness, ethical values included! It helps focus our all-important attention onto our inner motive-feelings, our actions here and now, and the results of those actions. Such ethical playfulness makes it easier to smilingly ask do I really need that 10th cup of coffee or that second pack of cigarettes or that house mouse or that 15th beer or even more heroin just because it’s there? From Dewey’s behavioral model of ethics, such feelings represent bodily tensions that have been relaxed before with coffee, cigarettes, beer or heroin. Learning how to relax one’s tensions thus becomes another useful and liberating ethical tool. It helps us become the master of our motive-desires rather than remain a slave to them.
Therein lies one of the most challenging parts of Dewey’s liberal ethical model. Often learning such useful ethical habits reduces itself to simply learning how to enjoy more healthful and constructive actions, one step at a time and one day at a time! Such ethical excellence includes physically celebrating such actions and rewarding them too! They help build stronger inner motive-feelings for them. Such actions even make ethical improvements easier and more enjoyable. They make it easier to enjoy ‘killing and burying’ all those enslaving and unsatisfying routine ethical habits one step at a time, and one day at a time! What could be more playfully enjoyable and ethically liberating at the same time, except perhaps telling a petty and greedy supervisor where to go?
Such ethical challenges are present on a daily basis. They challenge us to see which of our ethical habits are weak, excessive, and unhealthful, and then make a game of becoming more courageous, wise, respectful, and honest. Such common situations like, say, staying within a shopping budget rather than going deeper into debt, or obeying a just law rather than breaking it, offers daily challenges for becoming more relaxed and psychically centered, and then enjoying the results of more intelligent actions. For example, playfully laughing at the impulse to buy that genuine artificial tiger-skin rug is one way such excellence becomes ethical will power. And at the same time such playfulness helps make everyday life a more interesting and satisfying place to be. For us Deweyan liberals, it’s the best way anyone actually builds their own little private ethical 'survival kit', so to speak. Not only can such ethical actions make our inner motive-feelings more courageous or honest, but also help make our shared social lives more courageous, respectful, and honest.
Successfully answering such challenges teaches us neither modern scientific nor liberal ethical ideas reflect and correspond to already existing static and unchanging objects. They teach us we ourselves can build the person we want to become. In that process even ethical ideas and motives are merely useful behavioral tools to help us make life here and now more rewarding and satisfying. For example, when a mean and domineering person violently abuses a partner for not obeying them, it's yet another chance to courageously build virtues like self-defense and justice, perhaps aided by educational tools like a full-sized crowbar -- Wham! Thus, ordinary daily life and its situations often challenge us to keep building our own set of ethically excellent habit-arts, especially creativity, justice, and enjoyment. After all, we're all just people faced with the challenge to keep making life more enjoyable and satisfying, aren’t we? Have you begun feeling your own ethical challenges yet? That kind of ethical first step is usually the toughest one to make when building a more excellent habit-art. If nothing’s bothering people physically, they normally feel everything’s okay.
Dewey’s Fluid Model of Excellent Motives
So much for organic and growing ethical goods and values;, but what about excellent motive-feelings? After all, such feelings are also an important part of liberal ethical excellence. Why stay ethical divided by, say, wanting to cheat someone, but not being able to do so? Isn’t it ethically healthier not to feel such a motive in the first place? Should we feel a motive of wanting to reduce those who don’t agree with us to second class citizens, or even kill them? Such questions about motives bring us to another important ethical question: how do we know when our motives are excellent; what inner motive-feelings can best help encourage ethically liberal habit-arts, and how can we grow such motives?
Such questions are fairly easy to answer for us Deweyan liberals. We build excellent motive-feelings with excellent actions. If our actions are helpful and respectful, then our motive-feelings become helpful and respectful. Along with creating ethically excellent habits comes the growth of excellent motive-feelings. It’s yet another reason why early childhood education is so very important for building all liberal kinds of values and habits. After all, conservatives have known such behavioral facts for centuries, and so built their schools to teach such habits and motives. If, for example, our actions don't help re-educate an abusive spouse, then our motive-feelings for justice and education remain mere feelings. However, when the result of our action is learning a more respectful habit, then both inner motives and outer actions become stronger for similar situations! And, because we don't know what situations will happen tomorrow, it also makes building ethically excellent motives an experimental art, just like scientists and doctors build their habits and motives too. So, the more we practice intelligently respecting just laws, the stronger our motive-feeling become.
Another way such motives can begin forming is internally. For example, reading about such motives can help build a model of motive excellence, as can seeing other actions. The more we see examples of courageous actions, the easier it is to feel their meanings. However, what makes such feelings even stronger and deeper is actually practicing those actions.
No doubt, many conservatives and moderates may feel such a model of motive excellence is far less than best; for them some motives are eternally good and worthwhile, especially those directed towards eternal and unchanging objects. To want to learn more about them is the best motive of all; so said both Plato and Aristotle. Dewey, however, kept the liberal tradition alive and growing after being suppressed and confined for thousands of years. For him, the more we keep experimentally feeling the active results of our actions, the stronger they become and the more they help us stay focused in the present and working creatively to improve its challenges! The more that happens, the further away we move from conservative and moderate undemocratic kinds of ethical excellence. As we’ll see more fully in Book 4, ethical models like moderate Immanuel Kant’s radically separated the results of ethical practice from ethical motives, and thus help freeze ethical growth itself. Such a separation helped people feel some of their actions would always be right and ethical.
So, the question becomes what motive-feelings did Dewey recommend building with our actions? Once again we can see how down-to-earth and commonsensical his ethical model is. For example, he too celebrates experimentally feeling motives like kindness, respect, and sympathy for others, and not just routinely but intelligently! Acting with such motive-feelings helps make many ethical decisions easier and more satisfying. Often such feelings help produce better personal and social results, and they help make one’s psychic life less stressful too. After all, who can't feel kindly about helping a greedy and heartless drug dealer go to jail for 10 to 20, or a rogue stock broker feel the same results, with, perhaps, a day or two off for good behavior? At one time Dewey said it like this “The insistence … that we must become aware of the moral quality of our (inner) impulses and states of mind on the basis of the results they effect … is a fundamental truth of morals.” (Ethics, 252) Thus, Dewey’s liberal ethical model aims at building kinder and more sympathetic motive-feelings for everyone, and not just for those in our social class or religious group. Once again, with such commonsense democratic motives it’s easy to see how very simple a liberal ethical model can look. No doubt, in some situations such motive-feelings are more difficult to feel, but the more they’re practiced the easier it gets.
Obviously kindness and sympathy aren’t the only useful motive-feelings Dewey talked about. He also recommends motives of wholeheartedness, honest integrity, energy, forcefulness, and sincerity. (Ethics, 399, 403) With those motive-feelings Plato and Aristotle would probably agree, but again, where they differ are the objects they felt forceful about. Plato, for example, felt just as forceful about slavery and religious conformity as any modern conservative, but again the personal and social results of such forcefulness is what makes them excessive in any democratic setting. He forcefully felt all religious heretics be isolated and even killed if they didn’t conform. In short, he often lacked kind and sympathetic motive feelings for everyone, as Aristotle often did. Dewey, however, was much more of a liberal democrat, and so feeling kindness for everyone was much easier for him. Such feelings would help make everyone's personal and social live that much more peaceful and enjoyable.
Conflicting Motive-Feelings
No doubt, in life -- existentially -- many ethical situations can become more complex and difficult. Sometimes we feel so tense we feel we hate our self; many people have such self-esteem conflicting challenges; they want to do their job well, but end up feeling conflicted about their self-esteem. In short, motive-feelings can sometimes be conflicting, and thus create ethical dilemmas. You may want to stay home and study for a test tomorrow, but also want to go out, party hardy, and feel like other people really want and love you. You may want to both see a movie tonight and also pass a calculus test tomorrow; want both that 5th piece of pizza and low cholesterol reading; want to feel someone wants to give you some excitingly healthful tender loving sex, but also want some sleep too; want that $100,000 Porsche and stay out of bankruptcy court too. Such conflicting motives are often the stuff of real ethical dilemmas. We may have 2 or more conflicting motive-feelings.
No doubt, most such conflicts are resolved rather quickly, but some aren’t. Some unhealthful motive-feelings are more difficult to improve. Sometimes we may want to marry someone else we also feel is wrong for us. Sometimes the choice is between the motive of doing the right thing and endangering our life; should we reveal some wrong-doing and perhaps lose our job? Sometimes experimentally harmonizing our conflicting motive-feelings is damn difficult, but again, seeing possible future results is the most intelligent way to resolve such motive conflicts. Can we live with our self if we don’t become a whistleblower? If we can’t afford the payments, then forget about that Porsche. The results of our own actions often help resolve such motive conflicts. What choice will help build the ethical person we want to become? Is it better to overcome our fear of the dentist and get that tooth fixed, or live with the pain a little longer? Is it better to keep acting self-destructively and feeling we’re not worthy of being loved, or start building a more useful self-esteem motive? Is it better to keep feeling life is just too overwhelming or to start building a more useful motive-feeling of relaxed enjoyment? Those kinds of ethical conflicts are often some of the more common ones we face. They go to the core of our motive-values, and help us build a model of the person we want to be.
In any case, however, we see the importance of such a forward-looking ethical model of excellence. Perhaps most important of all, it holds up a model of ethical excellence to practice here and now, as well as a learning model for such ideas. Liberal ethical models help us know better our inner motive-feelings and resolve their conflicts. We can realizing the movie will still be playing tomorrow, the pizza will still be there tomorrow, your overnight sex guest will understand, and you can shop around for a cheaper genuine imitation tiger-skin rug.
In any case, however, the ethical goal is to keep building more independent and kinder working motives useful for building a kinder and more independent person. Should we keep feeling it’s okay to deserve a beating from a partner from time to time, or feel such a motive encourages warped and painful actions? Should we feel it’s healthful to keep wasting our precious personal energies with angry actions when more healthful and relaxed motive-feelings can produce much more intelligent results? No doubt, sometimes seeing such future results can be more difficult than other times, and equally difficult to grow more healthful habit-arts, but who ever said all ethical choices and actions are easy? Just like anything else, some conflicting ethical challenges are more difficult to overcome than others; welcome to life! As we saw earlier, making ethical choices strengthens our ethical character.
An important ethical point to remember is this: focusing on future results and imagining the person we want to become can make it easier to resolve our ethical conflicts. If I feel my ideal self as a kind, generous, sympathetic, courageous, respectful, and honest person, then such motive feelings can help guide the growth of that ideal self here and now. If, say, my motive feeling is not being a thief, unless it promotes justice, then stealing what isn’t mine becomes easier. If my motive-feeling is to be a relaxed person in control of my actions, then all the inner feelings of worthlessness and self-hate become that much easier to relax and let go of. Such ideal inner motive-feelings thus also become a useful behavioral tool for helping resolve ethical dilemmas of all kinds, and help us become more ethically excellent.
In any case, who knows the results of our choices unless our motive-feelings are actually experimented with? Just because motives and results are two separate words doesn’t mean they’re two separate and distinct ethical objects. All through life motive-feelings and actions both flow and interact continuously, making ethical excellence a series of fluid, on-going, organic experiments. And the deeper we feel that reality, the more powerful our motives become for helping resolve our ethical challenges and conflicts! So, once again, to illustrate completely and clearly all these ideas, the following landslidingly lame limerick is either capaciously clear, or unctuously useless; I’m still motivationally conflicted.
Burt worked as a lobbyist in Washington D. C.
Wining and dining politicians for a rather high fee.
But whatever the cause
He took no ethical pause;
The best motive was growing his money tree.
4. SOME ON-GOING ETHICAL SOCIAL CONFLICTS
For Dewey any choice for which genuine alternatives are possible is an ethical situation. Such a broad definition of ethics thus extends far beyond one’s own personal challenges and problems. It extends to the entire outer world as well, especially to political and economic choices. As the long history of slavery and racial hatred teach us, inhumane and unjust social inequality remains a serious ethical problem in many parts of the world! All such situations have genuine alternatives and choices.
Such reasoning also helped Dewey justify another ethically liberal excellence – equality and equal rights. The more people learn that habit-art, the easier it becomes for all people to keep democratically growing and building their own ethical universe. And such a liberal ethical virtue shows again how important our public schools are for the ethical health of our nation. In liberal schools students will learn what such ethical virtues feel like, rather than just reading about them, thus making it easier to reduce hateful and arrogant racial actions still plaguing many people even in the US.
The on-going worldwide struggle for equal civil and human rights is yet another sign such schools are far from working everywhere. In so many places around our world such liberal ethical habits and virtues are still just emerging within a still medieval model of ethics in which many actions are still judged as sinful and evil. In short, making our social world more ethically liberal is still very much a work in progress. For example, about 90 years after the US Civil War helped outlaw slavery, one young African woman named Rosa Parks still needed to make an ethical choice to demand her equal rights while riding on public buses! She refused to obey an unjust law and give her seat to a white person. And as a result of her ethical choice a civil rights movement was ignited, similar to the one Martin Luther ignited in Europe after he listed 95 reasons why he could no longer support the Catholic Church. The result of Rosa’s ethical choice helped spark a civil rights explosion in the US, much of which is still echoing 60 years later! After all, how can the democratic ethic of equality built into the US Constitution become a reality unless people challenge all the ways life is still unequal? How else can social peace and harmony become a reality unless people keep making such ethical choices not to obey unjust laws? For liberals like Dewey, such choices are as much a part of ethics as are the choices to keep improving our own personal habits. Both kinds of choices help build one’s character.
For Dewey the road to a more peaceful, tolerant, and productive outer social world is where ethical choices are still important. All such ethical choices celebrate both intelligent experimental testing and equality, helping make both ethical and political excellence experimental and democratic. No two people will have exactly the same set of ethical habit-arts, just as no 2 countries will have the same political habits, but building a more democratic world where everyone has the same rights and freedoms remains an important ethical goal. Only such ethical experimentation can reveal the social results of our ethical choices. Only such results help make all such choices helpful or harmful.
Such ethical experimentation is yet another sign of modern liberal excellence. For example, because Tom Edison was an inventor he built a different set of ethical habits from social worker Jane Addams, but the results of experimental testing was common to them both, and strengthened their beliefs in building a better world for everyone. What good is merely thinking of an ethical choice and not testing the idea? Hitler often bragged to people he was treating Jews kindly and merely relocating them to better jobs, but the more people took the time to actually see that idea’s results, the clearer it became his ethical actions were light-years away from producing kind or sympathetic results; many liberals today are still fighting such ethical hypocrisy around the world!
Here’s a second example of how personal ethical choices affect the outer social world. Early in the 1900s bankers loaned ship builders the money to build a ship called Titanic. But to speed up its maiden voyage the ethical choice was made not to seal the ship’s bulkheads, and thus make it truly unsinkable. Owners simply chose to get it into service so they could start paying off their bank loans and start making some money. When such ethical choices were tested, however, the results were disastrous; over 1500 people lost their lives in its maiden voyage as a result of such ethical choices! So, once again, personal ethical choices are often more socially important than personal choices, as corporate choices often tell us.
A third ethical example happened more recently. The ethical choices of a few financial managers to keep selling home mortgages to those who couldn’t afford them helped cause one of the worst financial disasters in US history in 2008-9. How so? Such ethical choices helped increase peoples’ debt, and thus create yet another form of slavery, namely economic slavery, causing millions to lose their jobs and homes! The ethical lesson in such events might be this: if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. We may think our ethical choice to get such a mortgage will produce useful social results for us, but only as the choice is tested experimentally do we really know how excellent it was. And thus, for seeing the real value of such ethical choices everyone is on the same experimental level. John Perkins’s book Confessions of an Economic Hitman shows how such ethical economic choices are still causing social kinds of slavery in many nations around the world.
Without the liberal ethical idea of basing one’s choices on motives like kindness, sympathy, and love, and then testing their social results, life for many remains much like the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) once described it before civilization started -- “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Why should the value of ethical choices be any different any other kind of testing? Such testing in fact also helps liberate us from some old conservative ethical ideas and models, namely that some ethical choices are always good.
Probably for almost all of the last few thousand years, especially for women, social customs of inequality like obedience, routine sameness, not questioning anything, and restricting their choices were pictured as both inner and outer social excellence. To violate them was often to court social disaster. For some native peoples the entire universe might collapse if such habits weren’t practiced, and in the Middle Ages violating such ethical rules threatened people with eternal hell fire! As a result of such conservative ethical models, much of modern life continues producing similar social results. Life in much of the world still makes such ethical choices almost instinctive, rather than intelligently experimental. Thus even in the early 2000s we still have the social absurdity of scientific technology changing life almost daily, while many still practice ancient conservative forms of unequal ethical excellence. Many ancient ethical habits and their social results thus live on. One such result is to keep the female contribution to life much less than what it could be. Even in the US, only recently have more women become economically and psychically capable of making different ethical choices, like becoming professionals, voting, and even running for office. Who knows? Such liberal ethical choices may even keep growing if we can keep from allowing millions may die from global warming! In such an increasing liberal world people may learn to make more liberal ethical choices and test their social results. For Dewey, only such choices and testing can help build a more equal and democratic world for everyone. Thus, more and more people are feeling an ethically liberal idea: This is our world now, and it's up to each of us to keep using our ethical choices to make its opportunities open to everyone on an equal basis.
Needless to say, for Dewey, merely obeying old conservative and moderate models of ethical excellence is the main ethical challenge today; such status quo choices help keep life much as it was throughout most of human history. Probably for millions of years human ethical life was divided between those who allowed such freedom, and those who wanted to control as many people as possible – between liberals and conservatives. Young folks are especially eager for such experimentation; they haven’t learned adult ethical habits yet. Dewey’s liberal ethical model simply aims at giving everyone a chance to feel what experimental ethics and freedom is like. If some action is no longer satisfying, then another ethical choice and experiment is called for. Such an ethical model aims at helping people feel their ethical freedom all through life; what kind of ethical choice may produce more satisfying results?
In our growing democratic world such experimental choices are essential if people are to keep growing and learning, and if so, then once again it shows how important our public schools are to such ethical growth. If youngsters aren’t allowed to make and test their own intelligent and helpful ethical choices about, say, that they want to study, then how can we expect them to keep learning and improving all through life? No doubt, in some places such ethical educational choices will be difficult to teach; even today many conservative religious and secular rulers react violently against such democratically experimental ethical models. Such people want to selfishly keep controlling as many people as possible, rather than helping liberate their creative energies and making some real contributions to life. However, 2 World Wars, several minor ones, economic strangulation, dangerous nuclear weapons, continuing outbursts of violence on small scales, even multiply killings within many of our public schools, keep reminding us many people are still anchored to their traditional ethical choices and habits of violence and destruction! To a degree, habits make conservatives of us all, but for us liberals such facts merely teach us we still have great ethical challenges in front of us, namely to keep educating young folks about how to experiment intelligently with their own ethical choices.
Such liberal ethical habits as free choice and equal opportunities are becoming more important in today’s world. Because technology is increasing the rate of change in our world, such experimental ethical habits have become more important than ever. For example, as the Industrial Revolution continued growing in the 1800s, science and profit-hungry people began increasing new social tensions and stresses with their economic ethical choices; choices about wages and working conditions had to be made; in many places even children worked 12 hour days for mere pennies, as is happening in China and India. Such new social situations helped create a need to experiment with new ethical choices, in order to improve what liberal economist John Galbraith called the 'quality of life'. New parks and recreation areas became possible ethical choices, to help relieve the new stressful tensions of industrial society, as well as labor unions to improve dangerous working conditions and starvation wages.
New economic stresses demanded new ethical choices. As workers continued building many more useful goods and services, like autos and electrical inventions, only a few people become very rich while many struggled on the brink of starvation. Starvation wages helped create the need for experimenting with organized labor unions to help make work and wages better. New experimental ways of expressing one’s social kindness and sympathy began growing as well, helping people see new choices they could make. Many also felt the need for sharing more equally the great economic wealth science and industry were helping create. Capitalist owners and workers became great at producing many new goods and wealth, but not very good at sharing them equally. Such new ethical social challenges were felt even in the early 1800s.
Some Liberal Ethical Choices of Robert Owens
Liberal Scottish businessman Robert Owens (1771-1858) faced a number of new and challenging ethical situations as Britain’s Industrial Revolution was just getting started in the 1700s. The main ethical choice was between treating his factory workers kindly or harshly? Should he use them to make as much money as he could, keeping them enslaved in ignorance and poverty, or should he pay them a decent wage and even help educate them so they could keep themselves growing intelligently as people? What working rights should people have? Should he hire women and young children merely because they were passive, obedient, and worked cheaply, or help build a school so they could become more intelligent and keep making life more civilized and worth living? How long should they work? What kind of a world did he want to create for himself and them with his ethical choices?
Eventually he chose to experiment with what’s become known as Socialist choices, based on kind and sympathetic motives and actions towards workers. Fellow Scotsman Andrew Carnegie made some similar kinds of choices after selling off his steel company in 1900 for some $300 million dollars. He then choose to give away almost all of it to help create a more peaceful and educational society; the building where I took my first philosophy class was called Carnegie Hall.
With such liberal motives and actions Owens helped create a modern meaning for the word ‘socialism’; in Britain they helped create the liberal Fabian Society which Dewey eventually accepted as the best political choice. Rather than acting like many American business leaders, with greedy and selfish motives and actions, Owens experimentally liberated himself from such greedy choices and helped build what many today call socialist business ethics, eventually helping create a new liberal political model besides conservative and libertarian. He realized many new social problems could be more quickly solved with government help. At first political conservatives reacted against all such choices and ideas, but as more people got the right to vote, conservatives often led the way by choosing to use government resources more humanely. They became convinced socialized tax monies could help many more lead a much better life. In the 1800s England faced many new social challenges created by the new industrial technology, like bad public health, air pollution, increased economic crime, child labor, women's inequality, and many others. During his long and productive life Owens also helped liberate workers from many of their traditional habits of obedience and narrow thinking by making it easier for the government to make their own working and living conditions better, and even helping help them when they were injured or retired. Almost single handedly his excellent liberal ethical motives of kindness and sympathy, and his ethical choices, helped build the modern virtues of political Socialism, which Dewey eventually embraced during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as did millions of other kind people too.
Eventually Owens' kind and helpful liberal motives and choices became a model for Dewey’s own social morals and politics. Workers' unions, for example, were at first greatly resisted in both England and America, even by Carnegie, but eventually they formed and began working to counterbalance growing industrial greed and power. It didn’t stop a small wealthy class of so-called Robber Barons from growing, and greatly affecting the imperialistic ethical choices politicians made to make that class wealthier all through the 1900s, but life for many millions became easier and less stressful. Both Owens and Dewey celebrated workers forming unions to improve different industries and life in general; I wonder if they ever thought some unions would become just as one-dimensional and power-hungry as some corporations normally were.
As a result of such liberally humane ethical choices, new and different social habits began growing with the idea of using the government to help improve many social conditions. Such a liberal ethical model was much different from the old ancient ethical models of Plato and Augustine; they focused on making life better after death, as if they really knew there was one. In any case, such intelligent liberal ethical experimentation focused on improving life here and now. Such choices and actions used science and technology to keep giving people different ethical choices from conservative status quo ethical models. Obviously, all during the 1900s and into the 2000s, many conservative business leaders choose to limit the results of more liberal choices, and thus keep increasing their own wealth, but once such new ethical models were in place, and people saw the better results they produced, then it became more difficult to stamp them out completely. After all, what good is working to make wealthy folks even wealthier when life for millions remains just as stressful and painful as ever?
Building a Modern Liberal Individual
Such new economic and social conditions call for new intelligent ethical choices and questions. For example, how can I contribute best to making life more enjoyable for myself and others? Should I join a labor union? Should workers allow theirs to become just as greedy and focused only on increasing worker salaries, or should they also work for the public good? Should they also demand more decision-making power on corporate boards of directors, where all corporate decisions are made? Will that help workers avoid such stressful actions as bankruptcy, with the result of job losses, lower wages for workers, and less union power? Today in fact union membership has been steadily shrinking, as well as wages, thus calling again for more intelligent ethical choices and experiments. For example, will sit-down strikes convince owners to increase wages, or not? Some workers are experimenting with that idea these days.
Another fundamental social ethical choice has been growing too. Should government be used to tax wealthy folks more, and use the money to help those less well off, or should government be kept from working like that? It’s the old ethical choice between liberals, conservatives, and moderate libertarians. Can the government produce better social results for more people, or is government really the problem? Such ethical choices are faced by voters to this day! Conservatives and libertarians want as much freedom to keep taking as much of the public’s money as they can, while liberals say there are some things which should never provide profits for anyone, like healthcare, war, and environmental health and well-being. The more voters allow a small wealthy conservative class to become even more politically powerful, the more difficult it becomes to make our government keep working to increase the public good, even though millions may want their representatives to produce such results. The tension between such choices is more deeply felt at elections times, as different ads keep telling people how to vote. Voters too may ask should they vote at all, what difference would it make if they didn’t, and how can merely one vote change anything, and so on? It’s so stressful most people simply refuse to make such ethical choices. Many feel the wealthy control most everything and so what can they do to change it. As we’ve seen, such fatalistic and skeptical feelings and motives make it more difficult to actually make life better for everyone, and the more rigid those feelings become, the more difficult solving new challenges with different experimental choices becomes.
As we’ve seen, in the ancient world the ethical situation was much worse. For many, fatalistic motive-feelings were much stronger and widespread than they are today. With almost no science and technology most everyone relied on their spirit-habits to at least make them feel life would get better. What’s more, people didn’t get much help from conservatives like Plato or moderates like Aristotle; they both felt those in the lower social classes were meant to support the upper classes; nature had decreed it! Life for them was arranged in a kind of natural hierarchy of meaning and value, from slaves to rulers. As a result, people were much more vulnerable to huge marching armies than they are today. Nuclear weapons have all but eliminated the possibility for another world war, at least one lasting more than a few minutes. But only slowly have such fatalistic motive-feelings of natural inferiority and superiority grown more democratic. The following passage from Dewey and Tufts' 1908 Ethics describes some ethical results of that social situation. Much of the book and its 1932 2nd edition is still well worth reading for its pictures of modern social ethical challenges to each of us.
“… The Age of the Sophists in Greece (400s BCE), of the Renaissance of Italy (1400s-1500s CE), of the Enlightenment and Romantic movements in Western Europe (1700s-1800s), and of the Industrial Revolution in recent times (1800s) illustrate different phases of (ethical) individualism. … an individual may ‘go to pieces’ in … reaction against social authority and custom. … (However, those) who accept the new conditions and assume responsibility with their freedom, who direct their (ethical) choices by reason instead of passion, who aim at justice and kindness as well as at happiness, become moral persons and gain thereby new worth and dignity. … a (modern) movement of (liberal) individualism … demands … a reconstructed individual -- a person who is individual in choice, in feeling, in responsibility, and at the same time social in what he regards as good, in his sympathies, and in his purposes. Otherwise individualism means progress towards the immoral.
… The genuinely moral person … forms his plans, regulates his desires, and hence performs his acts with reference to the effect they have upon the social groups of which he is a part. … he will find his happiness or satisfaction in the promotion of these activities … (Ethics, 75-76, 298, additions are my own)
Once again we see Dewey’s liberal model of ethical excellence is both simple to understand, and yet challenging to practice. It’s based on a few simple motives like kindness and sympathy, and a few active ethical virtues, like helpfulness and respect. In fact, many people today simply call such ideas common ethical sense; they’re common to many religions too. On a personal level of making intelligent ethical choices it sometimes means turning off the sources of entertaining trivia now available all day every day, and focusing more on getting the information necessary for making important ethical choices, like who to vote for on local, state, and national levels. Sometimes it also helps increase one’s creative thinking. In short, all people have their ethical challenges, both trivial and important, and Dewey’s ‘reconstructed’ individual becomes better at knowing which is which, so more time and attention can be devoted to the more important choices in life, especially important economic, personal, and political choices. The more those kinds of actions are practiced, the more ‘reconstructed’ one’s ethical world becomes. For example, knowing some of the possible future dangerous results of global warming makes it much easier to start making those personal and social choices for delaying those results. How much is air pollution and water conservative still a serious social problem for millions of people, and yet many don’t take the time to make intelligent choices about them? The more such ethical excellence is ignored, the easier it is for those with social and economic power to better adjust to any major changes life may throw their way as temperatures keep rising. Sometime soon even life and death may depend on the ethical choices we make here and now.
In short, continuing to expand our social consciousness and their possible ethical choices is largely what Dewey meant by the words ‘reconstructed individual.’ The rest of it meant turning such intelligent choices into intelligent actions. With all the new communication technology there’s really no excuse for not becoming more aware of what’s going on out there. After all, how can we keep making better ice cream eating choices unless we keep learning about new ones like Frog’s Feet Fudge, Alligator a la Mode, or Rattlesnake Raison? You see how much there is to know? Since when isn’t humor, even humdrum humor, part of a reconstructed person?
Intelligent ‘reconstructed’ people also know how to help others out there; such liberal ethical choices and actions not only help improve our shared world, but our own inner motives and character as well! As Aristotle and Dewey said, those inner motive-feelings can be felt as their own reward; they can feel great in themselves; Confucius too said those who expect no rewards are the highest types of people. Just the act of creating a more healthful ice cream can be its own ethical reward.
In any case, for us Deweyan liberals, ethical excellence is always intelligent, experimental, never finished, always growing, and eternally evolving as life keeps creating new situations. Kind actions may be useful in most situations, but not always. For many in Hollywood too, helping others is still the highest good, as it is for liberal people everywhere; sometimes it’s even achieved regardless of who gets killed in the process! For us liberal Deweyans, however, the old Platonic and Aristotelian eternally closed and finished ethical models have thus become only 2 different models of ethical excellence, not the only 2. In Books 2, 3, and 4 we’ll see in more detail how such liberal ideas like experiment learning and ethics slowly evolved over time, due in large part because education systems were monopolized and controlled by conservatives and moderates. In the 1200s Aristotle became Catholicism’s philosophic foundation! As a result, Dewey noted how rapidly scientific excellence has evolved compared to both liberal ethical and democratic habits of excellence; those last 2 kinds of excellence depend on widespread educational habits. Even today in many places they still are not taught as they might be.
How Many Excellent Virtues Do You Have?
On a more abstract level, ethical virtue or excellence is another important idea. There’s a great difference between ancient conservative and Dewey’s liberal definition; they help create different ethical models of virtues itself. As you might have expected, Dewey's model of virtues are much larger, more fluid, evolving, and democratic than conservative models. For him ethical virtues, or habits, are infinite in number! A virtue is ANY constructive, socially useful habit-art! A virtue is ANY freely chosen action that's socially useful and helpful to people here and now! With such a model people can thus feel virtuous on a daily basis. Even when a homeless person collects bottles and cans to recycle them, they practice a kind of ethical virtue; they help solve the social problem of having too much waste material and not recycling as much as possible! In fact, the more you look down on such virtuous actions, as both Plato and Aristotle did, the more you feel nature has inbuilt levels of ethical worth and value. For them, many people were, by nature, slaves -- mere social tools -- and so just weren’t capable of feeling what they said was the highest kind of ethical excellence. Simply because many people today are still undereducated, they don’t feel an infinite number of virtues really exist. In fact, however, every intelligent solution to a problem helps create another virtue.
Dewey’s ethical work helped such liberal ethical ideas of virtue become much more common, even for ice cream makers. Imagine fat-free, sugar-free, mint-flavored champagne ice cream! I'll drink to that excellence! How about hot & spicy tangerine? Carumba! How about chicken gizzard-flavored mocha almond? Or how about even pig’s feet spumoni? Has my ice cream creating virtue become excellent yet, or what? Now really, is building those kinds of virtuous excellence any different from a philosopher building a virtuous study habit?
However, for Dewey what makes some virtues more valuable than others are the results they produce. In how many different situations are the same virtues useful? Dewey mentions three virtues in particular, and 1 of them wasn’t very important in ancient Greece. They are INTELLIGENCE, SYMPATHY, and DUTY. Certainly wisdom/intelligence and duty were important; in fact many Greeks thought wisdom was the highest virtue; it could improve any habit. For Plato wisdom was pictured as a harmonizing force within the psyche, moderating both conflicting emotions and desires like sex, growth, nutrition, and exercise; he visualized it as an intelligent chariot driver controlling 2 spirited and irrational horses. What’s more, for many like him wisdom’s power came from a spirit-realm. Dewey, however, simply defined intelligence experimentally. Every animal and plant has some wisdom of its own; how else could they keep living if they didn't practice some kind of experimental wisdom to keep satisfying their needs in changing situations? What makes some ethical choices and actions wiser than others is the kind and helpful results they help produce.
Whenever any animal or plant solves a problem of satisfying its needs and keeps living, then it’s the same basic kind of experimental wisdom people practice today; in other words, for Dewey intelligent and wise growth is the 'end' or purpose of life. Even single-celled animals and plants, like amoeba, have some intelligence! Granted it’s not much, but then again some people don't always have much either. Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, both wanted to feel only mankind had the highest virtue of intelligence, and so they pictured nature like an evergreen tree; virtuous people were pictured about halfway up the tree, like Christians later pictured mankind as the highest animal and the lowest spirit-being.
During the last 2 centuries such a biological model has become unacceptable. Biologists and philosophers have learned nature and our own ancestors have helped build a vastly different model of intelligence. Research has shown how even simple bacteria intelligently satisfy their food needs with trial-and-error experimentation, and almost certainly the virtue of experimental intelligence was practiced even by our early African ancestors over 2 million years ago! When our H. habilis ancestors built and used their stone cutting tools to make more food available, they practiced the virtue of constructive intelligence. In what way? Well, even their simple stone tools were artfully and intelligently built, and no doubt sometimes used in an ethically excellent way; when food was shared socially, others’ food needs and wants were satisfied as well! Thus virtues of generosity and kindness were also built on a daily basis! Had Aristotle taken the time to experimentally test even one octopus he would have seen they're highly intelligent experimental animals. His own experimental learning habit wasn’t a strong virtue.
Simply because we humans have built a virtue of talking, it felt right to say we're the only animals with such an intelligent virtue. Ideas help us see many more ways and options of acting, rather than just routinely, like many other animals. In any case, however, both animals and plants act intelligently. Even apes can reason, like when they put 2 sticks together to reach some food beyond the length of one stick. So, for Dewey everything alive has some intelligence for satisfying its needs. What often separates our intelligent virtues from all other animals is the larger range of our intelligent actions; talking gives us the ability to expand our choices no end. Thus, we have the possibility of growing an infinite numbers of virtues. Not only do our speaking and writing virtues help solve abstract ethical and mathematical problems, but practical problems too, like how much sugar people can have before their pancreas, prostate, and acne explodes? More virtuous than that it's tough to be.
Intelligent ethical thinking has thus become pictured as being much more widespread than ancient and medieval models of it. We humans too have become much more a part of nature. As we’ve begun seeing, even our speaking and writing virtues have evolved naturally, rather than being already in us at birth. Thus, a reasoning virtue can now help improve ANY habit-art when ideas are tested experimentally. If, for example, someone created an idea for, say Peppermint Hog Jowls ice cream, worked wholeheartedly, honestly, and energetically at testing it, and then kindly helped others become healthier, to Dewey that was another example of virtuous intelligence, or ethical excellence.
Here’s one way Dewey described excellent intelligence:
"This factor of forethought and of preference, after comparison for … one of the ends considered, is the factor of intelligence involved in every voluntary act. To be (always) intelligent in action however is a far-reaching affair. To (always) know what one is really about is a large and difficult (ethical) order to fill; so large and difficult that it is the heart of morality." (Ethics, 306)
As we’ll see later in the section about tribal games of freedom, knowing what one is really about in an always changing world has become a very challenging virtue to grow.
In ancient times, talkative Greek philosophers like Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle began feeling the depth of 'what one is really about.' Anyone who reads Plato's and Aristotle's work can easily feel their sense of how complex life can be. Aristotle described how difficult ethical virtue or excellence can often be. "Anyone can be angry; that is quite easy. Anyone can give money away or spend it. But to do these things to the right person, with the right amount, at the right time, with the right (motive) aim and in the right manner -- that is not what anyone can easily do..."(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk.2, Ch.9). Plato too often felt how difficult it is to really know even spirit-objects. As we’ve seen already, in the Parmenides he mentioned a few very serious problems about spirit-objects he could not answer! Who knows how much those unsolved problems helped Aristotle’s intelligent virtue focus instead on putting unchanging objects into the natural world, as Socrates seemed to do?
Today too, many ethical situations can be very complex and involve many different options and choices, as any parent knows who has raised children. However, if one begins facing any ethical challenge by first asking what might be the kindest, most respectful, and most sympathetic choice to make, then it might make the decision making process easier and more intelligence. If so, then it also seems some excellent ethical advice might be not to worry too much if at first our actions don't produce excellent ethical results; what's important is to keep growing one’s virtuous intelligence experimentally; how else can a virtue of wisdom keep growing?
In any ethical situation, for Dewey intelligent experimentation is the best way everyone learns any kind of virtue, or excellence. Just reading about it creates a rather shallow feeling for such a virtue. Imagine Picasso or Leonardo never choosing to experiment with different artistic ideas; Pablo's paintings might all be blue and Leonardo would've painted only angels. Isn’t it the same way with virtuous wisdom? Isn’t it capable of growing all through life, and thus making every day another learning adventure about life’s infinite number of virtues, and which ones we want to learn more about? If it weren't that way, then life would soon become routine boredom. What's important, then, is to keep learning more about the virtues we choose to learn about! For example, don’t eat too much of that peppermint hog jowl ice cream. Despite life's complexity and sometimes chaotic events, we can stay focused on learning more about the virtues we feel are best. Such ethical choices and actions are, in fact, the daily building blocks of our own virtuous wisdom, and they’re an important part of our ethical ‘survival kit’.
How can we begin growing the virtue of intelligence? Choosing to ask intelligent questions is one way. How much of my income should I use to help others help themselves; what’s the best way to go about it; how much should I enjoy such giving; what are my weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, and do I love myself enough to start enjoying better habits? Suppose one day I admit I get too tense and stressed at work; I quickly get tired, irritable, and sometimes angry. An intelligent question becomes how can I improve such weak virtues. Well, first I can imagine some stress-relieving ideas, like pushing away from my desk and taking a few minutes to relax, stretch out, and let go of such tensions; I might even choose to use public transportation rather than staying tense in traffic, or even begin building a more healthful walking virtue. Or I might have a physical reason for my fatigue, so a physical exam might help. In any case, however, such intelligent ethical questions do something important inside us: they help us create our highest ethical goods and evils! In that example excessive tension becomes the highest evil, and relaxing the highest good! Until then they’re just words and ideas. Only when I choose a virtue to intelligently improve a situation do I then create a highest ethical good for myself!
In such a liberal ethical model, another important result follows. With such choices and actions I become another artist in building ethical goodness and virtue! Within Dewey’s liberal ethical model anyone can feel different highest goods and greatest evils every day! For many people eating healthy foods has become the highest good every day, and junk foods the greatest evil! In any case, however, if building such ethical virtues is an art, and what else can it be in an always changing world, then aren’t we all artists of virtuous intelligence? For Dewey, ideas like Nirvana, the Kingdom of Heaven, ethical virtues and excellence -- call it whatever you want – all reflect the reality of ethical art! Most everyone is capable of artfully building such virtues WITHIN THEMSELVES! And the more they help liberate us from life’s unsatisfying routines, and make life more satisfying, rewarding, and meaningful, the more we make them our highest goods! Now, who wants to create another ‘highest’ form of ice cream -- Frog’s Feet Fudge? How much have you made humor an ethical virtue?
Motives Helping Make Intelligence an Excellent Virtue
Dewey also suggested artfully building 2 other useful ethical motive-feelings: sympathy and kindness. Together with a profit-motive conservatives have elevated to their highest good, they help define the basic differences between conservative and liberal economic and political actions too. Many conservative and moderate aristocratic Greeks like Plato and Aristotle ignored feeling kindness and sympathy for anyone in different social classes; it helped justify their feelings of natural slavery. Even Socrates could talk in Athens’s marketplace about the eternal meaning of justice while feeling no sympathy or kindness for slaves being sold nearby. It was mainly liberal Greeks, Atomists, Stoics, and Christians who talked of acting with motives of kindness and sympathy, even when practicing such virtues was often ignored. Many conservative Christians like Augustine made it their highest religious good by feeling only its ideas were Absolute Truth, and as a result acting kindly and sympathetically to those with different religious ideas became practically impossible. In practice, then, Christians often pictured ethical excellence as trying to convince others only Christian virtues were the highest ethical good, sometimes with the help of violence and killing! When that happened, they in fact made religious diversity the highest evil.
Eventually, however, as the Protestant Reformation blossomed in the 1500s, and democratic political habits started growing again in the late 1600s, more and more people began realizing all such religious models of virtue and excellence are merely habits themselves! The more those ethical feelings grew, the easier it became to treat others more kindly and sympathetically, and if not, then certainly with respect. About such liberal motives Dewey says this:
...What is required (for moral excellence) is a blending, a fusing of the sympathetic tendencies with all the other impulsive and habitual traits of the self. When interest in power (for example) is permeated with an affectionate impulse(-motive), it’s protected from being a tendency to ... tyrannize. ... This same fusion protects sympathy from (mere) sentimentality and narrowness.
... the only effective thought is ... the (kind and ) generous thought. Sympathy ... leads us to take into account such results as affect the welfare of others; ... To (sympathetically) put our self in the place of another ... is the surest way to attain universality and objectivity of moral knowledge. Sympathy, in short, is the general principle ... because it furnishes the most reliable ... intellectual standpoint. It supplies the (inner motive) tool, par excellence, for analyzing and resolving complex (ethical situations).
... The habits of character ... sustain(ing) and spread(ing) the rational or (social) common good are virtues; the traits ... which have the opposite effect are the vices." (Ethics, 299, 334-35, 399)
Such a liberally fluid, organic, and ever-growing blending of sympathetic motives into all our ethical situations better helps produce the results of peace, equality, and the common good. Such motive feelings help produce healthful personal and social results, and thus become ethically valuable and good. Again, however, liberal morality, like science, is an experimental human art; with kind and sympathetic actions we build such motive-energies into ourselves. The more useful results they are, the more virtuous our ethical motives and actions become!
No doubt, many people today still picture ethical motives and virtues as already existing eternal Truths, either inbuilt into nature or coming from a spirit-realm. Obedience to god has been used for thousands of years to maintain social control. To those kinds of conservatives and moderates Dewey's liberal ethical models may feel too loose, too free-flowing and variable, and thus too radical. However, these days it’s become more acceptable to say all such models of ethical virtues merely reflect different ethical ideas and habits, not eternal Truth. For such conservative ideas there’s simply no objective evidence. In short, just as experimental science aims at discovering nature’s highest goods and evils, so too Dewey’s liberal model of ethical excellence does for each of us.
For thousands of years many conservative philosophers and social leaders used ideas like moral law and highest good to describe their models of ethical excellence, as if only they already existed and were already known. As a result, in many parts of our world today such conservative ethical actions continue on, as if an undemocratic moral Ice Age has never ended. For example, until fairly recently even in democratic America many people treated Africans and other minorities quite unsympathetically, as many still do for gay and lesbian people. Sometimes they literally take their lives in their hands outside their own communities. Such conservative ethical actions are yet more signs we’re still just emerging from practicing ancient and medieval models of ethical excellence based on social control rather than democratic kindness and sympathy.
However, just because some conservative ethical habits remain strong doesn't make them ethically excellent for everyone! Just because everyone at one time believed the earth was the center of the universe didn't make it so; it was just a commonly held highest religious belief. Besides, all of Western civilization’s 3 main religious traditions have been evolving themselves, and often painting different pictures of ethical excellence. What Jew in Jesus' day would ever imagine a liberal Jewish Reform ethical movement could ever evolve from their beliefs? So again, what’s ethical important for us Deweyan liberals is making our public educational systems teach such liberal ethical ideas on a wider scale than they do today. In fact, the same kinds of evolution happen with any subject, even economics. How many of Karl Marx’s or Adam Smith’s ideas are now useless? Obviously, those who elevate conservative ideas to the highest good still exist; feeling their ethical models somehow reflect nature’s Absolute Truth produces a secure feeling. But for many liberals today, ethical excellence has become much more naturalistic, individualistic, democratic, kind, and sympathetic. How many times have conservatives called us Deweyans bleeding heart liberals, as if their profit-motive and corporate monopolies are the cure for every social ill and weakness that exists? Now really, how much do you agree when you don’t have enough money for your favorite ice cream just as your favorite TV show starts?
So much for the virtues of intelligence and sympathy; what about Dewey's ideas of moral duties? How might they be seen and what are they? Once again, his answer is almost too obvious, showing yet again how simple and practical even advanced philosophic ethical thinking can be. Once we realize how useful sympathetic and kind motives are for helping resolve many of our ethical choices, then dah, simply acting kindly and sympathetically becomes our moral duty! Now that’s what I call philosophic simplicity. For us Deweyan liberals, our moral duty is simply to keep experimentally fusing kind and sympathetic inner motive-energies into all our actions! Such a fusing helps produce health-promoting results, like peace, democracy, respect, lawfulness, and generosity! Even for those who are dangerous to others we can still feel kind and sympathetic to them, and thus work for better kinds of early education to reduce such actions. After all, no one is born with dangerous and disrespectful habits. Everyone learns such habits, even those who want more Frog’s Feet Fudge ice cream.
With such an idea of duty, learning to feel and practice kind and sympathetic actions in our daily lives becomes a liberal duty. They help produce positive and constructive personal and social results. What’s more, learning them experimentally puts such ethical duties on the same level as doctors who build a duty to prescribe helpful medicines to patients. Both won’t know how useful their ethical duties really are until after they’re tested. Again, from Dewey’s Ethics:
"Complete morality is reached only when the individual recognizes the right and chooses the good freely, devotes himself heartily to its fulfillment, and seeks a progressive social development in which every member of society shall share. ... to promote and safeguard progress … (we) ... encourage ... the worth and happiness of the person and of every person." (335-336, 160-161, 465, 299, emphasis my own)
Such useful ethical actions become the duty of all liberals everywhere.
A Few Final Ethical Comments: Democracy
With the last quote, written at the early 1900s, Dewey justified one way of attacking the social challenge of crippling and unjust racial hatred, as well as unequal political and human rights. His solution was to help create more liberal democratic educational and political institutions so people could more easily learn such democratic virtues and duties. Many states passed laws allowing voters to directly choose laws their representatives either would not or could not pass. It was a logical conclusion of his democratic ethical ideas. When everyone artfully builds their own moral universe, then democracy becomes the best political system for growing such ethical diversity.
For many thousands of years now, unjust and undemocratic conservative political institutions have been dividing people into separate and different social classes, as well as denying basic human rights and freedoms to all law-abiding people. Such an undemocratic political status quo has been in power almost everywhere for thousands of years, largely because people were taught more liberal democratic habits. Some of the social results were continuing disease, poverty, ignorance, pain, and suffering. Physical slavery was another such result. Western civilization’s liberal tradition, dating back to Greeks like Solon, Protagoras, Democritus, and Pericles began feeling more sympathetic towards all people, but again, lack of liberal education and its ethical values soon ended such liberal political experiments. Conservatives to this day still work to restrict voting rights as much as possible.
Dewey’s educational and political work simply aimed at counterbalancing all such conservative models of ethical and political authoritarianism. Along with many other practical-minded liberals his duty and highest good became working to improve America's democratic institutions, based on equal rights for all! At the height of America's Progressive Era -- the early 1900s, he helped build counterbalancing institutions like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Essentially their mission was to keep improving undemocratic, hateful, and intolerant ethical actions wherever they were found. For example, they helped test unequal and racist 'Jim Crow' laws in court, unequal voting and workers' rights laws, and 1st Amendment freedoms of speech too. Decades after the US Civil War such laws allowed millions to keep denying equal rights to others, and so their power needed to be balanced to make the growth of more democratic ethical values of equality easier. Worker unions too helped counterbalance the socially harmful and unhealthful results of conservative corporate power; such results were, and still are, causing much personal and social stress in many peoples' lives. Rather than feeling kindness and sympathy towards their workers, their highest ethical value became making as much money as possible, and their own bankruptcy their highest evil. Merely because such a model of economic virtue continued producing stressful social results, another more humane democratic model was needed, one in which profits were strictly controlled or eliminated for some areas, like healthcare, public institutions like libraries, parks, and schools, and utilities like water and power. Why should anyone make money from someone else’s suffering, or lack of education? Thus, the liberal ethical virtue of democratic intelligence began challenging the unequal conservative and greedy status quo.
Today, almost no one realizes such liberally humane counterbalancing ethical models began growing in ancient Greece. However, it wasn’t allowed to last very long. In fact, most of our modern economic corporate structures, with decision-making power being in the hands of just a few board members rather than democratically in the hands of the many. That conservative model was quite similar to the ancient and medieval feudal aristocratic social model. In that world a few powerful families and religious officials usually controlled most of a country’s land-wealth, and also most of the political decisions the government made. Largely because there weren’t many counterbalancing democratic institutions it was easy to keep organizing religious war after war, sometimes lasting many decades like the Hundred Years War. Also, many Crusades over 3 centuries are another example of how such undemocratic institutions were used to control most everyone’s ethical decisions and choices. Such concentrated aristocratic power was so strong even a Children’s Crusade was organized, sending thousands to their death. According to economist John Galbraith, in many ways modern corporate money model has simply replaced the old concentrated feudal and religious land-power, controlled by a few but affecting many. Also, education and training in conservative schools taught people to merely accept that political and economic status quo. The political results can be seen even today in election results; only about 35% of eligible voters bother voting at all! Such numbers are yet another triumph of conservative educational systems.
Dewey’s liberal ethical model was meant to offer people a different model of ethics, a model based on democratic equality, as well as motives of kindness and sympathy for other people. It thus helped build a more liberal socialistic economic model, aimed at make life more enjoyable for as many as possible. For him the old model of people controlling their economic fate with their spending habits had become obsolete; about 2,000 large corporations and unions now control about half the world’s economic products and services, and their quest for ever-growing profits continue taking as much of the peoples’ socialized tax money as possible. Many public non-profit schools have become for-profit charter schools, and worker wages have been fairly level for decades now. According to one daily California newspaper, the prison guard’s union has helped increase the cost to taxpayers of housing and feeding one prisoner to about $50,000 a year! For-profit prisons have thus been growing in many parts of the country! And why not? It seems taxpayers are so busy working to pay their rents, mortgages, and fees banks keep tacking on to homeowners, they have neither the time nor energy to build more liberal schools where habits of democratic character excellence like voting and debating are as important as learning a useful skill. In fact, universities and colleges have become much more profit oriented. College costs have been growing much faster than most people can afford, and thus increasing the debts young folks needs jobs to pay off. Such undemocratic social institutions and their actions are now helping produce the need for new ethical choices and actions, thus creating the need for some new creative thinking. Such actions like voting and experimentation have become the duty for many liberals around the US.
Women's equal rights are another fine example of how new liberal ethical virtues are affecting the very democratic fabric of our country. For many thousands of years women were usually treated as de facto slaves -- slaves in fact and sometimes even by law -- de jure. Inheritance laws were often male-dominated. Almost always women were very low in society’s fixed hierarchy; they were routinely treated as lowly, inferior, and second-class people, and even that may be saying it too nicely. They made up a large part of the slave class. What’s more, for many ancient peoples women were pictured as the source of all evils, as the story of Adam and Eve and Pandora’s Box describe it. For many centuries women were controlled and treated by men as mere baby factories, producing more soldiers for yet more wars. Even in culturally advanced ancient Greece they were usually married off in their teens, kept from almost all kinds of education, and thus dependent on men. The social results were unhealthful too; their intellectual talents were almost always neglected, underdeveloped, and kept weak with housework, like making clothes, cooking, and raising children. Even though in ancient and medieval times Catholic convents helped develop some women’s talents for nursing and teaching, modern women have only recently gained more civil and political democratic rights in the 1900s than probably any other ten centuries combined!
As a result, many new social situations have grown. Many men have become more tolerant, sympathetic, kind, and respectful towards them and other minorities! In many places women have finally become liberated from old conservative ethical and political models; many have finally gained crucially important educational, voting, and especially reproductive rights in particular, as long ago Plato recommended they should. However, we’re still a long way from complete equality for women. In the US, they’re still often paid less than men, charged more for their clothes, and still often kept out of the highest levels of political power. A modern ethical problem remains: how can we continue including more women in our public and business systems, so their motive-feelings of kindness and sympathy can keep producing better socially useful results?
Today such macro-ethical situations continue evolving from the interactions between conservatives and liberals. Such democratic equal rights always depend on educating people to feel more liberal ethical ideas like kindness and sympathy, and to help make their actions demonstrate such feelings. An important liberal good is helping everyone develop their own unique set of talents if they want, and become the person they want to become! Why shouldn’t our liberal, kind, and sympathetic civil rights movements continue patiently, wholeheartedly, forcefully, and perhaps even joyfully improving dangerously intolerant and unjust hateful actions against anyone, whether it's women, gays, Africans, Asians, lesbians, or Native peoples. If they're law-abiding, then why shouldn't they all learn to feel what equal rights are like, and keep enlarging their own ethical choices?
Today, a most important result of liberal ethical excellence is helping build more democratic decision-making power into all our economic and political institutions, helping them produce more helpful, respectful, and constructive results. Such liberal kind and sympathetic feelings are helping create a democratic world almost all our ancestors could only dream about and wish for, but at the same time it’s still far from complete. Feelings of human equality are, as I write, becoming stronger in many places in the world, but building the liberal institutions to continue their growth is still as challenging today as it was in ancient Greece. As our news media remind us daily, there’s still much work to do in building such liberally democratic ethical virtues, but at last it’s no longer considered just a fantastic ideal. Without such a liberal ethical models like Dewey suggested, our world will remain unnecessarily and overly dangerous, clannish, tribal, narrow, confined, and slavish.
For continuing to build such a liberally democratic ethical model, all our political, economic, educational, religious, artistic, and domestic institutions have a role to play even on a daily basis. When they do they become the highest good for us Deweyan liberals, and when they don’t they become the greatest forms of social evil. In fact, each one of us can ethically choose to help encourage and celebrate such models of political and ethical equality for all, even if it’s just talking to our children as well as demonstrating what such ideas can mean. The more people who help work for such results, like everyone's freedom to pursue happiness in their own peaceful way, the more those habit-arts will become the highest good. They can, with wholehearted and sincere use, continue producing a more peaceful world for us all, but only if they're actively and forcefully practiced here and now. Believe it or not, even some conservatives and moderates can choose to act a little more kindly and sympathetically to those less well off than themselves. Stranger things have happened, right? If not, however, they too might find it difficult to have their Frog’s Feet Fudge ice cream and eat it too. Such thinking has inspired me yet again to write yet another languidly lame limerick.
Billionaire Smythe was the toast of the town,
Never mixing black clothes with anything brown.
Years ago his ethical ‘shoulds’
Made personal profits his highest goods,
Thus, raking them in and playing the clown.
5. ETHICAL AUDACITY, 101
In this and the following section I continue describing a liberal model of ethics with words like constructive audacity and respect. Is it really necessary? Nowadays it seems more necessary than ever, given the relentless audacity of greedy wealthy folks to keep doing whatever they can to make and keep ever greater amounts of money, and disrespectful people to keep controlling as many people as possible! Such wealthy folks have often encouraged politicians to keep using public funds to make our world more dangerous than it’s ever been; nuclear weapons are just one example. Within such a world liberal kinds of ethical audacity have become more necessary than ever before. They may be the only tools for growing the still young democratic spouts of peacefulness, self-determination, and respect now growing around the world.
As we’ve been seeing, for thousands of years now greedy conservatives have used their religious, economic, and political power to continue endangering and controlling all liberal democratic systems of equal rights and opportunities, including modern labor unions and local, state, and national political systems. What’s more, few people realize we already have a very rich history of such liberal ethical audacity, challenging all such concentrated forms of power. No doubt, a separate book would be needed to list even most of them, but even a few examples can be educational. Liberal kinds of ethical audacity are often useful against those people who still don’t respect other peaceful and lawful ethical models of excellence, and that includes many US presidents and corporate CEOs.
Luckily, once again, I’m inspired to offer yet another lynchingly lame limerick to make all such ethical situations perfectly clear from the very start, or at least as clear as mud; you make the call. After all, isn’t there some room in philosophy's history for a mad limerick-writing philosopher? I mean, why take life so seriously; shouldn’t there be a place for some philosophic fun and enjoyment? You might even think of it as a rare case of incurable limerick fever; it might be one for the psychology (or sorcery) textbooks, I'm not sure which witch is which. After all, from Dewey’s liberal point of view there’s already far too much obsessive madness in our world! In any case, I’m still hoping at least one of these limericks will be a little useful. I’m referring of course to the limericks; many witches are already audaciously useful. Who knows, limericks about chicken soup may even help cure limerick fever! What other medicinal properties could beak-clauses and claw-phrases possibly have anyway? The one below shows the ignorant arrogance many even educated people sometimes show.
There once was a judge with plenty of loot,
Who went off to Madam's to ring his root.
She said over a beer,
What happens here stays here,
To her such audacity was really a hoot!
What’s so audacious about that? Well, in today’s highly interactive world where millions are literally connected to each other around the world, what happens anywhere can quickly become known everywhere! Thus madam’s ethical audacity is needed in a world where many people still show little or no respect for good laws or good people.
Today in civilization's seemingly ethical free-for-all, where greed and violence often are the rule, and where even human life is still sacrificed for some unseen god, many traditional ethical models of blind and unquestioning obedience have simply become useless and even dangerous. Sometimes ethical lunacy may often be a better description of such actions. Besides fundamental religious leaders, politicians too often have no conscience about distorting reality for their own benefit and their wealthy supporters. In such a world liberal kinds of ethical audacity is needed to confront such actions wherever they occur.
What’s more, religious fanatics still seem intent on burning everything down they see as evil and starting all over again, with themselves as the dictatorial leaders of course, as if the feudalistic Middle Ages is still firmly in place around the world. Those kinds of destructive audacity are definitely what we liberals need less of; though greatly diminished, they're still obstacles to neutralize on the road to a more respectful and tolerant democratic world, where all people are free to build their own audaciously helpful actions and thus keep guiding their own growth. It’s sometimes described in this rather audacious way: peace above all else, no matter whom we have to kill to get it! Welcome to our first liberal principle of constructive ethical audacity! In fact, some people are so dangerous they should be controlled as soon as possible. Such an even more dangerous world needs more constructive kinds of ethical audacity, to keep fanatics from getting even one atomic weapon. So, these days people are facing a rather important ethical choice: What am I willing to do to stop the destructive audacity and madness of merely making more and more money, controlling our tremendous destructive power, and promote the sharing of equal rights with all law-abiding people?
More Audacious History
Fortunately, both history and current events offer many different example of such ethical audacity. How many people today realize liberal kinds of ethical audacity have been a part of philosophy since it began in Greece in the early 500s BCE? As we’ve already seen, constructive and peaceful kinds of ancient liberal audacity were demonstrated by people like Solon and Thales. How audacious was Solon to build a political model where more people controlled more of their own lives, or Thales to ignore the entire conservative spirit-model of nature and, instead, build a completely naturalistic model based on real events like water? And not only that, but inspire others to audaciously build other models based on natural events like air, fire, some kind of indefinite material stuff, and finally atoms. In fact, the entire liberal tradition in Western civilization depended on such ethical audacity, commonsense, bravery, and courage. They all began audaciously challenging the widespread conservative spirit-models most people believed were absolute Truth. Such liberal ethical audacity began teaching people they have a real choice for building their own models of life and nature. Both conservative Plato and moderate Aristotle accepted that challenging freedom.
With such actions liberal ethical audacity has remained a major form of reform for thousands of years; it’s been the mother of all audacious arts, from liberal philosophy to ancient and modern science to today’s liberation theology now practiced by Pope Francis himself! More importantly, however, such examples of ethical audaciousness usually began with the help of audacious questions: what is nature; do we need spirit-objects to keep improving it; what’s the best learning art; and what’re the best political and educational systems for promoting more kinds of helpful human arts? Such questions helped people examine their own unsatisfying ethical routines and start building better ones. What is creative audacity, and how can it help more people build more satisfying habits here and now? Such audacious questions have helped keep people growing and experimenting for thousands of years; modern science and technology was merely one result of such questioning. Even many conservative thinkers like Plato were audacious enough to question a lot of traditional ideas about religion, for example, to see how logical and useful they were for making our few short years of life even more satisfying and enjoyable. Such an ethical action-reaction system between liberals and conservatives has been going on for thousands of years, often based on new scientific discoveries. For example, as natural evolution was becoming a more acceptable biological model of life, conservative philosopher George Hegel (d. 1831) audaciously built a new conservative evolving model of spirit-objects, including an always evolving and changing spirit-god! For him the old eternally constant Christian god was dead.
In a sense then, an always changing nature helps make ethical audacity a valuable habit-art; the more things change, the greater the need for more ethical audacity to prevent forms of power from becoming too dangerously concentrated. The Protestant Reformation in the 1500s was another example of such audacity. So again, perhaps more than ever before, such audacity is needed as new forms of concentrated economic and political power have evolved. As a superrich class continues growing and increasing their political power, there’s an increased need for new audacious forms of rejection and non-compliance with such a feudalistic system. Why should people continue meekly accepting such a wealth-based system where legally taking more of peoples’ money and increasing their debt is the status quo? For many it’s become an ethical duty to experimentally find new audacious ways of diluting and diffusing such concentrated forms of power with more democratic actions!
For example, should university students begin audaciously demanding more decision-making power on their boards of regents, just as ancient Greek farmers demanded more democratic political power to make life easier and more debt free? Such democratic student power might better preserve educational excellence without increasing student debt through ever-higher tuitions fees? Such democratic audacity helps insure educational excellence and helps students learn what they want to learn? Until students have equal decision-making power on those boards, almost certainly they’ll continue being enslaved to ever-increasing amounts of debt. Also, a doctor shortage is predicted for the near future, so what new kinds of medical education can be used to help train more medical specialists, lower doctor debt and the need for charging outrageous fees, and at the same time increase general health? Such audacious educational questions can help create new systems to better serve the public and make life less stressful.
For almost all of the last 10,000 years, give or take a weekend or two, it seems people were encouraged not to practice ethical audacity, but rather unintelligent and routine social habits; only rarely were new inventions created. People weren’t taught how to keep improving many of their habits or institutions, but rather merely keep fearing what unseen spirit-objects could do to them if they didn’t obey traditions; the result was the creation of thousands of different spirit-rituals around the world. Such routine habits began growing in prehistoric times, and were encouraged to keep growing throughout ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Intelligently audacious liberal thinking and testing of such ideas was far from normal behavior. In fact, such audacious ideas like testing ideas for their results were almost always actively suppressed; it taught people practicing such liberal audacity might endanger one's life, even for rulers. Equally dangerous was intelligent ethical audacity – openly challenging old routine authoritarian pockets of power with kinder and more humane democratic ideas and actions. Often such people like Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama , Socrates, and Jesus of Nazareth were seen as 'boat-rockers' and dangerous social threats, as was even one of history's first truly audacious individuals, Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (d. 1336? BCE). Many Egyptian priests, like many priests today, loved and cherished their routine habit-arts; anyone audaciously suggesting anything else could put their lives in danger. Egypt's priestly caste, for example, resented Amen's idea to move the nation’s capital from Thebes to about 175 miles north. They feared what the gods might do to punish such ethical audaciousness, and what disasters it might cause? Much later, even the Homeric poems taught Greeks to fear what their spirit-god’s might do to them; the Indian idea of Karma worked in much the same way.
Confucius too was often seen as another one of those suspicious characters that occasionally caused people to wake up and see some more of life's useful possibilities. Within a world seen as still controlled by a great many animistic spirits, such people became dangerous; they audaciously kept challenging old ethical habits in one way or another, and thus increasing human freedom and diversity. In that respect, many of today’s reactions to liberal ethical audacity have changed only a little. Today many audacious activists become social reformers and public speakers, but for many today, life is still controlled by spirit-powers, and any kind of ethical audacity is to be feared. As a result, many today still feel such audacity is a grave sin; in ancient Greece it was called hubris -- the sin of pride. Today, however, it’s often called the art of creative thinking. Conservative Plato even did his share of it, but from within a spirit-model of nature. For him no one should do anything unless told to do so; that’s how much he cherished his feudalistic social system.
Fear Helped Maintain a Conservative Status Quo
Such routine conservative ethical habits often rested on fear. The Bible too tells us true religion begins with fearing god. Conservatives have been using ideas of fear for thousands of years to help maintain their social status quo; raw fear ruled most peoples' lives, rather than liberal audacious thinking and testing. The great Greek historian Thucydides tells us mostly out of fear Spartans started the Peloponnesian War against Athens around 430 BCE, and Pericles too used fear to help mobilize Athenians; they should fear the Spartans wrecking their empire. As a result, unintelligent actions based mostly on fear have kept people obedient and accepting of their social status quos.
For many thousands of years such conservative kinds of ethical actions worked, as they continue working for millions today. They were often justified with the fearful idea of disaster if people didn’t obey; god might punish everyone with another plague or earthquake. Even in the 1950s and ‘60s white conservatives often feared what life would become if Africans were allowed to vote and go to the same schools as white kids. Many felt god had chosen them to rule over inferior races. For decades Protestants in Northern Ireland feared Catholics in the south, and much the same things can be said about Arabs and Jews. Often liberals suggesting such fears were helping cause death and violence were often silenced and kept from even talking publicly about their ideas, must less testing them. Just imagine how much more dangerous it was to practice liberal democratic kinds of ethical audacity in ancient times, where rulers were seen as the earthly images of great spirit-powers, or picked by them! Imagine how much more frightened people were to audaciously question anything they were told, or even improve anything; such ethical actions might upset the spirit-powers. As Dewey notes, there obviously were a few new inventions here and there, but they were few and far between; destructive barbarians too often kept such liberal ethical audacity and testing to a minimum, unless of course it was creating better killing weapons.
No doubt, one of the most audacious liberal inventions of the 1400s was the movable printing press, again inspired by a similar Chinese invention. It not only challenged more people to become better readers, but to start learning new and different civilized ways of thinking and acting. Before that invention people regularly saw life and nature from within Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian models of it. For Christians most people were destined to merely satisfy their own animal urges and desires, most of which were sinful. Even useful inventions like shipbuilding, coin making, and building corporations often made warfare that much more widespread; large corporations made it easier to build larger armies and more destructive weapons. No doubt, for a few people who were making fortunes from such actions, it made life much more exciting, but for most everyone else it often meant a short, grubby life before being trampled into the dust, in which case it would, once again, definitely ruin another perfectly good day.
Fear of spirit-caused disasters and diseases have probably done more to depress people’s naturally constructive and intelligently audacious energies than any other feeling. It's one thing not to practice a habit; in that situation it can still be learned and practiced. But it's another thing to actually fear such actions, and for almost all of the last 10,000 people have feared such ethical audacity. Even in ancient Greece it became the highest sin! During that time almost everyone believed angry spirits could cause anything from personal sickness to catastrophic earth-wide flooding. Thus, the more audaciously someone merely changed some routine or part of nature, or didn’t worship exactly the same as everyone else, the more fearful people became about spirit-caused disasters! Ethically audacious actions might anger powerful spirits and produce dangerous results even for an entire nation; the Bible has several examples of such collective feelings of guilt. Even the ethical audacity of building useful dams and irrigation in ancient Iraq was sometimes seen as tempting the gods and their wrath; river-spirits must be kept flowing and happy, and if not could become angry. And even in supposedly enlightened Athens many people still believed a plague around 430 BCE was caused by an angry spirit-god, perhaps the goddess Athena herself, angry with them for fighting other Greeks in the Peloponnesian War. Most likely, however, it was caused by cholera-infested water as people crowded into Athens's city walls to escape Spartan soldiers on the war path; Pericles himself was merely one of its victims.
No doubt, early in civilization rulers and priests saw how powerful a fearful feeling can be for controlling people. State religions soon became a normal part of everyday life. Socrates himself was charged with not worshipping Athens’s state gods. No doubt, such fearful religious actions had a long history before Socrates, as we’ll see a little later; such ideas and habits probably went back into Neandertal cultures as well. After all, what Neandertal hunter didn’t want animal-spirits to provide more tasty mammoth-kabobs for diner? Thus, early forms of ethical audacity revolved around fear of spirit-objects, in order to keep making life satisfying and enjoyable; the result was the thousands of superstitious habits practiced in the native world. Such fear helped restrict intelligent audacity to only making spirit- objects friendlier, as anthropologists have been reporting for the last 100 years within native cultures around the world. As a result, in many nations today more liberally audacious ethical questions have only recently begun teaching people how to build much less fearful feelings about life and nature.
In such a fearful world, the very engine of both personal and social progress itself, intelligent and constructive ethical audacity, remained a rather rare and precious habit-art until around 1850. No doubt, conservative Socrates was a fine example of how philosophically audacious questioning could be used educationally. If young Greek men wanted to audaciously test any of their excellent ideas, he was more than willing to help. After all, he had seen the idiocy of war for himself, and even at its worst -- between Greek men themselves, while weapons makers continued making money from their deaths. That was perhaps the worst kind of economic audacity. However, the great weakness of his conservatively audacity was searching for objects that might not even exist, namely eternal and unchanging objects.
In his early adulthood Socrates began seeing how some liberally audacious humanist sophist-teachers were helping young Greek men become more focused on learning more useful skills for practicing democratic arts. To him such skills were definitely a philosophic improvement compared to learning different theories about how the universe got started and what it's made of, but to him such liberal audacity went too far. Audacious Sophist humanists ignored knowing unchanging objects altogether; conservative Socrates wasn’t psychically ready to go down that road. Soon, he too began seeing a more conservative type of questioning audacity, perhaps hoping it might help young Greeks stop killing each other just because they were told to. Feeling their own ignorance about their ideas like justice, friendship, and courage just might be the first step for learning more humane ethical actions here and now. Who knows, such audacious questions might even help make Athens's democratic system work better; for him democracy was the height of liberal audacity and believing any citizen would intelligently choose the best policy to test. For him that political audacity should be challenged; after all, they voted to force other city-states to remain part of the Athenian empire, rather than respecting their independence.
Still, as Athens's democracy grew, young men were audaciously given the chance to start practicing different political habits. Political debates were open to them, as well as voting powers for policy. Not surprisingly Socrates sensed a real danger, one that conservatives continue feeling to this day. The more people are involved in a decision-making process, the more power is diluted and shared with other people, thus taking power away from those who really deserve it, namely the educated few. If decisions are based on audaciously liberal democratic feelings of kindness and equal rights, then they can easily take more power away from those who should have it, namely the wealthy and prosperous. To this day such anti-democratic feelings continue motivating many conservatives. In ancient Athens, however, the clash of liberal and conservative models of ethical audacity helped set the stage for one of philosophy’s most dramatic events -- Socrates audaciously choosing to drink a cup of poison hemlock. That audacious ethical event will be described more fully in Part 3's Ancient Models of Excellence.
Unfortunately for Western civilization, conservative kinds of ethical audacity were the only models taught for thousands of years. Liberal Sophists and Atomists both had their own naturalistic models of ethical audacity, based largely on promoting intelligent kinds of pleasure. During Plato's lifetime, in fact, one charming example of ethical audacity involved a poor and destitute Cynic philosopher named Diogenes. Like Socrates, Cynics too chose to audaciously 'drop out' of the money-making rat race and with their actions question any other model. For them ethical audacity began by asking why make life more complicated and stressful than it need be? After all, we all live for just a few decades at best, so why not relax and enjoy it as much as possible? How audacious was that?
One story in particular has survived. One day Alexander the Great was said to be strolling through Athens and heard about the famous Diogenes, so he went to talk with the homeless hermit; a bathtub barrel was his home and his quest was to find honest people. Cynic, by the way, is a Greek word for dog, so the Cynics audaciously lived like dogs, some even fornicating publicly. Plato called him a-Socrates-gone-mad! But after Alex talked with him for a while he was evidently impressed with his wisdom and audacious disregard for every civilized art except talking; nevertheless, he tested him anyway. He told Diogenes he’d give him anything he wanted; what did he really want most? Diogenes sensed another chance to demonstrate his ethical audacity, and thus help teach people even poor folks can live honest and honorable lives free of material goods. So without thinking too much about it, he simply asked Alex to step to one side; he wanted to get warm and he was blocking his sunlight.
Truly, not all ethical audaciousness need be dramatic protest or tragically dead, like Socrates, but remaining true to one’s basic feelings often encourages audacious ethical choices to be made. In fact, as many humorists show us even today, their art can be just as educationally audacious as protest, and in some ways perhaps even more-so. I don’t mean to start a Greek-Jewish controversy about who really invented audacious chutzpah first -- Greeks or Jews? I don’t think it would have made any difference to Diogenes though; the important thing was one’s audacious ethical practice. No doubt, if he were alive today Diogenes would probably still tell people like President Bush 2 not only to step aside but keep walking as well.
In the Middle Ages liberal ethical audacity remained rare, just like food other than sheep-kabobs. Even though idiotic violence was still a very common fact of life, even though religious and political leaders too often actually burned to death many thousands of women and children as witches and heretics, women too sometimes made some audacious ethical choices and gained some social power; such actions showed people not just men could practice intelligent audacity.
Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc are 2 medieval examples. Before she was burned alive as a devil-possessed witch in 1431, Joan's audacious military actions for France helped rally dejected troops into kicking the occupying English back to England. Before they left however they captured her and burned her as a witch. Centuries earlier England's Queen Eleanor (d. 1204) was perhaps the finest medieval female example of ethical audaciousness! She not only lived to 82 and bore 10 children, but became so powerful in the 1100s her second husband, England’s King Henry 2, locked her in a castle so she couldn’t raise another army to throw him off the throne. Incidentally, if you get the chance maybe you'd like to see a fine Hollywood film about Eleanor starring Katherine Hepburn; it’s called The Lion in Winter. It certainly doesn't tell all of Eleanor’s story, or even half of it -- what film could? -- but it’s still a wonderfully powerful educational film about independent ethical audacity in the 1100s and the 1960s. When it was released during the Vietnam War many people still had conflicting ethical feelings about the war; should they support or oppose it; were the Vietnamese a real threat to the US, or just another opportunity for a few wealthy arms makers to make millions more from yet another war? The film gave liberal Katherine an opportunity to audaciously tell the world her views; she was against the war and the leader who kept fighting it. No doubt, it helped motivate many anti-war protesters to act even more audaciously, like burning draft cards and refusing to be inducted, as heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali did! So a film about events 800 years earlier helped promote modern kinds of ethical audacity.
In the 1590s another dramatic example of ethical audacity was committed by a scientist named Giordano Bruno; it was comparable to Socrates himself. To protest how his church was unjustly restricting scientific growth and research about the earth's position in space, he resigned his professorship and membership in his Dominican order! And as if that wasn't audacious enough, he then became first a Calvinist Presbyterian and after that a Lutheran! It didn't stop there either. He publicly declared the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, as Aristotle and the Church said, and said it circles the sun once a year!
For the Church such audacity was too unbearable. Eventually he was convicted of heresy and in 1600 publicly burned in Rome. Many conservative Catholic officials felt such audacity just could not be tolerated by anyone under any circumstances. Thankfully, however, he didn’t die in vain. Since then the Church has become much more tolerant of different ethical models, no doubt as a result of many other audacious actions by scientists like Galileo and Newton. I like to think Bruno did more than his share to help educate people about the Church’s brutality, and its weakness in not practicing its highest excellence, namely love and charity. When people see others audaciously sacrifice their lives to promote different ethical models, it can be very inspiring. To me people like Eleanor and Bruno, along with thousands of others like them, are mankind's true saints. Hundreds of years later the Church finally declared Joan a saint too.
Because most everyone's ethical habits during medieval times were ethically passive and obedient to their social and religious leaders, many believed people like Bruno were not only sinful but socially dangerous as well. Bruno attacked the very foundation of conservative philosophy, namely, there exists only one model of eternal and unchanging Truth. Such people still feared god might send more plague to everyone as a punishment for allowing such sinful audacity? As a result, social fear remained a common feeling, whether it was about deadly plague, earthquakes, famines, fires, or heretics!
In short, most everyone’s inner psychic survival kit of ethical feelings was greatly different from today. Often in the Middle Ages anyone could simply accuse someone of sinfulness and it was reason enough to cause violent actions against them. Often someone might just accuse, say, some local Jews of being devil-possessed. Today such accusers in industrial states would no doubt be quickly whisked off to the nearest mental hospital, but back then it often led to Jews' wholesale slaughter and murder, and then taking their possessions. Such conservative kinds of ethical audacity were often justified in the name of religious purity and social stability; it was in fact legalized murder and robbery, as is modern warfare, and part of audacity's dark side. After all, the more people see such actions, the easier it is to make them fearful, thus keeping them controlled and obedient to the social status quo. Even audacious kings like Henry 2 (d. 1189) were sometimes damned to eternal hell-fire -- excommunicated. The social result, however, was to keep liberal audacious actions like equal rights and democracy all but useless, even though many early Christians audaciously defied the Roman emperor himself.
Democratic Audacity: An Important Liberal Value
The lesson for us Deweyan liberals seems obvious. If we’re to continue growing the democratic values of equal rights for everyone, then ethical audacity should remain an important habit for all liberal democrats. Even in the early 2000s such liberal audacity is still very new for millions of people who’re just emerging from medieval psychic feelings. Hopefully, such examples will help readers begin feeling what a useful tool such audacity is for building a more liberated world for everyone, liberated from greedy conservatives who want nothing more than more power for themselves and their class. As we’ve been seeing, today’s social forms of power have begun shifting from religious to economic forms. People are much better educated today than ever, but in many ways many of their actions are still controlled by those few with huge amounts of economic power, as are most political leaders too. Most people still don’t feel how audacious their votes can be for building a more democratic world. New scientific communication tools may help more people connect with many others, but unless people vote to build a more democratic society, one where intelligent growth is most important, then our largely feudalistic political and economic systems will continue controlling much of life for the benefit of wealthy folks. What good is being more aware of how economic power is audaciously being used to serve its own ends, unless people audaciously vote to tax the wealthy more, and thus share their economic power? What’s important is how easily money circulates, not how concentrated it becomes.
Such liberal ethical audacity can take many different forms. For example, the more presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon acted unlawfully and unethically audacious about the Vietnam War, the more audaciously they were mocked and ridiculed even on TV, making it easier for people to take away their power. In ancient Greece the comic playwright Aristophanes stayed connected to current events, mocking everything from war to Socrates, and since the 1960s intelligently audacious comedy has become another powerful tool for helping people laugh at those who are greedy for power more than anything else. Again, however, unless people audaciously express more constructive liberal feelings with their votes, and help educate others to build such habits, the powerful will continue working to make themselves even more powerful. History tells us that’s just a fact of life. Who hasn’t yet realized the quest for more power, like anything else, can become addictive, and satisfied only with more power. The art of liberal ethical audacity may still be alive and well for many, but unless such habits keeps growing, a largely feudalistic status quo will continue on. When is the last time you told a religious leader, all their actions are just another form of personal habits, or conservative political leaders many of their ideas are no longer justified or acceptable?
A Liberal Movement
Today, thanks to a much more enlightened and informed public, passive and accepting ethical actions are often seen as much less than excellent, as is unjustified violence. With Dewey's intelligent democratic and educational forms of audacity, it’s become much easier to challenge all such conservative actions, and thus help build a more liberal world, one voter at a time. Sometimes it may mean audaciously testing political leaders to see their responses. Sometimes it may mean audaciously testing educational leaders to see how much they really allow students the freedom to learn what they want to learn, and thus begin feeling intelligent kinds of democratic freedom itself. And as we’ll see later in the section Tribal Games of Freedom, it may mean audaciously testing peoples’ greediness, to see how much they’ll keep of what they earn. In fact, such kinds of ethical audacity are already happening on a daily basis, and often they’re best answered with equally audacious acts of kindness and generosity! As the old saying goes, to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
As we’ve already seen, agnosticism is another liberal audacious idea helping to build a more peaceful and tolerant world. Millions of people are still taught to accept the assumption of different spirit-objects, even though they can’t even be objectively proved to exist. These days millions of people have accepted experimental learning as producing the best kinds of knowledge, and so they’ve audaciously applied that learning habit to even spirit-ideas. They’re not afraid to audaciously say they need to see some proof such objects exist before believing in them. As a result, compared to life in ancient and medieval times, new audacious humanistic impulse-instincts for peace, kindness, and equal rights among all human tribes has become much more important than it’s ever been. No doubt, sometimes such audacious religious ideas may be dangerous to talk about, but a large part of wisdom itself is learning when such ideas can be safely talked about, and when they can’t. Also, democracy and Behavioral psychology are also encouraging such liberal audacity. In fact, these days such liberal actions continue actively threatening many conservative habits, especially political ones. Recently laws in conservative controlled states have restricted voting power, or at least have tried too. To us liberals, however, such actions objectively prove conservatives continue battling the growth of audacious liberal actions like equal rights for all, in the quest to maintain a conservative feudalistic status quo.
The recent withering of labor union power to demand better wages and a fairer share of corporate profits is yet another example of how conservative corporate power can be used to weaken democratic power. Over the past 40 years union power has shrunk dramatically, decreasing worker economic power and freedom to support more liberal candidates while, at the same time, increasing corporate profits and power to new levels. As a result, new forms of unionizing audacity are now called for, forms that again challenge workers to gain more control of their lives with better wages. Why should CEOs make over 300 times what their workers make? That system merely preserves conservative power.
Even so, many European and US unions have discovered there's a difference between intelligent and unintelligent union actions? When, for example, unions focus mainly on their own growth and power, rather than the public good, they too can act counterproductively. When, say, the economy goes into a slump and unemployment goes up, public unions can sometimes make the situation worse by not lowering their own wages to keep budgets balanced and members working. Again, audacious flexibility is another important part of ethical audacity. How flexible are we when conditions change? Healthcare benefits for workers are another example. For years their cost was routinely passed on to auto consumers at the dealership, but eventually such costs helped make less expensive foreign cars more attractive. How intelligent was it for auto unions to keep demanding better healthcare coverage, than it was to help build a better healthcare system for everyone, one in which everyone helps cover everyone else? It’s called a public single payer healthcare system, now working in many countries.
Also, with better communication tools, there are many more chances for audacious consumer actions! Such tools make it much easier to organize public power. Sometimes it can help balance the corporate audacity for more and more profits regardless of the public’s health.
In the liberal conservation movement too, audacious direct confrontation has become much more common against big corporations who often ignore the environmental damage their actions produce. Whale hunting is merely one such example, and coal mining is another one. No doubt, some environmentalists sometimes act too audaciously and try to protect all life forms. How intelligent is that when most life forms on earth have gone extinct over the past 3 billion years? Isn’t there a line between intelligent and destructive audacity people should be aware of? Should we try to preserve all of our earth’s 1 million insect species?
Obviously, such questions can become a part of ethical audacity. Where is the line between the conscious art of intelligent audacity and the routine practice of it? Mahatma Gandhi’s helping peacefully expel the British from India soon after I was born is intelligent audacity on a national scale! With such audacious actions like fasting he helped millions of people feel their own power not to support a small oppressive ruling class! He helped people feel the difference between routine obedience and intelligently peacefully disobedience against unjust and unequal laws. Who knows? Thanks to the democratization of our electronic tools, and their great educational potential, one day consumers may become more flexible than they are now, and become more capable of peaceful and constructive acts of audacity.
How far should it go? I mean, is there only one definition of ethical audacity capable of applying to all ethical situations, so we can always know how to act audaciously in all situations? Are there such universal definitions of audacity like Socrates and Plato assumed existed? For us liberal Deweyans, that assumption is as useless in an always changing world as the search for one chemical way to change lead into gold. It represents yet another attempt to make nature bend to our ideas, rather than always adjusting our ideas and actions to the current situation. Sometimes running like hell away from a dangerous situation is intelligent ethical audacity!
Dewey's joyful news about the art of intelligent audacity is this: Almost everyone can experimentally start building, honing, and energizing their own forms of it, even at the everyday level. How? Merely by taking the time to audaciously ask how life can be improved in some way, and perhaps even work to invent a new tool or method for improving it! Such questions about ethical audacity can help create new and possibly useful actions. For example, many people still have irrational hatreds even about the way other people even look and sometimes act, even if they're peaceful actions. I’m thinking about all those protest actions. Millions of people still see protesting gays and lesbians as evil and sinful. Thus, audaciously testing others to see their re-actions is an intelligent form of ethical audacity. How dangerous might some people be? Are they democratic or dictatorial, tolerant or dominating, violent or peaceful? Such intelligent questions and audacious testing help people become an experimental artist in audacity. How audaciously generous are you? Can you afford to keep only 10% of your income, and donate 90% to help better educate others, and if not, then what percentages can you use? Here’s another audaciously ethical question. What will someone do FOR $20,000 and what will they do WITH $20,000? Have you taught yourself to ask, and answer, such intelligently audacious questions yet?
Educational Audacity
Life is literally full of such audacious ethical questions, but only if we make the asking of them a working habit. Again, there’s a line between growing such a healthy habit, and obsessing about such questions; where do you draw that ethical line? For Dewey, the line about educational audacity should be drawn on the other side of intelligent educational questions. For him all conservative book-centered forms of education need some audacious kinds of questions to start making them better, like, for example, what are the weak and unhealthful social results of such an educational system? Is it helping produce excessive unemployment results, weak character habits, more criminal activity, and even more drug use? Is it producing more useful political and economic skills for living intelligently in an advanced democratic republic? Such audacious educational questions helped him ask if even kindergarten kids can start building intelligent experimental habit-arts, rather than just be make to focus on silently reading more and more textbooks, or merely playing more computer games? To those Deweyans like myself, we need more of such educationally audacious questions, not less. Why shouldn't even young primary age students begin learning how to intelligent use school-money to start building the useful habit of spending money wisely, and helping those less fortunate, or for running useful businesses in school? In such audacious educational experiences, where all students are free to build the skills they want, students can begin feeling how their extra monies can best be used to keep making their schools and neighborhoods more exciting and enjoyable places to be, not only for themselves, but for their children as well.
How many people today feel they have the power to build such liberal kinds of schools in their own neighborhoods? Audacious educational questions can help improve education below the university level. In many new charter schools public monies are often used for continuing a conservative textbook model of education already in place in our public schools. Is it too educationally audacious to ask if such schools are helping liberate students to intelligently learn the skills they want to learn, or are they merely enslaving students psychically to learn what they have little desire and need to learn? What social results are made more likely in such book-centered schools? Is such a stressful and boring educational system helping produce the growing number of violent shootings we’re seeing around the country? Are they telling us our traditional schools becoming more unacceptable to more and more students? Whether public or charter, such book-centered schools help keep students passively enslaved and obedient to what others say they should be learning, rather than teaching them the useful skills they want to learn. Even as Plato shows us, in ancient Greece educational audacity was a large part of the conservative philosophic tradition; social harmony and peace were much easier to achieve when children were trained to learn certain habits. But in his democratic world, liberals were asking what habits should we teach young folks? History teaches us, conservative habits have helped keep authoritarian feudalistic political and religious systems in place for thousands of years! For us Deweyan liberals, few human institutions are more important than our public schools. Within them are encouraged the habits adults may practice for the rest of their lives.
Another audacious educational question is this: Can the habits of joy and happiness be more easily learned when students have the freedom to choose and actually learn the skills they want to learn? Such liberal democratic schools will actively teach such useful habits, making it easier for students to like school, rather than endure it. Such liberal schools would actively help students learn how to joyfully resist many of the dangerous drug and gang temptations now becoming more available than ever before? For much too long conservative schools, homes, and churches have ignored joyfully teaching such useful skills, thinking liberal habits were too audacious. The harmful social results, however, continue showing up in outrageously expensive prison costs and drug-deaths each year, drug-gang warfare, and in all the homes where women and men become hooked on drugs to merely relieve their stressful tensions and fears. Such results are helped if our public schools continue neglecting teaching young folks how to make their own lives more joyful and happy. Book-centered schools help keep people vulnerable to all those greedy and destructive habits and hustlers out there who love to take other people’s freedom in exchange for their money! In fact, on a daily basis, ignorant and greedy people audaciously test others to see how unintelligent and selfish they are, and how dangerously they live. Such people who break the law and disrespect others often become the object of Underground kinds of ethical audacity and justice!
Here’s a little example of sexual audacity from my own life. Into my 20s I was still almost completely unaware such audacious games were being played, and so I was easily talked into investing $200 in some stock. Then over the next several months some ‘free-spirited’ women offered themselves for my pleasure and of course my egg fertilizing services. Then, about a year later, I cashed in on my investment and much to my surprise got $400 back! In other words $200 was my audacious payoff for services rendered. However, because I wasn't ethically audacious about helping others, I failed that character test. Instead of using at least the $200 to help others, like a dummy I kept it and let those audacious women pay me off. Live and learn eh? Years later, however, I became audacious enough to donate all of a small inheritance to help fight the AIDS epidemic, and so kept the freedom to keep learning what I wanted to learn.
Is it really necessary to teach and reward children for intelligently practicing ethical audacity, like joyful exercise and healthful diet habits? It is if you want to help protect them from endangering their own lives with poor character habits. There’re a lot of glitzy and dangerous temptations out there, money, drugs, and sex being perhaps the 3 most powerful ones. Such potentially dangerous temptations can be better controlled educationally with generous and helpful habits. If not, then we all pay in one way or another for allowing such habits to continue being ignored.
Intelligent audacity, whether liberal or conservative, helps direct the glitz to where it might help the most people, and thus build useful kinds of character excellence! To us liberal Deweyans, the sooner children of all ages are encouraged to learn such ethical audaciously like joy and happiness, the sooner they become inoculated against all those out there who are offering destructive and harmful kinds of actions. So, if you’re that kind of liberal parent, why not begin encouraging your kids to practice such ethical audacity? Who knows? One day they may even become audacious enough to realize how helpful you were, and even thank you for it!
As you may already know, the average teenager is especially vulnerable to such ethical audacious destruction. Neighborhood drug gangs often try recruiting even pre-teens to work for them. It’s another reason Deweyans like myself say we should be teaching more intelligently joyful ethical habits to even primary-age students. Because such training is still neglected in many homes and schools, many teens are almost completely unprepared for intelligently responding to such temptations. For example, many young girls take taunting and ridicule personally, rather than joyfully smiling and giving back the same kinds of talk! Such students have already learned to feel good about themselves, and give to people what people give to them. What goes around, aye? Isn’t such a liberally audacious response better than banging someone’s head with a 2x4? After all, you might break a perfectly good 2x4! Those little splinters are annoying, aren’t they? Are learning such useful character habits much more useful than reading lots of useless information or playing video games at schools? Caring parents can even help children learn such intelligent audacity at the dinner table every night.
Often in the Middle Ages many in the Church helped build hospitals and kindly cared for others less fortunate; in a world brimming with controlled violence and disease, and where robber-gangs were much more common than today, that was ethically and medically audacious. Now I’m certainly not saying we should all become poor monks, but the audacious ideal of living simply and satisfying our needs, rather than all our greedy wants, makes life easier and less stressful. Believe it or not, almost certainly, many in Hollywood already practice that audacious ethical art. However, don't just take my word for it. Why not do some research and find out for yourself? How many of today's biggest 'stars' live like monks and nuns? Just because people wear colorful clothes, jewelry, and lots of make-up for awards shows doesn't mean they're all wealthy! Is that another audacious thought, or what? Many in fact audaciously dedicate their lives to helping those less fortunate and creating a more peaceful world!
What the world may need now more than anything else is more kinds of such liberal educational audacity! What else can love mean? How else are we going to start better controlling our populations and environment pollution so that life can become more enjoyable and less stressful? Unless we start teaching more intelligent reproductive and energy habits, life will only become worse for most everyone. How many parents, teachers, preachers, and politicians are ready to help teach such liberal kinds of ethical audacity? There are in fact limits to how many people can live well on our planet, as well as how much carbon the atmosphere can absorb before a warmer world starts kills us all.
Obviously many teachers and parents still aren't ready to build such schools, but why let that stop you from audaciously experimenting on your own? Such educational audacity can help keep making life more interesting, productive, and useful. Or would you prefer your children and mate continue stumbling through life, afraid of most everyone or everything, and living as many do now in parts of India and Africa? Doesn’t our world already have far too many undereducated people who haven’t learned what intelligently joyful audacity feels like? Don’t we already have far too many people who’re almost hypnotized by glitzy jewelry, money, cars, military power, or even using people as sex objects, rather than audaciously focusing on helping those less fortunate? To me the more I continue helping others, even if it's only donating a few dollars each month to help feed the poor, the more I feel my own character audacity growing STRONGER; it’s another great inner result from experimenting with Dewey's kind of naturalistic excellence.