American Philosophy and John Dewey

On the American side of the Atlantic, toward the end of the nineteenth century philosophy began to follow its own lines of development rather than merely construct variations of British empiricism or literary versions of German idealism. The intellectual world in the United States had matured to the point where a new professionalism had an effect that was similar to what was happening in Britain, that is, new professional standards led to systematic philosophy that could find little of value in "popular writings" on the importance of evolution for ethics. The great figures in American philosophy—William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, George Santayana—were unanimous in their rejection of Spencer and in their rejection of evolution as a guide for ethics.

William James, for example, like all the American pragmatists,

[39] For example, Anthony Quinton, "Ethics and the Theory of Evolution," in I. T. Ramsey, ed., Biology and Personality: Frontier Problems in Science, Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965): 107.

[40] The undergraduate lectures that Moore heard were posthumously printed as Sidgwick, Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau (see fn. 33, chap. 5).

back to Chauncey Wright, interpreted ideas by their practical consequences. He stressed the importance of evolution for understanding the living world and mind. But as much as he was influenced by an evolutionary perspective, James rejected any notion that it could provide a guide for ethical decision or a foundation for morality.^[41] After a brief flirtation with Spencer's teleological ethics early in his career, he criticized it in a review for the Nation: "We can never on evolutionist principles altogether bar out personal bias, or the subjective method, from the construction of the ethical standard of right."^[42] He went on to explain, "For if what is right means what succeeds, however fatally doomed to succeed that thing may be, it yet succeeds through the determinate acts of determinate individuals; and until it has been revealed what shall succeed, we are all free to 'go in' for our preferences and try to make them right by making them victorious."^[43] James was no more sympathetic to the Darwinian approach, and in the same year as his early criticism of Spencer (1879) he reviewed Clifford's Lectures and Essays for the Nation and took a swipe at the latter's selectionist perspective: "The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning into itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to another."^[44]

William James never developed a systematic ethics; however, he wrote extensively on the subject, and it was central to his more general philosophy. In his writings his opposition to evolutionary

[41] On James's relationship to evolution, see Philip Weiner, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949); Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior; and Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Weiner also has an interesting discussion of Chauncey Wright, as does Edward H. Madden, Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963). Wright was critical of Spencer but held Darwin in high regard. Wright died at the young age of 45 and did not leave any essays on ethics. His opinions have been reconstructed from letters and a few published remarks. From these it appears that he was skeptical of attempts like Spencer's to create an evolutionary ethics but that he gave his own moral thoughts, which are based on utilitarianism, an evolutionary twist on occasion. See J. J. Chambliss, "Natural Selection and Utilitarian Ethics in Chauncey Wright," American Quarterly 12 (1960): 144-159.

[42] James's remark, which originally was published in 1879, appears in his Collected Essays and Reviews (London: Longmans, Green, 1920): 148.

[43] Ibid., 148-149.

[44] Ibid., 143-144.

ethics was clearly expressed.^[45] And even a cursory reading of the other pragmatists reveals little to suggest that any were more sympathetic. John Dewey, the one figure of the pragmatist school who because of his emphasis on the importance of Darwin for philosophy might have been expected to be a champion for evolutionary ethics, was, like James, openly critical.

Dewey appreciated the impact of Darwin's ideas and often stressed the importance of evolution for an understanding of man. He valued historical research and was stridently naturalistic. But Dewey was biting in his critique of both Spencerian and Darwinian attempts to derive ethical maxims from evolution. In his highly influential textbook, Ethics (1908), which he wrote with his fellow pragmatist colleague James Tufts, such attempts were dismissed as pseudo-science and as a parody of the facts.^[46] The view that a biological perspective could clarify the domain of human ethics was treated as a fundamentally misguided notion: "The chief objection to this 'naturalistic' ethics is that it overlooks the fact that, even from the Darwinian point of view, the human animal is a human animal."^[47] Erecting central principles, such as efficiency or achievement, from a reading of nature, according to Dewey and Tufts, was taking means for ends, a fallacy common to all materialism.^[48]

This is not to say that Dewey regarded the theory of evolution as uninteresting for the consideration of ethics. A decade earlier he had discussed the topic of evolutionary ethics in reference to Huxley's Romanes Lecture. In Dewey's perceptive article, he noted how philosophical subjects rarely were pursued to conclusive ends but rather in midstream the interests of scholars shifted and went off in other directions. Dewey applied this perspective to the history of the early debates on evolutionary ethics and contended that

[45] On James's philosophy, see the carefully crafted biography by Myers, William James, which replaces the earlier two-volume biography by Perry as the major study on James. See Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935). Also of interest are Graham Bird, William James (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); Bernard Brennan, The Ethics of William James (New York: Bookman Associates, 1961); John K. Roth, Freedom and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969); and Ellen Kappy Suckiel, The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).

[46] John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1908): 369.

[47] Ibid., 372. The quotations from Ethics appear in the sections written by Dewey.

[48] Ibid., 373.

they commenced with the issue of the relationship of man to the lower animals, that is, whether or not a chasm existed between man's intellectual, moral, and physical nature and that of lower forms. A shift in interest, dating from Huxley's Romanes Lecture, allegedly redirected the topic to a discussion of the relationship of evolutionary concepts and ethical concepts.^[49] The accuracy of Dewey's claim was debatable, for several important studies tracing the moral sentiment from animal to man dated from the 1890s, for example, Alexander Sutherland's Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct^[50] and Henry Calderwood's Evolution and Man's Place in Nature. David Ritchie, author of the popular Darwinism and Politics, claimed that the origin of the moral sense "forms the best initial test of the adequacy or inadequacy of the theory of natural selection outside the merely biological domain."^[51] And as late as 1915, L. T. Hobhouse published his Mind in Evolution, which reflected the continuing discussion on the origin of the moral sentiment that went on in journals, particularly those that stressed psychological issues, such as Mind.^[52]

Although Dewey's point may have lacked historical veracity, it nonetheless did point to an important distinction: that the location of the historical origins of the moral sentiment was not necessarily the discovery of a foundation for an ethical system. The former question was what Darwin concerned himself with as an issue that had relevance for the acceptance of a general evolutionary perspective on the living world. The latter concerned those writers, some Darwinian, some not, who were searching for a new system of ethics and saw in the natural world a potential foundation. Dewey may have gotten his historical facts a little jumbled in portraying these issues in a chronological sequence, but that they were distinct issues is worth noting and has been stressed repeatedly by critics of evolutionary ethics.

Although Dewey agreed with Huxley that the theory of evolution did not provide an adequate guide for action, he chided Hux-

[49] John Dewey, "Evolution and Ethics," The Monist 8, no. 3 (1898): 322.

[50] Alexander Sutherland, The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1898).

[51] David G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics: With Two Additional Essays on Human Evolution, 3d ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895): 96. The quotation is from an essay published originally as "Natural Selection and the Spiritual World," Westminster Review 133 (1890): 459-469.

[52] L. T. Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1915).

ley for overstating his case and argued that evolution was an important background for philosophy. Dewey accepted Huxley's rejection of crude "Social Darwinist" formulations that exalted ruthless selfishness. But, unlike Huxley, he did not frame the relationship of man to nature as a cosmic conflict. Rather, Dewey stressed continuity but contrasted the differences between biological evolution and social progress. If there was an analogy to be made between the process of speciation and the advancement of society, it was in the creation of new paths of development. There may be, according to Dewey, a selection operating in human culture, but it was not the crude Malthusian one that Darwin depended on in his description of the origin of species. Instead Dewey pointed out the conscious and deliberate form of action that man could and did take in response to his goals. Public opinion and education encouraged and discouraged types of action.^[53] The animal instincts that we have inherited were, therefore, no more than "promptings" and were "no more sins than . . . saintly attributes."^[54] It was in the conscious training and directing of our "animal" nature that ethical issues intruded. Evolution, then, served for Dewey as a backdrop. It explained how it was that man had appeared on earth and served as a naturalistic bulwark against importation of religious and metaphysical ethical demands. But it was not a foundation for ethics. Natural selection could not be generalized into a criterion to justify actions that promoted the general good, nor could it serve to sanctify actions that were leading toward an evolutionary goal.

Dewey's theory of value, which was later in the century overwhelmed by analytical philosophy and is only now making a minor comeback in professional philosophy, approached ethics in a manner that was very different from that of the supporters of evolutionary ethics. Although he recognized the "cosmic roots" of morality in custom, ritual, and so on, Dewey argued that a complete morality existed only when an individual freely chose the good. Moreover, such choice was not judged by a set of rules or criteria such as actions leading to the greatest good or survival value for society.

Dewey's values reflected a mainstream American liberal reform stance. He, however, did not take for granted the received moral

[53] See Dewey's "Evolution and Ethics."

[54] Ibid., 330.

precepts of his milieu. Dewey stressed the dynamic nature of society and did not accept the smug Victorian notion that "right" and "wrong" were obvious. He stood in marked contrast to writers like Jacob Gould Schurman, who in his Ethical Import of Darwinism (1887) wrote that a historical study of ethical positions would clarify what men have everywhere and at all times considered right and wrong. As Schurman noted, "All are agreed that certain courses of conduct are right and the opposite wrong, moralists seem unable to agree in anything except the contradictory claim of building their incompatible theories upon these universally recognized propositions."^[55]

Dewey did not attempt to build his theory on such allegedly recognized propositions. Instead he stressed the unique character of all moral decisions. Moral inquiry, like all other inquiry, began with the recognition of a situation that was problematic. Such situations were always complex contextual wholes and required careful evaluation. Inquiry, whether about the natural world or about a moral dilemma in the social world, took an indeterminate, problematic situation and formulated a testable hypothesis that proposed a solution judged adequate to the situation at hand.^[56]

The Darwinian world served Dewey as a background. He believed that the organic world constantly adjusted to its changing environment and in so doing modified the system of which it was a part. Although Dewey had little use for the simpleminded application of natural selection as a criterion of human action, there was a weak sense in which Dewey's conception of moral inquiry had a Darwinian cast: he thought of "truth" as those conditions that resolved a problematic situation. But fitting Dewey simplistically into an evolutionary mold does violence to his philosophy. To be sure, the ideas that we judged adequate were ones that would stand up to severe scrutiny, but far from a blind selectionist process, human actors consciously made decisions within a social

[55] Jacob Gould Schurman, The Ethical Import of Darwinism, 3d ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887): 2. Schurman was critical of evolutionary ethics. His ideas are more in the tradition of comparative culture that led to approaches like those of ethical relativity. See, for example, Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1906-1908), and his more accessible Ethical Relativity (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932).

[56] For a sympathetic and insightful discussion, see H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (INdianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

framework that was far removed from the calculus of pleasures or the calculus of population genetics.

The decades flanking the turn of century, then, were ambivalent times for evolutionary ethics. Popular writers, indulging in speculative social philosophy, spun out various versions of ethics with alleged ties to the theory of evolution, or to more general developmental philosophies. Such views, like those of Kidd, often had brilliant, if brief, moments of public interest, but none were able to penetrate into the halls of academia or into the serious intellectual journals. No proponent was able to clothe evolutionary ethics in acceptable or rigorous language to bring it successfully into the twentieth century. But the story was far from over.