Dr. Seuss and Philosophy by Jacob M. Held

Author:Jacob M. Held [Held, Jacob M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2011-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Pragmatist Ethics with John Dewey, Horton, and the Lorax

Thomas M. Alexander

Pragmatism is an unfortunate term, especially when it comes to the subject of ethics, for its popular sense connotes someone who is self-centered and shortsighted whereas the philosophical version means just the opposite: developing long-range, shared goals and ideals that expand meaning in our lives. While both William James (1842–1910) and Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), the founders of pragmatism, had important things to say about ethics, it was John Dewey (1859–1952) who developed the most encompassing and profound ideas on the subject. Ethics, for Dewey, blended in with his whole social philosophy, which included his theory of the role of education in democracy and his view of democracy itself as social intelligence applied to all aspects of life.

Dewey’s ideas were frequently misunderstood—to the point of being taken as saying the opposite of what he meant (as in the case of the term pragmatism itself). He was accused of denying there were any intrinsic values, of making success the end of life, of advocating whatever was crudely expedient, of being a nihilist and believer in social Darwinism. Each one of these claims is perfectly false; Dewey rejected these notions and affirmed their exact contraries. Part of the reason for this misjudgment was that people had such a fixed idea of ethics as a set of absolutes that any other view was thought to come down to “nature red in tooth and claw.” People often want a feeling of security in the values they prize the most. Many such people did find Dewey’s ideas threatening, especially those who thought that ethics had to be a preordained set of fixed beliefs and an infallible way of discerning good from evil—that is, people who turned to a dogmatic outlook as a way of not having actually to think about the complexity of existence. Like Socrates, Dewey thought that morality was all one with what he called “reflective conduct.” People who view ethics as unquestioning obedience to commands (either God-given or coming from social institutions or traditions) exhibit what Dewey called “the quest for certainty.” Not only did he think this quest futile but also he thought it actually made people less able to deal with ethical issues as they arose in life. Such people, after all, are like the German soldiers at the concentration camps who pleaded they were “just following orders.” The ethical life, for Dewey, was one of constant reflection and risk. Neither obedience nor good intentions were enough to help us evade the responsibility of moral reflection or the possibility of tragic error.

So, what is ethics concerned with? Dewey affirms that there is no separate sphere of our existence that is “ethical”; that is, ethics is concerned with all forms of conduct, or is so at least potentially. To use one of Dewey’s examples, it may seem outside of the concerns of ethics to decide to open a window to get fresh air. But if there is a sick

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