Ethics

Dewey, John

Publication Date: 1908

About this Item

First edition, First Printing with all points present (according to The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 5, published by Southern Illinois University Press) including NEW YORK / HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY / 1908 on the title page (with no London publisher listed) and no impression number on the copyright page. Dewey s important treatise on the concept of ethics and morals, co-authored with his most important philosophical collaborators, James Tufts. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: John Dewey (1859 1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching conflicts between capital and labor as they were integrated into the urban industrial economy. As the face-to-face communal life of small villages and towns waned, it confronted the need to create new forms of community life capable of sustaining democracy on urban and national scales. Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms nor traditional philosophical ethics were able to cope with the problems raised by these dramatic transformations. Traditional morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Hidebound and unreflective, it was incapable of changing to address the problems raised by new circumstances. Traditional philosophical ethics sought to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic methods. Its preoccupation with reducing the diverse sources of moral insight to a single fixed principle subordinated practical service to ordinary people to the futile search for certainty, stability, and simplicity. In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most people. To address the problems raised by social change, moral practice needed to acquire the disposition to respond intelligently to new circumstances. Dewey saw his reconstruction of philosophical ethics as a means to effect this practical reconstruction. Dewey s ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end or supreme ethical principle with the goal of identifying a method for improving our value judgments. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is the use of reflective intelligence to revise our judgments in light of the consequences of acting on them. Value judgments are tools for satisfactorily redirecting conduct when habits fail. As tools, they can be evaluated instrumentally. We test our value judgments by putting them into practice and seeing whether the results are satisfactory whether they solve our problems with acceptable side-effects, whether they enable successful responses to novel problems, whether living in accordance with alternative value judgments yields more satisfactory results. We make moral progress by adopting habits of reflectively revising our value judgments in response to the widest consequences for everyone of following them. The conditions of warrant for value judgments lie in human conduct, not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct, such as God s commands, Platonic Forms, pure reason, or nature. Dewey offers a naturalistic metaethic of value judgments, grounded in developmental and social psychology. First edition, first printing in well-preserved, dark green boards with edgewear and rubbing; Gilt titles bright, neatly penciled marginalia and underlining throughout; binding firm and tight. Seller Inventory # ABE-1698352108010

Bibliographic Details

Title: Ethics

Publication Date: 1908

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Good

Edition: 1st Edition