The Ethics of Nonviolence

Essays by Robert L. Holmes

Robert L. Holmes, Predrag Cicovacki, Predrag Cicovacki

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623565800
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Robert Holmes is one of the leading proponents of nonviolence in the United States, and his influence extends to the rest of the world. However, he has never presented his views on nonviolence in full-length book form. The Ethics of Nonviolence brings together his best essays on the topic, both classic works and more obscure pieces, as well as several important essays that have never been published. Holmes started his career by following Dewey and James, and then turned toward metaethics. The Vietnam War finally led him toward moral problems related to war and violence. For the last forty years he has been a great proponent of nonviolence and pacifism in the style of Tolstoy and Gandhi. If ethics is meant to be more than a purely academic exercise, the theoretical ethics of philosophy must be shown to be relevant to applied morality; the ongoing process of making moral judgments must add value to the world we live in. For Robert Holmes, no aspect of reality is more in need of ethical thinking and reform than the culture of war and violence that cannot be ignored. There are morally viable alternatives to this violence, Holmes argues, and he scrutinizes the sources and implications of such positions. Holmes shows that nonviolence and pacifism can lead us toward a more peaceful and humanely dignified world.

1

John Dewey’s Moral Philosophy in Contemporary Perspective

Dewey never developed his ethical thought sufficiently. Holmes tries to remedy this shortcoming by showing first that Dewey’s position is not that of naturalism, intuitionism, or noncognitivism (the positions many philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century believed to exhaust our viable choices). For Dewey, these accounts of moral judgments, while each containing a grain of truth, obscure for us a more important concern—our understanding of morality as a way of life. A judgment expresses a moral way of life if it is made with a view to promoting the good (individual and social), and if it is both warranted and verifiable from an empirical standpoint (rather than to be a result of mere habit or impulse). Holmes’ interpretation of Dewey’s ethics, which ties together moral practice and critical reasoning, as well as individual and social concerns, deviates from the traditional ethical approaches by looking away from a search for one universal principle of morality. Holmes’ early essay on Dewey has two merits. First, it shows the vitality of a general approach to morality as a way of life, and, second, it prepares a ground for a context-based ethics of nonviolence, which Holmes himself developed in the later stages of his career.

It is regrettable that the ethical thought of so noted a philosopher as John Dewey should be as little understood as it is, particularly as it occupies such a central position in his philosophy as a whole. It would not be too much to say that his major contributions to philosophy, whether in metaphysics, logic or historical analysis, can only imperfectly be understood apart from his ethical writings. Dewey himself shares a measure of responsibility for this lack of understanding, however, inasmuch as he never states fully and unequivocally precisely where he stands on many of the principal questions of ethics. Thus those who read him tend to fix upon those few works which appear to have clear direction and, by extrapolation, try to develop an interpretation for his thought as a whole. This generally results in reading him as an ethical naturalist, an interpretation particularly tempting in view of his clear commitment to a metaphysical naturalism. This puts him, according to common accounts, in the tradition of Hume, Bentham, and Mill, and in the twentieth century on the side, notably, of R. B. Perry and (in his theory of value) C. I. Lewis. On this interpretation he would also be cross-classified as a cognitivist, which would align him with the intuitionists in regard to the possibility of attaining genuine knowledge in morals and against the emotivists and more recent anti-descriptivists, who deny that moral judgments are primarily informative. But though there is much to recommend this interpretation, and it certainly derives support from works which represent only a partial development of his views or selected aspects thereof, it does not survive closer examination in the light of his overall writings on ethics; writings which must be ferreted out from the whole voluminous body of unsystematic, difficult, and sometimes tedious writings of a long and productive lifetime. To take up the challenge posed by them, and to draw together the many relevant and often isolated strands of his thought, is to find in Dewey a timely, perceptive, and relatively coherent ethics of pragmatism, one which repays careful study by anyone interested in many of the problems in the forefront of contemporary ethical theory.

Cautioning in advance that summary treatment of any aspect of Dewey’s thought, much less one as far-reaching in compass as his ethics, must of necessity be omissive, I shall in the following develop what I believe to be the most plausible rendering of his philosophy. In so doing I will confine myself principally to explicating his stand vis-à-vis contemporary metaethical positions, though I will expand upon this in the later sections and some of his normative, or substantive, views as well. In the final section I will outline a theory of morality as a whole which, though nowhere explicitly defended by Dewey, is consonant with various theses he does defend. The burden of my argument will be to show, first, that he is not holding the sort of position usually characterized as ethical naturalism, and secondly, that the position he does hold marks a significant departure from all three of the conventional metaethical positions, intuitionism, naturalism, and noncognitivism. Metaphorically he stands at the third point of a triangle, the other two points of which are naturalism and emotivism, for he adapts salient features of each of these positions to an orientation which fits the framework of his view of the nature of ethics, science and philosophy in general. Let us begin by assessing the chief arguments in support of a naturalistic interpretation, as these will provide a point of departure for clarifying his considered view.

Ethical naturalism

Since G. E. Moore’s attempt to expose a fallacy in any theory which defines goodness in terms of natural properties, ethical naturalism has come to be associated with any view which holds that ethical terms in general can be defined in like fashion. By this view, ethical judgments are factual assertions, true or false, and capable of empirical verification in essentially the same manner as scientific statements. However, a naturalist need not hold quite all of what Moore ascribed to him, for he may deny the possibility or plausibility of defining moral terms in the way Moore criticized and yet hold that the judgments in which such terms occur are empirical. That is, we can distinguish the following two theses:

1.Ethical terms are definable by reference to non-normative terms.

2.Moral judgments are statements of empirical fact and are primarily intended to convey information.

Anyone holding both (1) and (2) we may call a naturalist in a strong sense; anyone holding just (2), either denying (1) or leaving it open, may be called a naturalist in a weak sense. Anyone who holds (1) presumably will also hold (2), though not necessarily vice versa.

It is obvious upon even a casual reading that Dewey makes no unequivocal commitment to naturalism in either of these senses. Indeed, it is doubtful that he was ever very much concerned with metaethics per se, for as he conceives it,

the distinctive office, problems and subject-matter of philosophy grow out of stresses and strains in the community life in which a given form of philosophy arises, and . . . accordingly, its specific problems vary with the changes in human life that are always going on and that at times constitute a crisis and a turning point in human history.¹

Although a concern with normative practical problems is not inconsistent with the holding of any given metaethical view, much less naturalism in particular, it is clear nonetheless throughout Dewey’s writings that his main interest is with practical decision and the methodology by which it is reached, and that he is less concerned with linguistic distinctions than to see that intelligent thought provides the proper orientation for the handling of practical problems. No less than what he says on specifically ethical matters, his writings on politics, education and religion attest to this.

We may still ask, however, what stand he would have adopted on this issue had he been more keenly interested in it, and I believe that it is profitable to do so, for he certainly was concerned to distinguish normative and non-normative judgments and to see that the two are not confused.² And the naturalistic interpretation has initial plausibility in view of his emphasis upon the need of a scientific method for ethics, his insistence that judgments of value must make reference to verifiable consequences of action, and what is implicit throughout his writings, that moral judgments are capable of some kind of empirical confirmation. This has led many writers to the view expressed by Brand Blanshard when he asks: “Does Dewey mean that problems of value are merely problems of fact, that questions of duty, or right and wrong, of better and worse, are to be settled by observation in the same sense that the question can be so settled whether a chair has four legs?” and then concludes, “The answer is Yes, he does.”³ But important countervailing considerations have been given insufficient attention by those who interpret Dewey in this fashion, and it is these which I propose to discuss. They involve particularly the issues of the definability of moral terms and the cognitivity of moral judgments.

Meaning as function

The first point worth noticing is that Dewey nowhere explicitly defines moral terms, naturalistically or otherwise. This in itself should be noteworthy to those who read him as holding the sort of position described above, and it is evidence that even if he is subscribing to naturalism, it is unlikely that this is what we are calling the stronger form. It might be argued, of course, that he assumes some sort of definition along naturalistic lines, even though he never states clearly what it is. But the unlikelihood of this is clear from an important early essay which indicates, first, that he is more interested in judgments and propositions than in the terms which compose them, and secondly, that he is concerned to explicate meaning in terms of use and function rather than by definition. For, as he says of ethical judgment, “The work that it has to do gives it certain limiting or defining elements and properties. These constitute the ultimate Terms or Categories of all ethical science.”⁴ “Categories” here include the concepts operative in moral discourse, such as “right,” “good,” and “obligation.” Just as science has its own categories which “define to us the limiting conditions under which . . . [intellectual or scientific judgments] do their work,” so ethics is equipped with the tools “necessary to its task.” To this extent ethics and science parallel one another.

It is upon closer examination of these “tools” of the respective disciplines that significant differences appear. In science, terms must be deliberately and precisely defined; prior to inquiry there must be agreement, for example, as to what conditions define a calorie of heat or a volt of electricity, with these and other concepts then entering into the formation of judgments. In this way they assist in the assimilation of factual data to the task of directing inquiry to a satisfactory conclusion. The reverse is the case with ethics, for although it is true that the terms enter into the construction of judgments, the meanings of judgments nonetheless in a sense precede the specific meanings of the terms they contain.

An analysis of the make-up of [ethical judgments] . . . must reveal all the distinctions which have claim to the title of fundamental ethical categories. . . . The differential meaning of any one of the terms is dependent upon the particular part it plays in the development and termination of judgments of this sort.⁵

It is a mistake, in other words, to fix upon ethical terms in isolation from judgments in which they are used, and to suppose that they have some one meaning constant through all situations.

Only reference to a situation within which the categories emerge and function can furnish the basis for estimation of their value and import. Otherwise the definition of basic ethical terms is left to argumentation based upon opinion, an opinion which snatches at some of the more obvious features of the situation (and thereby may always possess some measure of truth), and which, failing to grasp the situation as a whole, fails to grasp the exact significance of its characteristic terms.⁶

The point is that only by an analysis of the function of ethical judgments are we able to determine the meanings of their constituent terms. The approach to ethics which takes account of this would be what Dewey calls a “logic of conduct” and constitutes part of what he means by a science of ethics.⁷

This accords with his distinction between common sense and science, both of which constitute language systems but which differ in the character of the meanings which they embody. Common sense is the outgrowth of custom and convention, and its meanings have evolved slowly through the various demands for communication. Thus its language carries with it many of the beliefs and customs of the group within which it has evolved. In science, on the other hand, meanings have been deliberately fixed with a view to facilitating productive inquiry, and have been purposely divested of their subjective trappings.

The primary meanings and associations of ideas and hypotheses are derived from their position and force in common sense situations of use-enjoyment. They are expressed in symbols developed for the sake of social communication rather than to serve the conditions of controlled inquiry. The symbols are loaded ...