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By Root 810 0

free and we create our “essence” out of our existence; that is, we become what we are as a result of our choices. Choosing is our act of self-creation. But for Sartre this was an irrational act of pure will and something that each individual had to grapple with on his own. He gives the example of a young man, one of his students, who came to him during the war with a moral dilemma: should he join the Résistance (the “resistance” movement against the Germans) or stay at home and care for his aging mother?3 Sartre’s response was “I can’t choose for you.” Sartre regarded the young man as trying to evade his freedom; but even in the act of choosing to go to Sartre and not a priest, he had in effect chosen. What the young man was probably hoping for was someone to help him figure out the implications of each possible decision; that is, the meaning of each possible choice. It is too bad he was not able to go to Dewey instead of Sartre. For both thinkers we could say that when we choose we choose the self we will be, except that Dewey thinks this is a deliberative process, an exploration in thought and dialogue with others, while for Sartre it is a lonely and irrational act of will.

As we deliberate, the role of ideals becomes clear. Ideals are not pure fixed realities but genuine possibilities of the present. Insofar as an ideal becomes truly operative in our present situation, various aspects of the situation are transformed into what Dewey calls “ends-in-view.” That is, the meaning of something in the present situation is transformed by the possibilities it has of realizing some ideal. Let us say I wish to befriend someone I like at work. The ideal here would be friendship—the enjoyment of companionship, enjoyment of each other’s company, and sharing of interests. The means at hand—the ends-in-view—could be asking the person to join me for lunch or a cup of coffee, engaging in conversation that indicates interest in what he or she does or cares about or offering to do small favors. Another example could be that one’s ideal is to build a house. At various stages pouring cement, setting up wooden frames, laying bricks, and so on would be the ends-in-view of the same ideal: the complete house. What Dewey wants to stress by this term is that nothing is a “mere means”; the end is the outgrowth of the means and in reflecting on the means, we need also to reflect on the end. Dewey is often thought to have held that we somehow seize on an end and then coldly use whatever can function as a means to realize it. This is the opposite of what he said. Dewey constantly emphasized not only that means and ends are woven together in intelligent conduct but also that ends themselves must undergo reflection and deliberation as they are realized. After all, the person one thought would be a good friend may turn out to be another sort of individual entirely; the actual house one lives in may be quite a different reality from the ideal one thought to bring forth.

Deliberation, then, involves the use of imagination to reveal the possibilities of the present situation and the various ideals or meanings it might come to embody. Dewey’s ethics, then, is really an ethics of meaning. The environment in which we act is not merely the immediate physical one, here and now. The environment includes past history and future possibilities. Intelligence is our ability to interpret the present in light of those two temporal horizons. The more we grasp the past history involved in the present situation the more likely we are to understand better the conflicts it carries. Knowledge is a highly relevant aspect of ethics for Dewey. Knowledge does not simply give us the past history but provides a more accurate basis for projecting possibilities in the present. The more we grasp the range of possibilities for action, the more we might select a course of action that realizes value and meaning, harmonizing the conflict. Thus knowledge, imagination, and ideals work together to constitute moral intelligence. This is why the popular understanding of the term pragmatist