OR:

Either-Or: "The international crisis is a moral crisis." (THOMAS F. WOODLOCK, Editor's note: This column appeared in The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 1939.)

"Above all, they emphasize that the international crisis is a moral crisis, and that the foundations of the world will be shaky until the moral props are restored."--Anne O'Hare McCormick in The New York Times, June 3, 1939. [...]

"There is no separate body of moral rules; no separate subject-matter of moral knowledge and hence no such thing as an isolated ethical science. If the business of morals is not to speculate upon an ultimate standard of right, it is to utilize physiology, anthropology and psychology to discover all that can be discovered of man, his organic powers and potentialities."--John Dewey, Creative Intelligence, 1917, pp. 65-69.

The foregoing remarks join the issues pretty well. And the interesting thing is that the issues boil down to a very simple one, whether man is or is not a "moral" being. Professor Dewey thinks he is not. Nazism also plumps for the negative, and acts upon it. (So does Sovietism.) Dr. Butler is unequivocably in the affirmative. That uncannily clairvoyant lady, Mrs. McCormick, sees an apostasy from morals as the root of all the world's present troubles, and makes a powerful case in support of her thesis. [...]

Now leaving open for the moment the question whether man is a moral being or not, we are confronted by the obvious fact that the Western civilization is founded on the assumption that he is, and by the equally obvious fact that our American social structure is in a very special sense formally created on the same base. On this base have rested all the traditions, the mores, and the conventions of both. That base is now attacked in principle and in practice. If it goes the traditions and the mores go with it. What kind of social order can we expect to arise upon its ruins?

A hundred years later and pragmatists are still peddling the same utilitarian nonsense, about flexible morality.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2003 8:13 PM