consequences of our actions? Our ability to measure and to predict the benefits and
harms resulting from a course of action or a moral rule is dubious, to say the least.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty with utilitarianism is that it fails to take into
account considerations of justice. We can imagine instances where a certain course
of action would produce great benefits for society, but they would be clearly unjust.
South African whites, for example, sometimes claim that all South Africans--
including blacks--are better off under white rule. They have claimed that in those
African nations that have traded a whites-only government for a black or mixed
one, social conditions have rapidly deteriorated. Civil wars, economic decline,
famine, and unrest, they predict, will be the result of allowing the black majority of
South Africa to run the government. If such a prediction is true, then the white
government of South Africa would be morally justified by utilitarianism, in spite of
If our moral decisions are to take into account considerations of justice, then
apparently utilitarianism cannot be the sole principle guiding our decisions. It can,
however, play a role in these decisions. The principle of utilitarianism invites us to
consider the immediate and the less immediate consequences of our actions. It also
asks us to look beyond self-interest to consider impartially the interests of all
persons affected by our actions.
Dewey said, "A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common
interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in
social matters is not knowledge at all." Dewey’s
theme is that privilege inevitably
produces cognitive distortion: "All special privilege narrows the outlook of those
who possess it, as well as limits the development of those not having it. A very
considerable portion of what is regarded as the inherent selfishness of mankind is
the product of an inequitable distribution of power-inequitable because it shuts out
some from the conditions which direct and evoke their capacities, while it produces
a one-sided growth in those who have privilege" (Dewey & Tufts, Ethics, pp. 358-
Dewey's view is that we don't know what our interests and needs are or what
we are capable of until we actually engage in politics. A corollary of this view is that
there can be no final answer to the question of how we should live, and therefore
we should always leave it open to further discussion and experimentation. That is
precisely why we need democracy.
At the same time, we do know that certain things stunt our nature and
capacities. Dewey was well aware that equality and freedom can conflict, and that
there is no easy solution when they do conflict; but he would, I think, feel that this
conflict is too much emphasized in present-day political philosophy. In Dewey's
view, there is simply no doubt that inequality, on the scale that exists today, stunts
our nature and capacities, and thus leads to unfreedom on a massive scale. If we are
to talk about "conflicts between equality and freedom", we should also talk about the
ways in which inequality leads to unfreedom.
In Democracy and Education, Dewey said, “The development within the
young of the attitudes and dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive
life of a society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and
knowledge. An aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to
consciousness and made a factor in determiningpresent observation and choice of
ways of acting. It signifies that an activity has become intelligent. Specifically it
means foresight of the alternative consequences attendant upon acting in a given
situation in different ways, and the use of what is anticipated to direct observation
In setting aims for education, Dewey’s emphasis is on freer and better
balanced activities--it is a limit set to activity. A utilitarian goal is fixed and rigid. It
aims to imposed upon the process a notion of preparation for a remote future and
renders the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish. The Deweian
aim is opposed at every point to an aim which is imposed from without. Dictated
orders to do such and such is not a stimulus to intelligence. To consider the
curriculum in its entirety as a kind of composite made by the aggregation of
segregated values can result in a tendency to assign separate values to each study,
and in the isolation of social groups and classes. Dewey fought against these kind of
goals, and considered it the business of education in a democracy to struggle against
this isolation in order that the various interests may reinforce and play into one
I agree with Nodings, “... much of school curriculum should be organized
around themes of care: caring for self, caring for intimate others, caring for strangers
and global others, caring for plants, animals, and the natural environment, caring
for the human-made environment, and caring for ideas.” There is nothing in any
subject itself that is inherently “good for the mind.” Intelligence should be applied
to doing, not to some unseen and stable capacity.
As my society struggles with its exit from an industrial (post-modern) society
while at the same time struggles with its entrance into an information society, I
must side with Dewey, “Since education is the process through which the needed
transformation may be accomplished and not remain a mere hypothesis as to what
is desirable, we reach a justification of the statement that philosophy is the theory of
education as a deliberately conducted practice.” That “Democratic Communitarians”
is preferable to the utilitarians’ value on consequences. I understand that this is not
an either or choice. Since I cannot know consequences with certainty, I will rely
more heavily on Dewey’s “Democratic Communitarians.”
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