The Journal of Value Inquiry32: 279–282, 1998. 279c 1998Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

BOOK REVIEW

Jennifer Welchman, Dewey’s Ethical Thought. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1995. vi + 256 pp. (indexed). ISBN 0-8014-2729-0, US$ 35.00 (Hb).

John Dewey’s moral theory suffers from neglect. While there is currently agood deal of interest in Dewey’s metaphysics and epistemology, his ethics isall but ignored. There are, for example, almost no detailed studies of Dewey’sethics, so that our understanding of it is severely limited and our grasp ofDewey’s work as a whole is incomplete.

Jennifer Welchman’s book,Dewey’s Ethical Thought, goes some waytoward remedying this unfortunate situation. In the nearly barren field ofstudies in this area, the effort alone is constructive. Indeed, I would say thatprior to any assessment of its contents, the book gets two stars simply forbeing written. After a fair appraisal, the book shows itself to be a good, some-times solid articulation and defense of Dewey’s moral theory, but with severalimportant flaws that need to be mentioned.

Welchman’s aim is to show that “Dewey’s moral philosophy is of philo-sophical interest,” in particular as a resource for current efforts to naturalizeethics (p. 6). Welchman wants to convince analytic philosophers that Dewey’s“scientific ethics” avoids the fallacy of arguing from an “is” to an “ought”and therefore is safe to mine for insights (p. 2). The method is historical. PartI covers Dewey’s early idealism from 1884 to 1894, and Part II his transitionto pragmatism from 1894 to 1908. In Part I, Welchman shows how Dewey’sdesire to connect science and value dominates his early thinking. At first thisconcern is rooted in American Hegelianism; later Dewey rejects Hegelian-ism in favor of Hegel. So, in Part I we get a detailed discussion of Dewey’sstruggle to connect science and value via Absolute Mind, in contrast to denialof Hegelians of any such rapprochement. This analysis has the advantageof clarifying, in the context of Dewey’s first two ethical textsOutlines of aCritical Theory of EthicsandThe Study of Ethics: A Syllabus, the concern tounify science and value at all costs which begins to lead Dewey away fromthe dominant modes of thought of his day.

In Part II, Welchman addresses Dewey’s shift. Dewey learned from theexperimental psychologists how we can have the desired continuity with-out Absolute Mind. This transition turned into a revolution in thought, andpragmatism was born. Dewey’s pragmatism is still a kind of idealism, in

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Welchman’s account, in which the principal aims of unity and constructivismare achieved without the Absolute. To clarify the transition, Welchman pro-vides a thorough discussion of Dewey’s early pragmatic works, from his 1894“The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” to the 1908Ethics, jointly writtenwith James H. Tufts. Welchman ends her book with a discussion ofEthicsandits relation to current ethical concerns. Welchman’s concluding insight is thatDewey is a Pragmatic Communitarian who has finally developed a coherentscientific ethics in which actual scientists use their own community standardsand procedures to address problems of social planning.

Overall, the discussion is lucid and revealing. Welchman’s language, thoughoften ponderous, is always clear, and her analysis of Dewey’s earliest idealistworks is particularly astute. In light of the supreme importance for Dewey’sethics of inquiry, Welchman’s analysis is invaluable. Here we finally get areal, head-on attempt to make sense of what it means to have a scientificethics, an all-important issue which most commentators side-step. Moreover,Welchman is clearly at home in the thought of the period between 1884and 1908. She has mastered and conveys with facility such nearly forgottenfigures as F.H. Bradley, T.H. Greene, G. Stanley Hall, Bernard Bosanquet,and Herbert Spencer. Her analysis of Bradley’s self-realization ethics, andDewey’s relation to it, is especially helpful, since it plots Dewey’s earlythought on the map of his time. After a provocative analysis of Dewey’sidealism, we are left with the provocative, if not explicit insight that, minusthe Absolute, Dewey remained something of an idealist until the end.

These are among the strengths of Welchman’s book: deft historical analyses,provocative reconstructions of the early works. The book is good scholarship.It is thorough and informative, with consistently strong, well-documenteddiscussions of little known texts. Above all, the book does a good job try-ing to convince non-Deweyans of the importance and integrity of Dewey’sthinking. It is the perfect book for philosophers who are flirting with Dewey’sphilosophy but who are still not sure of its coherence, as well as for scholarsinterested in freshening up on the development of Dewey’s early ideas.

I disagree with Welchman’s procedure, however, for it is inexplicably his-torical throughout. After stating her aim to make “readily understandableDewey’s moral philosophy” and its coherence, what follows is not a dis-cussion of Dewey’s moral philosophy as promised, but a discussion of thedevelopment of that philosophy: two different topics (p. 9). In fact, Dewey’sfull position is never reached, the book ending with an analysis of Dewey’sposition in 1908. Welchman’s title is thus a misnomer. The book is not actuallyabout Dewey’s ethical thought, but about how he came by it.

Welchman’s explanation for the historical procedure is that Dewey’s earlythought is “crucial to our understanding of Dewey’s mature moral philosophy,

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for it was in this period that Dewey developed the conceptions of scientificand moral judgment in which his later naturalistic ethical theory was based”(p. 5). However, though these early pieces are crucial to our understandingof Dewey’s mature moral philosophy, they are no substitute for it; nor canthe fact of their being crucial justify focusing exclusively on them in a workentitled comprehensivelyDewey’s Ethical Thought.

The larger problem here, beyond the problem of an incorrect title, is thatWelchman’s procedure partially obstructs her aim. Her aim is to show howDewey’s moral philosophy as a whole avoids a pernicious fallacy; her proce-dure is to write exclusively about Dewey’s early position. We never arrive atDewey’s mature position, so that we are left guessing how the early defenserelates to Dewey’s later thought. It is thus unclear whether Welchman can ade-quately defend her thesis that Dewey’s moral philosophy as such is defensible.The historical procedure is at odds with the main thesis.

Two further problems with Welchman’s book are worth mentioning becausethey suggest the kind of work that still needs to be done in this area. First,Welchman makes the common mistake of supposing that scientific ethicswould be perfectly analogous to what goes on in the physical sciences. Ademocratic community, she says, ought for Dewey to be a scientific commu-nity of inquiry (p. 205). However, she then defines “scientific communities”by extraneous, non-scientific, non-inquiry-related features, such as being mer-itocracies and riddled with technical elements too abstruse for the averageperson (ibid.). She transports non-scientific qualities to Dewey’s scientificethics. This interpretation of Dewey, however, is a mistake. Dewey explicitlysays in hisLogical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality, a workto which Welchman devotes some space, that his point of view “expresslydisclaims any effort to reduce the statement of matters of conduct to formscomparable with those of physical science” (John Dewey,Logical Condi-tions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1903, p. 3). The only feature to be carried over is the logical procedureor method involved, not the extraneous features surrounding the method aspracticed by chemists or physicists. In treating of scientific ethics, therefore,Welchman misses just what is supposed to be scientific about ethics. She doesdiscuss some of the relevant features such as experimentation, but an adequateaccount of Dewey’s ethics would have to leave the realm of analogy altogetherand explore a whole new creature. The method or the logical procedure, notthe actual practices of scientists, is what Dewey has in mind when he speaksof rendering ethics scientific, and it is precisely this combination of logicalprocedure and ethical concern in Dewey’s work which has yet to be exploredin sufficient detail.

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The second problem stems from Welchman’s choice of audience. Sheaddresses herself mainly to analytic philosophers, adopting their languageand their concerns. Her approach is little more than the point, counter-pointtechnique common to analytic philosophy: first the argument, then the prob-lems with it, then a refutation of the problems, and so on for the whole work.Such a procedure, at least as Welchman practices it, is a bit dull and dry, aboveall, too analytic. There is nothing wrong with being an analytic philosopher, ofcourse. But as a work which attempts to criticize analytic philosophy througha defense of Dewey’s ethics, Welchman’s preference for analytic languageand thought at least raises an interesting question, if not a problem. Is it pos-sible to challenge analytic philosophy in the terms of analytic philosophy?Or does the language, the peculiar modes of thought of the movement, notreaffirm itself in the challenge and rob us of the effort? Has Welchman notsucceeded instead in turning Dewey into an analytic philosopher? I have noanswer, but for being written about one of this century’s most rousing philoso-phers, Welchman’s book is curiously uninspired. It lacks verve, a certain feelfor Dewey’s thought, even where it is at its conceptual best, and this detractsfrom its overall effect.

Perhaps the best way to put the point, as well as to summarize the workas a whole, is to say that while the book is certainly good scholarship, it istoo often only that. For readers wanting something a little more alive whichconveys the spirit and not just the letter of Dewey’s thought,Dewey’s EthicalThoughtwill disappoint. Likewise, for anyone wanting a fool-proof, flawlessargument, the book will seem marred. Nonetheless,Dewey’s Ethical Thoughtshould be read, and when it is read it will be appreciated. For, despite itsflaws, the work is good scholarship on an important and timely matter, andthat, to be sure, is no small achievement.

Donald MorseDepartment of Philosophy

University of OregonEugene, OR 97403

USA