Human Nature and Conduct by John Dewey — Read

For practical purposes morals mean customs, folkways, established collective habits. This is a commonplace of the anthropologist, though the moral theorist generally suffers from an illusion that his own place and day is, or ought to be, an exception. But always and everywhere customs supply the standards for personal activities. They are the pattern into which individual activity must weave itself. This is as true today as it ever was. But because of present mobility and interminglings of customs, an individual is now offered an enormous range of custom-patterns, and can exercise personal ingenuity in selecting and rearranging their elements. In short he can, if he will, intelligently adapt customs to conditions, and thereby remake them. Customs in any case constitute moral standards. For they are active demands for certain ways of acting. Every habit creates an unconscious expectation. It forms a certain outlook. What psychologists have laboriously treated under the caption of association of ideas has little to do with ideas and everything to do with the influence of habit upon recollection and perception. A habit, a routine habit, when interfered with generates uneasiness, sets up a protest in favor of restoration and a sense of need of some expiatory act, or else it goes off in casual reminiscence. It is the essence of routine to insist upon its own continuation. Breach of it is violation of right. Deviation from it is transgression.

All that metaphysics has said about the nisus of Being to conserve its essence and all that a mythological psychology has said about a special instinct of self-preservation is a cover for the persistent self-assertion of habit. Habit is energy organized in certain channels. When interfered with, it swells as resentment and as an avenging force. To say that it will be obeyed, that custom makes law, that nomos is lord of all, is after all only to say that habit is habit. Emotion is a perturbation from clash or failure of habit, and reflection, roughly speaking, is the painful effort of disturbed habits to readjust themselves. It is a pity that Westermarck in his monumental collection of facts which show the connection of custom with morals4 is still so much under the influence of current subjective psychology that he misstates the point of his data. For although he recognizes the objectivity of custom, he treats sympathetic resentment and approbation as distinctive inner feelings or conscious states which give rise to acts. In his anxiety to displace an unreal rational source of morals he sets up an equally unreal emotional basis. In truth, feelings as well as reason spring up within action. Breach of custom or habit is the source of sympathetic resentment, while overt approbation goes out to fidelity to custom maintained under exceptional circumstances.