Human Nature and Conduct by John Dewey — Read

The reason for dividing conduct into two distinct regions, one of expediency and the other of morality, disappears when the psychology that identifies ordinary deliberation with calculation is disposed of. There is seen to be but one issue involved in all reflection upon conduct: The rectifying of present troubles, the harmonizing of present incompatibilities by projecting a course of action which gathers into itself the meaning of them all. The recognition of the true psychology also reveals to us the nature of good or satisfaction. Good consists in the meaning that is experienced to belong to an activity when conflict and entanglement of various incompatible impulses and habits terminate in a unified orderly release in action. This human good, being a fulfilment conditioned upon thought, differs from the pleasures which an animal nature -- of course we also remain animals so far as we do not think -- hits upon accidentally. Moreover there is a genuine difference between a false good, a spurious satisfaction, and a "true" good, and there is an empirical test for discovering the difference. The unification which ends thought in act may be only a superficial compromise, not a real decision but a postponement of the issue. Many of our so-called decisions are of this nature. Or it may present, as we have seen, a victory of a temporarily intense impulse over its rivals, a unity by oppression and suppression, not by coordination. These seeming unifications which are not unifications of fact are revealed by the event, by subsequent occurrences. It is one of the penalties of evil choice, perhaps the chief penalty, that the wrongdoer becomes more and more incapable of detecting these objective revelations of himself.

In quality, the good is never twice alike. It never copies itself. It is new every morning, fresh every evening. It is unique in its every presentation. For it marks the resolution of a distinctive complication of competing habits and impulses which can never repeat itself. Only with a habit rigid to the point of immobility could exactly the same good recur twice. And with such rigid routines the same good does not after all recur, for it does not even occur. There is no consciousness at all, either of good or bad. Rigid habits sink below the level of any meaning at all. And since we live in a moving world, they plunge us finally against conditions to which they are not adapted and so terminate in disaster.