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Editor's Introduction to the Lectures on Political Ethics The Significance of the Lectures The subject matter of the "Lectures on Political Ethics" is the separate and antagonistic spheres ofacademic and intellectual inquiry commonly designated as Politics, Economics, and Ethics. As we go on to read them over one hundred years after they were delivered, our concern will most likely be as specialists in Dewey's thought. As in the "Lectures on the Logic of Ethics," the issues raised here are abstract and seemingly divorced from present day concerns. As contemporary students ofethics, our immediate concern is likely to be about what ought to be done about such matters as the problems of crime and the decline of education in our inner cities, what would be the proper moral response to the assertion that the federal government is intrusive and inefficient, or how to go about developing laws and policies concerning active, voluntary euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, and so on. Our task as scholars is to formulate a moral answer to these difficulties, but what happens next is out ofour hands. Whether or not our moral recommendations will be implemented is a matter for the political theorists, who interpret practical politics. It is also a separate question whether the corporations that constitute the economic process will work for, or at least tolerate, the bringing of our moral recommendations into reality. Economic theory is called upon to explain the actions of entrepreneurs . As moral philosophers, it is not our business to concern ourselves with such economic matters. The scenario just set forth suggests how discussion about specific matters of moral concern can get turned around. Our initial interest is often practical: to find a working moral solution as to what ought to be done. But, lacking any account of the manner in which a proposed "working moral solution" is to become actualized within the existing political and economic processes, our selfprofessed practical concern is abandoned. Moral inquiry now becomes "theory;' 103 Lectures on Political Ethics with its own modes of inquiry and thought. Qua theory, inquirers create an approach to its unique subject matter, method, rules of success and failure. This approach is sustained independently of whether anyone does or does not "follow " the recommendations made in its name. Meanwhile, practical political activity and practical economic activity deal with separate subject matters. Politics is about power. Economics is about the activities of rational, self-interested humans, both as entrepreneurs and as consumers. There is a striking confirmation of this state of affairs in a recent book, The Crisis ofVision in Modern Economic Thought. The authors, Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg, are searching for a new "classical situation" or widely accepted consensus in economic theory that will respond to the social difficulties ofour own day. But theoretical economists have cut themselves off from any effort to gain political influence, while ordinary business life is governed in practice by the quest for indefinite capital accumulation. The authors, qua economists , can offer no rational basis for moral reform with regard to the growing poverty of the lower income segment of the population or to global environmental destruction. From their point ofview, moral considerations are "pre-analytic :' Nor do the authors do anything to dispel the widely accepted view that politics, as reflected in the "public sector" of the economy, "speaks with a voice that has no presumed internal rationality, and from a past too often associated with various forms of oppression."j So Dewey's concern about the interrelation of Politics, Economics, and Ethics is of current interest. If the scenario set forth by the academic inquirers is correct , our social life, that is, our activities, relationships, and interactions with others, seems to be divided against itself. As economic persons, we are self-interested but without political power. As political persons we seek this power, or at least have an influence on it. Yet, as ethical persons we denounce self-interest and the quest for power apart from whatever role we are playing in the economic and political process. Is this state of affairs a reflection of the activities of individuals participating in the social process, or does it indicate a serious flaw in our theoretical categories ? These lectures take the latter position. They are a continuation of Dewey's effort to get behind distinctions that are made in the course ofinquiry and then taken to indicate dualisms. In political inquiry, the theory of sovereignty or supreme political power leads to a dualism...

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