Narrative and Moral Psychology in the Philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot

I. Introduction

On the evening of December 18, 1930, President Herbert Hoover invited a group of forty to the White House for a dinner in honor of Vice President Curtis. To the right of the president sat General Otto Falk, who had earned considerable acclaim in the Spanish American War. To the right of General Falk sat Ella Lyman Cabot who had, after considerable difficulty, earned a reputation as a social and educational reformer in the early decades of the twentieth century. Cabot’s purposes and intellectual projects were inhibited by the gendered cultural norms of the day, but she was eventually successful in situating her work in the burgeoning social progressive movement that took the nation by storm and ushered John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Jane Addams into the public spotlight.

The publishing of Everyday Ethics in 1906 coincided with a growing sentiment that conservative ideologies of the past were ill-equipped to handle the difficult realities of the present. The progressives sought to strike a pragmatic balance between conservatism and the radical strains of anarchy and socialism that quickly arose as its counterbalance. Cabot’s mature ethics and social-political thought can be understood in light of the progressive attempt to address the corruption of bureaucracy and “big government” while insisting that government should in fact have a role in facing the social crises that arose in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. According to Cabot and others, the solution to these crises was not a “bigger” government, but a better one, in the sense of promoting new and more responsive forms of deliberative democracy. At the heart of this ideal democracy were educational practices that might inform and sustain the American public.

As John Dewey states in the Public and Its Problems (1927), a genuine public comes into being in the face of problematic situations that its members must collectively face. The pre-condition of the public is the realization of collective interests as a way of avoiding the negative, sometimes disastrous, consequences that occur when members of a society interact without a guiding purpose. Education, according to the progressive political theorists, was meant to prime members of a population to be full-fledged citizens, both in the sense of exercising their individual political freedoms and in embodying an active civic-mindedness. Beginning in the 1830s, in a time that coincided with the birth of classical American philosophy, the civic-mindedness of Americans was closely tied to the project of westward expansion, which revealed threats that demanded a unified national response. As this Manifest Destiny was revived in the 1890s, the early progressives tried to clip the wings of imperialism while maintaining a sense of national identity and patriotism. This was no easy task. The difficulty can be traced to several different sources. First, these newer ideals of peace and cooperation, put forward by the likes of Jane Addams in 1907, did not fit with the growth of the early military-industrial complex, which accounted for the livelihood of so many across the expanding United States. Second, these ideals appeared “weak” and “feminine” in the face of a sexist culture still dominated by stereotypically “masculine” prerogatives of exploration and conquest. Finally, public intellectuals such as William James, who were enamored by such prerogatives, downplayed or wholly ignored peace ideals that might provide an alternative to bellicosity. This is the context in which Ella Lyman Cabot attempted to fashion her educational theory and ethical thought. Cabot is unique in her framing of the problems of pacificism, patriotism, and political diversity—she follows James’s lead in attempting to salvage some value from the political iconography of the early twentieth century, but she, unlike James, remains faithful to the progressive reform and pacifism of Jane Addams. This paper provides a commentary on Cabot’s ethical thought as presented in Everyday Ethics, Ethics for Children (1910), A Course in Citizenship (1914), and Our Part in the World (1918), concentrating on the relationship between narrative and ethical training.

II. Moral Psychology and Ethical Imitation

I would like to show that Cabot’s ethical pedagogy...