Ethics and Education

Abstract

Though C. J. Ducasse was a systematic philosopher who made significant contributions to almost all areas of philosophy, normative ethics is an apparent exception. He published much in meta-ethics, but there is little, if any, of his published work directed explicitly to the question what good ia, or what one ought to do, whatever these evaluative terms might mean. Some philosophers have inferred from this fact, plus the nature of his “skeptical” meta-ethics, that he held no normative view of his own. But such an inference is mistaken. To think that Ducasse espoused no normative view is to miss one whole dimension of his systematic thought — one that knits together firmly certain of his views on education, art, and religion. The latter are not only individual areas interesting in their own right to Ducasse, but seen in certain ways they are part and parcel of his moral philosophy. The purpose of this chapter is to make clear the nature of his “progressive and universal hedonism” by examining carefully his published articles on education and, even more importantly, by drawing upon his unpublished notes on moral philosophy. Though a major point of this chapter is to fill in a gap in Ducasse’s systematic philosophy, we will also offer criticisms of both his meta-ethics and progressive hedonism in the hope of throwing additional light on his ethical views as a whole. One particularly interesting point, as we shall see, is that Ducasse can rebut an objection to hedonism by applying his adverbial analysis of ‘seeing this color’ to ‘experiencing this pleasure’. We will conclude with a discussion of other aspects of Ducasse’s philosophy of education, including his concept of “wisdom.”