Philosophy Talk: Moral Undergoing

In many ways making moral progress seems to require that we go outside the limits of moral striving understood in terms of ends-directed exertion. Genuine moral self-development combines striving toward ideals through action and opening to unchosen dimensions of experience and reality through undergoing. If we only look at moral action, we get stuck with a very lopsided view of things. I borrow the vocabulary of doing and undergoing from John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), in which he argues that every experience worthy of the name is an aesthetic experience. I adapt Dewey’s conception of undergoing to develop an account of moral undergoing as a method of making progress through receptivity as opposed to action.

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