HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY Volume 21, Number 3, July 2004 299 JONATHAN EDWARDS’S CONTRIBUTION TO JOHN DEWEY’S THEORY OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY John R. Shook I n the fall of 1894 Dewey had his thirty-fifth birthday and started his new responsibilities as the head of the philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy department at the University of Chicago. His philosophy had begun its mature phase as well. Its main lines and foundational principles were freshly laid down; Dewey would proceed to confidently apply his theories of mind and knowledge to a variety of practical issues from education to politics. In two important writings published in that year of 1894, an article titled “Ego and Cause” and a short book on The Study of Ethics, Dewey announced his detailed views on free will and moral responsibility. These views, with only minor adjustments, were foundational principles of Dewey’s moral theory in later works such as Ethics (1908) and Human Nature and Conduct (1922). By the early 1890s Dewey’s position on free will was clear. The ancient debate between determinism and libertarianism was bankrupt, he declared, because nei- ther position could fully account for our practice of deliberating choices and taking responsibility for the consequences of our choices. In a manner strongly reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards, Dewey aimed his heaviest attack at the libertarians by arguing that an independent “will” or “ego” charged with exercising the power of choosing is a mythical creature. The only meaningful sense of “willing” is embodied in acting: the whole person wills in acting, and therefore freedom or lack thereof is a property of the person, and not of any part or aspect of a person. In this person-centered account of freedom, Dewey also took a stand against incompatibilists who use determinism to deny freedom. Again taking Edwards’s view of these matters, Dewey argued that the deter- minist cannot appeal to the existence of motives prior to willing in order to show why choices cannot be free. Surely motives cause willing; but one’s motives remain one’s own, and hence responsibility encompasses