Following this clew, we are led to remark that the consequences are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
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When indirect consequences are recognized and there is effort to regulate them, something having the traits of a state comes into existence.
When the consequences of an action are confined, or are thought to be confined, mainly to the persons directly engaged in it, the transaction is a private one.
When A and B carry on a conversation together the action is a trans-action: both are concerned in it; its results pass, as it were, across from one to the other.
But, presumably, the consequences of advantage and injury do not extend beyond A and B; the activity lies between them; it is private.
The distinction between private and public is thus in no sense equivalent to the distinction between individual and social, even if we suppose that the latter distinction has a definite meaning.
Many private acts are social; their consequences contribute to the welfare of the community or affect its status and prospects.
In the broad sense any transaction deliberately carried on between two or more persons is social in quality.
To some extent it is true, as Adam Smith asserted, that our breakfast table is better supplied by the convergent outcome of activities of farmers, grocers and butchers carrying on private affairs with a view to private profit than it would…
Communities have been supplied with works of art, with scientific discoveries, because of the personal delight found by private persons in engaging in these activities.
Even the most bellicose of militarists will hardly contend that all wars have been socially helpful, or deny that some have been so destructive of social values that it would have been infinitely better if they had not been waged.
If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.