David L Norton

Studies, family and early career

Norton earned a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 1952. In 1953 he married Joan Marie Carter of Webster Groves, Missouri, and in 1954 their first child, Anita Lee Norton (later Kronsberg) was born. During these years Norton also served as Associate Leader of the St. Louis Ethical Society. He and his wife lost an infant daughter, Nancy Ann, to crib death (or sudden infant death syndrome) in 1959. I n 1961 Norton and his wife adopted an infant son, whom they named Ronald Vallet Norton.

After working as a civil engineer in California, Norton returned to Washington University to study philosophy, earning a Master's degree in 1962. He then took up doctoral work at Boston University, earning his Ph.D. in 1968. While in Boston, Norton served as Leader of the Boston Ethical Society. His second son, Peter, was born in Boston in 1963. His dissertation was "Transcendental Imagination: A Post-Kantian Appraisal."

In 1966 Norton moved with his family to Newark, Delaware, to serve on the faculty of the University of Delaware's philosophy department. Shortly thereafter he divorced and remarried. He fathered two more sons, Tucker (b. 1971) and Cory (b. 1976).

Philosophy

Norton taught at the University of Delaware for 29 years. In 1976 Princeton University Press published his book Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism, which received wide notice. His next book, Democracy and Moral Development, was published by the University of California Press in 1991. In 1995 Norton succumbed quickly to cancer, dying July 24. His final book, Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality, published by Rowman and Littlefield, appeared soon after.

In the last of the works listed above, Norton summarized his three books' related purposes. In Personal Destinies, he "addressed the fundamental moral question, What is a worthy life for a human being?" In Democracy and Moral Development, he took up "the inescapable correlative, What is a good society?" Finally, in Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality, Norton asked "what kind of world can productively accommodate a plurality of good societies?" and identified the traits of character required of individuals who would promote it.

As an academic philosopher, Norton devoted attention to the fundamental and practical problems of the life well lived. For his inspiration Norton turned chiefly to the Greeks, and especially to the dialogues of Plato. He called himself an ethical individualist, seeing a harmony between the individual's fidelity to his own "personal destiny" and the fulfillment of society's collective needs. He held that within each person is an innate potentiality (his daimon, or soul), and that each person's life task is to discover it and actualize it. This conviction shaped Norton's views on the distinct purposes of each of life's stages, on the proper roles of parents and schools, and on the best social and political arrangements.

In a late essay, Norton put his philosophy in succinct terms: "There is a distinctive course of life that is right for each individual, amid countless possibilities. This is the individual's vocation, variously termed his or her 'genius,' 'daimon,' 'Buddha nature,' or 'atman.' It consists in innate potentialities that predispose persons to a particular direction in life. As distinguished from other possibilities, the actualization by an individual of his or her potentialities affords intrinsic rewards to that person—that is, the activity is personally fulfilling and satisfying. Self-knowledge, then, is knowledge of the activities, situations, and relationships that the individual experiences as intrinsically rewarding. Engaged at these, the individual invests the best of himself or herself and strives continuously to improve, while in the process contributing objective values to others." ["Education for Self-Knowledge and Worthy Living," in Howie and Schedler, eds., Ethical Issues in Contemporary Society (Southern Illinois University Press, 1995)].

Norton's own philosophy recognized "duplicity" as a "hallmark of human nature," and saw in it the ultimate threat to the life well lived (Personal Destinies, ch. 1). The epigraph to Personal Destinies' is an appeal from Socrates to unite "the outward and inward man." As Norton wrote in 1976, "Philosophy will sometimes present an individual with features of his acts and principles that horrify him, producing in him an exchange of principles and patterns of behavior" (Personal Destinies, "Unscholarly Epilogue").

Quotations

• "In pre-Hellenic Greece, sculptors made busts of the semi-deity Silenus that had a trick to them. Inside the hollow clay likeness was hidden a golden figurine, to be revealed when the bust was broken open. .... Each person is a bust of Silenus containing a golden figurine, his daimon. The person's daimon is an ideal of perfection—unique, individual, and self-identical. It is neither the actual person nor a product of the actual person, yet it is fully real, affording to the actual person his supreme aim and establishing the principle by which the actual person can grow in identity, worth, and being." —Personal Destinies, ch. 1.

• "From the humanistic standpoint a philosophy that seeks converts is a contradiction in terms. The function of humanistic philosophy is not to impose invented forms upon human life, but to elicit and clarify the forms the lives of persons implicitly possess." —Personal Destinies, "Unscholarly Epilogue."

• "Those who accepted classical liberalism's invitation also incurred great costs, for with it they accepted an economistic conception of self and society that has by its moral minimalism rendered invisible the large demands and rewards of worthy living." —Democracy and Moral Development, ch. 7.

• Autonomy is not "total self-sufficiency" but "the entitlement of each interactive entity to determine for itself what its contributions to others will be and, likewise, to determine for itself what use it will make of the self-determined contributions of other entities." —Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality, ch. 4.