 In his discussion of Dewey’s ethical naturalism in the “portrait,” Hook proceeded to bring together different strands of Dewey’s ethical theory that had been developed throughout his philosophical career, from his early textbook on ethics in 1908 through Human Nature and Conduct to The Quest for Certainty and concluding with The Theory of Valuation of 1937. Hook stresses that a common feature of Dewey’s diverse presentations of his ethical theory is the location and derivation of morality within the scope of nature, particularly the understanding of human nature. Accordingly, for Dewey, there is an intimate connection, rather than a bifurcation, between value and fact, the “ought” and the “is,” or the prescriptive and the descriptive. A major argument of Dewey’s for this connection, which is the hallmark of his ethical naturalism, was developed in the chapter on the “Construction of Good” in The Quest for Certainty. Hook shares the Deweyan naturalist view that is developed in that chapter that the term “Good” can be understood by reference to the “desirable”. Emphasizing this naturalistic analysis, Hook, like Dewey, recognized the prescriptive component in desirability. “The desirable” refers to what ought to be desired, not only to what could be desired or what is desired. Hook insisted that the prescriptive component is not separated from the descriptive facts of desire. The connection between the desirable and the desired was not deemed to be a fallacy which overlooked the gulf between the “ought” and the “is,” but a justified recognition of the way in which the moral norms for human behavior were developed by recognizing the empirical needs, interests and desires of human beings. Dewey identified phrases like “the desirable” with similar terms, such as “likeable” and “enjoyable.” In each case, the dispositional term could not be reduced to a singular episodic term. To claim that an object, event or experience was likeable, desirable or enjoyable was not so much to claim that it had been liked, desired or enjoyed by a subject, but involved a species of predictive hypothesis, namely, that it could or would be enjoyed by other persons who possessed the relevant potential capacities. The denial that statements about “the Good” were subjective and the recognition that they involved a predictive hypothesis led to the more general thesis that statements about the good, or normative statements, were to be interpreted as statements regarding what would be desired by persons who understood the nature of their desires and knew the consequences of their desires. Accordingly, ethical norms were not subjective or relative but represented cognitive empirical predictions that could be verified or confirmed. They were hypotheses about what would be liked or enjoyed or desired by persons who had investigated critically the nature of their desires, analyzed rationally the optimal means required to satisfy those desires and were sensitive to the consequences of their desires. The derivation of a fundamental moral term like “Good” from the empirical and experiential elements of human desires determined the naturalist character of Deweyan ethics. While human desires could be perverse, such as malicious desires that would wreak havoc with the lives of other people, Hook’s belief was that such perverse desires could not withstand the tests required for normative acceptance. Without being able to appeal to an absolute intuitive exclusion of such malicious desires or of perverse policies that were motivated by these desires, Deweyan naturalism argued that such desires would not meet the criteria for acceptance as norms. Such desires could be understood as incoherent, self-contradictory or self-destructive, and they would inevitably conflict with other desires as well as lead to counter-productive consequences which would mandate their unacceptability. Thus, ethical norms were neither subjective expressions of likes, preferences or desires nor intuitive absolutes that were moral imperatives without any connection to human desires or interests, but were empirical hypotheses regarding optimal norms for realizing desirable ends. Accordingly, empirical statements were cognitive and could be shown in principle to be either true or false.