A Handbook of Ethical Theory Part 4

He has conquered the strong, overtaken the swift, called upon his ingenuity to furnish him with means of defence. He has defied cold and heat, and we find him, with appliances of his own devising, successfully combating the rigors of Arctic frosts and the torrid sun of the tropics.

Intelligence has supplemented instinct and has guaranteed the survival of the individual and of the race.

It has even protected man against himself, against the very dangers arising out of his immunity from other dangers. A gregarious creature, increasing and multiplying, he would be threatened with starvation did not his intelligent control over nature furnish him with a food-supply which makes it possible for vast numbers of human beings to live and thrive on a territory of limited extent. Moreover, he has compa.s.sed those complicated forms of social organization which reveal themselves in cities and states, solving problems of production, transportation and distribution before which undeveloped man would stand helpless.

And from the problem of living at all he has pa.s.sed to that of living well. He has created new wants and has satisfied them. He has built up for himself a rich and diversified life, many of the activities of which appear to have the remotest of bearings upon the mere struggle for existence, but the exercise of which gives him satisfaction. Thus, the primitive instinct of curiosity, once relatively aimless and insignificant, has developed into the pa.s.sion for systematic knowledge and the persistent search for truth; the rudimentary aesthetic feeling which is revealed in primitive man, and traces of which are recognizable in creatures far lower in the scale, has blossomed out in those elaborate creations, which, at an enormous expense of labor and ingenuity, have come to enrich the domains of literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture. Civilized man is to a great extent occupied with the production of what he does not need, if need be measured by what his wants are at a lower stage of his development. But these same things he needs imperatively, if we measure his need by his desires when they have been multiplied and their scope indefinitely widened.

26. THE CONQUEST OF NATURE AND THE WELL-BEING OF MAN.--It is evident that the successful exploitation of the resources of material nature is of enormous significance to the life of man. It may bring emanc.i.p.ation; it offers opportunity. One is tempted to affirm, without stopping to reflect, that the development of the arts and sciences, the increase of wealth and of knowledge, must in the nature of things increase human happiness.

One is tempted, further, to maintain that an advance in civilization must imply an advance in moralization. Man has a moral nature which exhibits itself to some degree at every stage of his development. What more natural to conclude than that, with the progressive unfolding of his intelligence, with increase in knowledge, with some relaxation of the struggle for existence which pits man against his fellow-man, and subordinates all other considerations to the inexorable law of self- preservation, his moral nature would have the opportunity to show itself in a fuller measure?

When we compare man at his very lowest with man at his highest such judgments appear to be justified. But man is to be found at all sorts of intermediate stages.

His knowledge may be limited, the development of the arts not far advanced, his control over nature far from complete, and yet he may live in comparative security and with such wants as he has reasonably well satisfied. His compet.i.tion with his fellows may not be bitter and absorbing. The simple life is not necessarily an unhappy life, if the simplicity which characterizes it be not too extreme. In judging broadly of the significance for human life of the control over nature which is implied in the advance of civilization, one must take into consideration several points of capital importance:

(1) The multiplication of man's wants results, not in happiness, but in unhappiness, unless the satisfaction of those wants can be adequately provided for.

(2) The effort to satisfy the new wants which have been called into being may be accompanied by an enormous expenditure of effort. Where the effort is excessive man becomes again the slave of his environment. His task is set for him, and he fulfills it under the lash of an imperious necessity.

The higher standard may become as inexorable a task-master as was the lower.

(3) It does not follow that, because a given community is set free from the bondage of the daily anxiety touching the problem of living at all, and may address itself deliberately to the problem of living well, it will necessarily take up into its ideal of what const.i.tutes living well all those goods upon which developed man is apt to set a value. A civilization may be a grossly material one, even when endowed with no little wealth. With wealth comes the opportunity for the development of the arts which embellish life, but that opportunity may not be embraced.

Man may be materially rich and spiritually poor; he may allow some of his faculties to lie dormant, and may lose the enjoyments which would have been his had they been developed. The Athenian citizen two millenniums ago had no such mastery over the forces of nature as we possess today.

Nevertheless, he was enabled to live a many-sided life beside which the life of the modern man may appear poor and bare. It is by no means self- evident that the good of man consists in the mult.i.tude of the material things which he can compel to his service.

(4) Moreover, it does not follow that, because the sum of man's activities, his behavior, broadly taken, is vastly altered, by an increase in his control over his material environment, the result is an advance in moralization. An advance in civilization--in knowledge, in the control over nature's resources, in the evolution of the industrial and even of the fine arts--does not necessarily imply a corresponding ethical advance on the part of a given community. New conditions, brought about by an increase of knowledge, of wealth, of power, may result in ethical degeneration.

What const.i.tutes the moral in human behavior, what marks out right or wrong conduct from conduct ethically indifferent, we have not yet considered. But no man is wholly without information in the field of morals, and we may here fall back upon such conceptions as men generally possess before they have evolved a science of morals. In the light of such conceptions a simple and comparatively undeveloped culture may compare very favorably with one much higher in the scale of civilization.

In the simplest groups of human beings, justice, veracity and a regard to common good may be conspicuous; the claim of each man upon his fellow-man may be generally acknowledged. In communities more advanced, the growth of cla.s.s distinctions and the inequalities due to the ama.s.sing of wealth on the part of individuals may go far to nullify the advantage to the individual of any advance made by the community as a whole. The social bonds which have obtained between members of the same group may be relaxed; the devotion to the common good may be replaced by the selfish calculation of profit to the individual; the exploitation of man by his fellow-man may be accepted as natural and normal. It is not without its significance that the most highly civilized of states have, under the pressure of economic advance, come to adopt the inst.i.tution of slavery in its most degraded forms; that the problem of property and poverty may present itself as most pressing and most difficult of solution where national wealth has grown to enormous proportions. The body politic may be most prosperous from a material point of view, and at the same time, considered from the point of view of the moralist, thoroughly rotten in its const.i.tution.

It is well to remember that, even in the most advanced of modern civilizations, whatever the degree of enlightenment and the power enjoyed by the community as a whole, it is quite possible for the individual to be condemned to a life little different in essentials from that of the lowest savage. He whose feverish existence is devoted to the nerve- racking occupation of gambling in stocks, who goes to his bed at night scheming how he may with impunity exploit his fellow-man, and who rises in the morning with a strained consciousness of possible fluctuations in the market which may overwhelm him in irretrievable disaster, lives in perils which easily bear comparison with those which threaten the precarious existence of primitive man. To ma.s.ses of men in civilized communities the problem of the food supply is all-absorbing, and may exclude all other and broader interests. The factory-worker, with a mind stupefied by the mechanical repet.i.tion of some few simple physical movements of no possible interest to him except as resulting in the wage that keeps him alive, has no share in such light as may be scattered about him.

The control of the forces of nature brings about great changes in human societies, but it may leave the individual, whether rich or poor, a prey to dangers and anxieties, engaged in an unequal combat with his environment, absorbed in the satisfaction of material needs, undeveloped, unreflective and most restricted in his outlook. Of emanc.i.p.ation there can here be no question.

And a civilization in which the control of the forces of nature has been carried to the highest pitch of development may furnish a background to the darkest of pa.s.sions. It may serve as a stage upon which callous indifference, greed, rapacity, gross sensuality, play their parts naked and unashamed. That some men sunk in ignorance and subject to such pa.s.sions live in huts and have their noses pierced, and others have taken up from their environment the habit of dining in evening dress, is to the moralist a relatively insignificant detail. He looks at the man, and he finds him in each case essentially the same--a primitive and undeveloped creature who has not come into his rightful heritage.

CHAPTER X

MAN'S SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT

27. MAN IS a.s.sIGNED HIS PLACE.--The old fable of a social contract, by virtue of which man becomes a member of a society, agreeing to renounce certain rights he might exercise if wholly independent, and to receive in exchange legal rights which guarantee to the individual the protection of life and property and the manifold advantages to be derived from cooperative effort, points a moral, like other fables.

The contract in question never had an existence, but neither did the conversation between the gra.s.shopper and the ant. In each case, a truth is ill.u.s.trated by a play of the imagination. Contracts there have been in plenty, between individuals, between families, between social cla.s.ses, between nations; but they have all been contracts between men already in a social state of some sort, capable of choice and merely desirous of modifying in some particular some aspect of that social state. The notion of an original contract, lying at the base of all a.s.sociation of man with man, is no more than a fiction which serves to ill.u.s.trate the truth that the desires and wills of men are a significant factor in determining the particular forms under which that a.s.sociation reveals itself.

No man enters into a contract to be born, or to be born a Kaffir, a Malay, a Hindoo, an Englishman or an American. He enters the world without his own consent, and without his own connivance he is a.s.signed a place in a social state of some sort. The reception which is accorded to him is of the utmost moment to him. He may be rejected utterly by the social forces presiding over his birth. In which case he does not start life independently, but is snuffed out as is a candle-flame by the wind.

And if accepted, as he usually is in civilized communities, he takes his place in the definite social order into which he is born, and becomes the subject of education and training as a member of that particular community.

28. VARIETIES OF THE SOCIAL ORDER.--The social order into which he is thus ushered may be most varied in character. He may find himself a member of a small and primitive group of human beings, a family standing in more or less loose relations to a limited number of other families; he may belong to a clan in which family relations.h.i.+p still serves as a real or fictive bond; his clan may have its place in a confederation; or the body politic in which he is a unit may be a nation, or an empire including many nationalities.

His relations to his fellow-man will naturally present themselves to him in a different light according to the different nature of the social environment in which he finds himself. The community of feeling and of interests which defines rights, determines expectations, and prescribes duties, cannot be the same under differing conditions. Social life implies cooperation, but the limits of possible cooperation are very differently estimated by man at different stages of his development. To a few human beings each man is bound closely at every stage of his evolution. The family bond is everywhere recognized. But, beyond that, there are wider and looser relations.h.i.+ps recognized in very diverse degrees, as intelligence expands, as economic advance and political enlightenment make possible a community life on a larger scale, as sympathy becomes less narrow and exclusive.

It is not easy for a member of a community at a given stage of its development even to conceive the possibility of such communities as may come into existence under widely different conditions. The simple, communistic savage, limited in his outlook, thinks in terms of small numbers. A handful of individuals enjoy members.h.i.+p in his group; he recognizes certain relations, more or less loose, to other groups, with which his group comes into contact; beyond is the stranger, the natural enemy, upon whom he has no claim and to whom he owes no duty.

At a higher level there comes into being the state, including a greater number of individuals and internally organized as the simpler society is not. But even in a highly civilized state much the same att.i.tude towards different cla.s.ses of human beings may seem natural and inevitable. To Plato there remained the strongly marked distinctions between the Athenian, the citizen of another h.e.l.lenic community, and the barbarian.

War, when waged against the last, might justifiably be merciless; not so, when it was war between Greek states. [Footnote: Republic, Book V.] Into such conceptions of rights and duties men are born; they take them up with the very air that they breathe, and they may never feel impelled to subject them to the test of criticism.

It is instructive to remark that neither the speculative genius of a Plato nor the acute intelligence of an Aristotle could rise to the conception of an organized, self-governing community on a great scale. To each it seemed evident that the group proper must remain a comparatively small one. Plato finds it necessary to provide in his "Laws" that the number of households in the State shall be limited to five thousand and forty. Aristotle, less arbitrarily exact, allows a variation within rather broad limits, holding that a political community should not comprise a number of citizens smaller than ten, nor one greater than one hundred thousand. [FOOTNOTE: PLATO, _Laws_, v. ARISTOTLE, _Ethics_, ix, 10.] That a highly organized state, a state not composed of a horde of subjects under autocratic control, but one in which the citizens are, in theory, self-governing, should spread over half a continent and include a hundred millions of souls, would have seemed to these men of genius the wildest of dreams. Yet such a dream has been realized.

29. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION.--The social body of which man becomes, by the accident of birth, an involuntary member, may stand at any point in the scale of economic evolution. It may be a primitive group living from hand to mouth by the chase, by fis.h.i.+ng or by gathering such food as nature spontaneously produces. It may be a pastoral people, more or less nomadic, occupied with the care of flocks and herds. It may be an agricultural community, rooted to the soil, looking forward from seed- time to harvest, capable of foresight in storing and distributing the fruits of its labors. It may combine some of the above activities; and may, in addition, have arrived at the stage at which the arts and crafts have attained to a considerable development. In its life commerce may have come to play an important role, bringing it into peaceful relations with other communities and broadening the circle of its interests. That human societies at such different stages of their development should differ greatly in their internal organization, in their relations to other communities, and in the demands which they make upon the individuals who compose them, is to be expected. Some manner of life, appropriate to the status of the community, comes to be prescribed. The ideal of conduct, whether unconsciously admitted or consciously embraced and inculcated, is not the same in different societies. The virtues which come to be prized, the defects which are disapproved, vary with their setting.

Moreover, the process of inner development results in differentiation of function. Clearly marked social cla.s.ses come into existence, standing in more or less sharply defined relations to other social cla.s.ses, endowed with special rights and called to the performance of peculiar duties.

Man is not merely born into this or that community; he is born into a place in the community. In very primitive societies that place may differ little from other places, save as such are determined by age or s.e.x. But in more highly differentiated societies it may differ enormously, entail the performance of widely different functions, and prescribe distinct varieties of conduct.

"What will be the manner of life," said Plato, [Footnote: Laws, vii.]

"among men who may be supposed to have their food and clothing provided for them in moderation, and who have entrusted the practice of the arts to others, and whose husbandry, committed to slaves paying a part of the produce, brings them a return sufficient for living temperately?"

His ideal leisure cla.s.s is patterned after what he saw before him in Athens. He conceives those who belong to it to be set free from sordid cares and physical labors, in order that they may devote themselves to the perfecting of their own minds and bodies and to preparation for the serious work of supervising and controlling the state. Their members.h.i.+p in the cla.s.s defined their duties and prescribed the course of education which should fit them to fulfill them. It is not conceived that the functions natural and proper to one human being are also natural and proper to another in the same community.

The flat monotony which obtains in those simplest human societies, resembling extended families, where there is scarcely a demarcation of cla.s.ses, a distinction of occupations and a recognition of private property in any developed sense, has given place in such a state to sharp contrasts in the status of man and man. Such contrasts obtain in all modern civilized communities. Man is not merely a subject or citizen; he is a subject or citizen of this cla.s.s or of that, and the environment which molds him varies accordingly.

30. SOCIAL ORDER AND HUMAN WILL.--We have seen that the material environment of a man, the extent of his mastery over nature and of his emanc.i.p.ation from the dictation of pressing bodily needs, is a factor of enormous importance in determining what he shall become and what sort of a life he shall lead. That his social setting is equally significant is obvious. What he shall know, what habits he shall form, what emotions he shall experience in this situation and in that, what tasks he shall find set before him, and what ideals he shall strive to attain, are largely determined for him independently of his choice.

To be sure, it remains true that man is man, endowed with certain instincts and impulses and gifted with human intelligence. Nor are all men alike in their impulses or in the degree of their intelligence.

Within limits the individual may exercise choice, reacting upon and modifying his environment and himself. But a moment's reflection reveals to us that the new departure is but a step taken from a vantage-ground which has not been won by independent effort. The information in the light of which he chooses, the situation in the face of which he acts, the emotional nature which impels him to effort, the habits of thought and action which have become part of his being--these are largely due to the larger whole of which he finds himself a part. He did not build the stage upon which he is to act. His lines have been learned from others.

He may recite them imperfectly; he may modify them in this or in that particular. But the drama from which, and from which alone, he gains his significance, is not his own creation.

The independence of the individual in the face of his material and social environment makes itself more apparent with the progressive development of man. But man attains his development as a member of society, and in the course of a historical evolution. It was pointed out many centuries ago that a hand cut off from the human body cannot properly be called a hand, for it can perform none of the functions of one. And man, torn from his setting, can no longer be considered man as the proper subject of moral science.

It is as a thinking and willing creature in a social setting that man becomes a moral agent. To understand him we must make a study of the individual and of the social will.

PART IV

THE REALM OF ENDS

CHAPTER XI

IMPULSE, DESIRE, AND WILL

31. IMPULSE.--Commands and prohibitions address themselves to man as a voluntary agent. But it seems right to treat as willed by man much more than falls under the head of conscious and deliberate volition. We do not hesitate to make him responsible for vastly more; and yet common sense does not, when enlightened, regard men as responsible for what is recognized as falling wholly beyond the direct and indirect control of their wills.