Chapter I

The Nature of Ethics

The Forerunner: Vol. V, No. 1 (p. 20-25)

January 1914

Some form of ethics has been in use since the widening consciousness of man enabled him to relate consequences to actions, and to generalize upon what he observed.

He began by making the first broad childish classification of Good and Bad, that flat poster effect in strong black and white which acknowledges no gradation. He knew nothing whatever of any of the other sciences by which we may understand human ethics; he was innocent of physiology, of psychology, of sociology; economic laws had not dawned upon him, and, above all, he failed to appreciate the basic fact without which this science is wholly unintelligible--its social nature.

We assume that those life forms we call "the lower animals" have not the degree of consciousness necessary to form ideas about their own conduct, or to generalize laws of behavior with a notation of "right" and "wrong." Their conduct has been slowly perfected by nature's large, slow, relentless methods of elimination: "I teach by killing--let the others learn." Under this severe punishment of sinners they have developed a system of conduct which suits their needs. Animals, for the most part, do "right" that which is right for them because those who did not have died.

We, with our larger minds, studying their conduct from without, can easily grasp the simple ethics of these lower lives. The earliest, most limited creatures have no responsibilities beyond absorbing nourishment and splitting in two. Later the pursuit of nourishment becomes more complex, as do the reproductive processes; and we may observe a wider range of conduct with its greater possibilities of resultant good and evil.

When the creatures studied live in groups, and profit by mutual service and assistance, we find a scheme of conduct evolved which distances our highest efforts. The unbroken and exalted virtues of the ant, for instance, have long been urged upon our imitation, though the ancient observers knew little enough of the full apotheosis of altruism exhibited in an ant-hill. But in all this we do not conceive of these creatures as entertaining any mental images of their own conduct, or as exhorting the young to behave thus and not otherwise.

All human problems are complicated by the element of consciousness, and that consciousness, in the human stage, is social. We, living in social relation, develop, proportionately with its advance, the power to visualize our own conduct as we do that of other persons; to analyze causal relations, and to generalize our study into rules of behavior.

Hence we find ethics, to some degree, in all human groups.

It is interesting to observe at once, in comparing lower with higher social groups, that the ethics of a primitive tribe is far more akin to that of group creatures below them than is ours, and their methods of enforcing them almost as relentless as nature's.

As we develop socially we require a far more complex scheme of conduct, and, so far, the human race has never developed an ethics which kept pace with social evolution. As individuals we may know how to behave, but in larger forms -in principalities, kingdoms, and, highest of all, in republics, we do not know how to behave.

Ethics is the science of conduct; that is all.

It should be based on a clear understanding of the social structure and functions as hygiene is based on physiology; and as we may learn how to be well from such knowledge, so should we learn how to "be good" from a general knowledge of ethics.

At present there is no such general knowledge. The conduct of humanity is modified by many conflicting forces, but knowledge of the science of ethics plays small part among them. It is held to be an abstract science, suitable for mature students who care for it; it is classed with logic, or with metaphysics; it is by no means popular.

Whereas ethics is the simplest, the most practical of sciences; it should be taught, even in the baby garden, in the same delicate simplicity that characterizes the beginnings in other sciences. It should be a universally required course in all schools, and its larger study should be also mandatory in colleges.

Whatever else a child or youth may learn, how to behave is requisite for everyone, and ethics is merely the science of human behavior.

Sociology, to ethics, is as physiology to hygiene. The one treats of the structure and the unconscious function, the other of the conscious conduct which affects them. From this point of view we might characterize ethics as moral hygiene.

Ethics is to social relation what physics is to material relation. The laws of physics govern the inter-relations of matter; the laws of ethics the interrelations of humanity. Since our whole historic process consists in the modification and development of those human interrelations, and since our consciousness has power to govern conduct to an appreciable degree, it is evident how important to normal social development is a general knowledge of this basic science. But as one turns the pages of history the whole record shows how lacking is such knowledge, and how sadly delayed and perverted has been our progress because of that lack.

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To find a broad, natural, easily perceived base for this necessary understanding, we should follow back our ideas of "good and bad," or "right and wrong," to their very earliest possibilities.

Drop down the scale of evolution; leave humanity far behind; leave all the animal creation; retire to the stage of creation before life was, and see if you can predicate right and wrong of what was then going on.

As soon as we are able to perceive "a law" i. e., "an observed sequence of phenomena"-as soon as it is apparent to us that this crystal is square, this triangular, and this duodecahedral, then, if we find one varying, one pinched, irregular, disproportionate, we say: "this one is wrong," or "this is a bad one.”

Where we find any process going on, with observable sequence of cause and effect, we can instantly call its regular fulfillment "right" and any error or failure "wrong."

This does not, of course, involve the slightest degree of blame or praise-those emotions are quite aside from our study. Much less does it involve the idea of "virtue" or of "sin," those arbitrary concepts of our misguided minds. We are studying ethics, a science, not yet touching upon morality, religion, convention, education, tradition, or any of the many modifying factors which have heretofore so blinded us to this science.

So studying, we may follow up the laws of growth through the broad simplicity of the earliest life forms, finding in each, as soon as it had a discernible structure and functions, the right and wrong of its little life.

Presently we come to the condition, common throughout life, which we in our sophisticated minds call "a conflict of duties." The life-processes of two forms clash, their interests differ; the bluefish eats the menhaden.

Such an event is so incessant, so universal, as visibly to constitute one of nature's chief lines of work. Throughout all the living world death cuts off the individual, and the constituents of the previous form go to make up the later one. Life passes into life, continuously-this is evidently the way it works.

When confronted with an event which is so patently "wrong" for the menhaden, so as patently "right" for the bluefish, we may form our first generalization in ethics:

That is right, for a given organism, which leads to its best development.

This gives us the sense of relativity in ethics, a perception which we have practically adopted and acted upon in all our ordinary life, assuming that to be right which profited our species, and never dreaming that what we called the lower animals had any "rights" at all.

In recent years, with our widening range of thought, we have come to admit. certain abstract "rights" even among birds and beasts, but even so we generally assume that what is "right" for humanity is the real standard of conduct.

Once admitting this relativity, we may study the little circle of personal or racial ethics of each living thing, existing only in our minds, to be sure, but quite capable, none the less, of discussion and proof. We can easily see how each creature ought to behave, and how universally they behave as they ought each after its kind. And when we mark our own ruthless way, exterminating the fierce beasts that ate us, enslaving the strong ones to serve us, making pets of the little ones that please us, we do not call it wrong to so interfere with their life-schemes, but cheerfully agree:

"That is right for a given organism which leads to its best development."

Then we must decide as to the nature of the human organism, and what does lead to its best development. The first The first is the base and the second the subject matter of ethics.

Here is where we must face at once the question of whether humanity consists of individuals, or of groups; whether we live and grow individually or socially; whether ethics is to be predicated of individual conduct or of group conduct.

Precisely at this point has the whole human race failed to pass the examination and been sent back to the lower class-room over and over again.

We early developed an individual ethics, a family ethics, even a tribal ethics, sufficient to enable our kind of animal to survive and conquer. We have never developed a social ethics in any way equal to maintain a high and growing society.

The most successful civilizations, measured by mere endurance, are the ancient ones, of which China is the latest great survivor. In these social forms a state of equilibrium has been reached in which enough individuals are enabled to live and reproduce to constitute the bulk of a great state, and in which enough social development is obtained to promote and administer the most necessary functions of a great state; but not enough social development to so rear the individuals and enlarge the social functions as to allow of constant progress.

The most successful civilizations, measured by conquest, are by no means the most ancient, but young valiant ones, with a superabundance of fighting males. Their success is no proof of social progress; quite the contrary.

A peaceful agricultural and manufacturing community might be terrorized and even overcome by a body of armed brigands, but this does not show brigandage to be better than agriculture.

Again, a successful civilization may be measured by its continued fruition in the best products of brain and hand; but if such an one is not able to maintain the mass of its constituents in a state of personal and social health, it only survives by virtue of not being conquered.

In our whole long story, no people yet have ever learned the A, B, C, of social ethics. Their swollen, misbehaved national growths have hung snarling together or turned tooth and claw on one another, all up the ages; and when one, from conquest or fortunate condition, was safe from war, it has straightway proceeded to develop internal diseases of most dangerous character.

As peoples, we have not yet learned how to behave.

The social character of ethics rests upon the social nature of humanity. We exist, function, and develop in organic relation, not as distinct individuals.

Of course, we visibly are individuals, and still have a considerable range of individual interests, but so do the constituent cells of our own bodies, when microscopically examined. The crucial test is that those body-cells do not exist save in bodies, and that these individuals do not exist, save in societies. The kind of individual varies also with the kind of society; a given form of government, a given church, a given system of education tending to produce certain kinds of people.

What first variation in environment started these social modifications it is hard to trace; but once established, a society modifies its individuals far more rapidly and powerfully than they modify it.

Our own brief national history glowingly illuminates this fact.

Here, in a new, large, and propitious environment, were planted individuals from Scandinavia, Italy, France, Spain, Holland and England, in varying numbers. Influenced by their surroundings conditions these scattered social elements coalesced, organized, rebelled against previous social connections and became a nation, and this nation rapidly developed certain special characteristics which we now call American.

So far the course of events, though on a larger scale, and more swiftly accomplished, is not so different from that of earlier social births. But we have one conspicuous feature in our growth which is quite, unique, namely our enormous and continuous assimilation of alien individuals.

This transfusion of blood, so to speak, was at first natural and healthy, being the voluntary immigration of healthy stock; of individuals sufficiently wise to see the advantages of the new country, sufficiently strong to break with home ties, and sufficiently successful to afford to come. Such material is an advantage to any nation, and our vigorous young organism thrived and grew apace, making Americans out of all comers by the overpowering force of social contact and transmission.

Later, when these natural forces were interfered with by self-interested parties, employers of labor and steamship companies mainly, we have had pumped into our national circulation such an amount of alien blood that our capacity for re-nationalizing them is taxed to the utmost.

Nevertheless, as far as it goes, our experiment does show the predominant force of social influence, even over so long established and persistent a group of racial characteristics as those of the Jews.

A given society is the life form, and its ethics must be social.

Since our human life consists of superimposed stages, still separately conscious, we may here discriminate, showing three perfectly distinct ranges of ethics:

• The ethics of the individual.
• The ethics of the family.
• The ethics of the state.

These are by no means necessarily in contradiction. They overlap and include one another when viewed from the larger range; but may antagonize and conflict when viewed from below.

Beginning with the simplest, pertaining to the individual, we must detach an individual life completely from all others, and then consider its conduct solely as measured by individual interests. This is difficult to do in human life, because the human individual does not exist separately, not normally, that is. Three arbitrary instances may be taken: that of a man shipwrecked on an otherwise uninhabited island; that of a prisoner in solitary confinement for life; or that of a hermit, self-isolated in cave or cell.

Each concept of right or wrong, good or evil, must here be measured by the personal reaction only. If there is hope of escape from island or prison, that might modify conduct with a view to future social relation, but in the case of the hermit there is not even such a hope; his view is absolutely personal, for all eternity; his conduct is modified absolutely to his own advantage.

In this extreme case we may note at once the cessation of all industry; for work is in itself an essentially social function, pre-supposing other persons whom the work serves.

The hermit has no industry. He is not willing even to provide his own food, which would involve some industry, or if he hunted, fished, and sought for fruit and nuts, would involve such freedom and activity as are incompatible with absolute pre-occupation with self. No. The hermit so adjusts his place of retirement that through a morbid influence over others' minds they bring him food. His activity is reduced to the lowest minimum, and is mainly psychic, consisting of certain mental performances all redounding to his own ultimate advantage. At least he thinks so.

This spectacle of ultra-egoism is rare, and promptly self-destructive. Society does not rear such often, and they do not reproduce their kind.

The life prisoner, or shipwrecked man are not thus egoistic, but while they live alone their vices or virtues must be measured by their effect upon themselves.

To such an individual ethics are limited and clear, as with an amoeba-and he is not required even to split in two. So simple are individual ethics that their fulfillment may be safely left to instinct, the natural desires of a healthy being tend to his own good conduct.

In the family relation, the next step upward, we find instant conflict between the good of the individual and the good of the family. Of course the maintenance of the family is of advantage to the individual-no second stage could be reached and upheld which would destroy the first, but while family life as a whole multiplies, protects, and promotes individual life, it does so at the incidental expense of much individual comfort and freedom.

The highly evolved processes of motherhood show this so conclusively that we have described them under the phrase "the maternal sacrifice," but the cares and labors of the mother are by no means so sacrificial as the early stages of paternity.

Many a humble father dies even in the act of his one offering; millions more die soon after, having existed but for that; and still more millions perish mere waste, having accomplished nothing.

But whether in the quick death of the father bee, or the slow strain, the anguish, the long giving of gestation, parturition and lactation, in later motherhood, there is some sacrifice involved. The gain is greater than the loss else would it not have been established, but there is some loss.

This brings us to a conflict in ethics. What is right for the individual must be measured against what is right for the family, and as the family ethics is higher it must triumph.

Among our unreasoning friends in fur and feathers this too is regulated by what we call instinct, and the heights and depths of parental devotion, parental care and labor, parental courage and self-sacrifice, are visibly attained.

With us something of the same effect is shown, especially in that half the world least educated, least developed in human liberty, activity, and reason the women. Fathers also often show it, even in the instinctive form; and our conscious recognition of it is shown in law, in religion, and in the tremendous weight of tradition and custom.

We are under no delusion in regard to the pre-eminence of family ethics over individual ethics; it would seem almost as if we held that the individual had no rights the family was bound to respect. In our own country particularly this family ethics stands rampant; the mother is supposed to have and to desire no life beyond that of ministering to her children; the father is valued as "a good provider" and "a good family man."

But when it comes to the third stage, social ethics-we hardly know there is such a thing.

In the interests of the individual we toil and strive and wrangle; in the interests of the family we strain and suffer; but the interests of the community do not form any large part in our ethical standards.

Yet the interests of the community are the base, the only base, of real ethics, our ethics, the ethics of humanity.

Individual existence with its instincts and desires we share with the whole creation; family existence with its instincts and desires we share with all the higher creatures; but social existence in our exquisitely specialized, highly organized form, is our great human prerogative. Social relationship is human life.

The development of ever higher forms of social relationship is the human process. It is what we are here for. Upon this social organism, its nature, its processes, its purpose, its advantage, we must build our ethics.

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The step upward, from individual to family life, was taken so slowly, under the leadership of such gradually developed instincts, that it has never involved much difficulty. Civilized and uncivilized people generally attain a certain grade of family virtue. of family virtue. Where they fail in it, from marked persistence of lower desires, or from morbid social development, we have a wide common morality from which to condemn such failure.

But the progress of humanity in social relationship has been too swift, too irregular, to develop its commensurate social instincts, and too much interferred with by many jarring influences for us to have thought clearly about it.

This is especially true of the history of the last half-millenium: since the hard-walled cell structure of absolute monarchies and an absolute church gave way to the loosening processes of the new ideals of liberty-freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of action.

Since then we have grown so momentously, with such unprecedented and accelerating swiftness, that it is no wonder the habit-ridden philosophies of the past have failed to grasp the newer state of human life.

Our mechanical progress has greatly outstripped our psychic progress. In the arts and crafts, in manufacture, invention and discovery, in the great new world of the natural sciences, we have swept ahead with dizzying speed. But in our mental attitudes, our habits of thought, and in especial in that field which has treated of "moral values," we have definitely striven not to progress to maintain at any cost our previous standards—and we have been lamentably successful.

The more new, specialized and detailed an art or science or business may be, the more free it is to expand and push forward, as for instance the advance in electricity; but in the more intimate and vital relations of life, and in that group of ideas and emotions we call "sacred," progress is slow, irregular, and difficult.

Such ethics as we know is old. It is based on the advantage of the individual, as understood in the past; on the advantage of the family, as understood in the past; and, dimly the advantage of the state, as understood in the past.

So our average ethical measurements rest upon the individual's eternal profit; upon the family's immediate personal needs; and upon such service to the state as shall "maintain the law" and fight when so directed.

Of Social Ethics in the full sense we have no more grasp than an unhatched egg.

(To be Continued.)