Chapter II

Some Bases of Ethical Valuation

The Forerunner: Vol. V, No. 2 (p. 48-53)

February 1914

Among our earliest ethical percepts was the recognition that not only were certain acts "wrong," but that some were far more wrong than others.

Our judgment in the matter varies, however, from the lowest social group to the highest, and varies among the highest. Not only so, but in a specialized social group such as a great modern nation, we find that ethical values differ as among classes, professions, ages, and sexes, to say nothing of religions.

The whole course of human life is hedged about with ethical restrictions; from the baby who is taught that his essential virtue is keeping quiet, through all the positive and negative conduct required in the different trades, and in the frankly open division between the ethics of the two sexes.

So complex, so confused, so contradictory, is this field of social perception, that in order to form any clear idea of it we must study it from the side, watching the gradual appearance of these distinctions as society developed.

No thorough, all-embracing view is offered, but a brief survey of certain conspicuous well-known ethical concepts, and their course of development.

We are to conceive of early man as coming into a vague, fluctuating state of consciousness, which we naturally call "self-consciousness" because it is the self which registers its sensations. But the main subject matter of this consciousness, and the agent of its appearance and growth is society. Our human consciousness is essentially social. Self-consciousness is to be sure manifested in proportion to social development, up to this time, but that is because our unrecognized social relations are so ill adjusted as to cause pain, and the pain, of course, is felt by the self.

Also, as we fail to recognize our consciousness as social, we use its widening powers in a forced restriction to our own affairs, a process so morbid as to lead to disease and insanity if carried too far.

In the days of our racial beginnings we may conceive of the growing consciousness of man as slowly recognizing the advantages of obedience, of courage, of loyalty, of hospitality, in others of the tribe, and expressing his approval of them.

Obedience is perhaps the earliest ethical concept, having been established in practice far behind humanity. Suppose we follow that one virtue in its long course from the animal family into the human family, up through history and the changing human mind to its present condition, a mere preliminary outline of study.

The animal mother, in the higher species, has a long period of infancy to guard, and this guardianship, to be effective, requires prompt acquiescence on the part of the young. She has no speech, no means of conveying a general direction or showing its reasons. can only by voice or action convey an impulse to an immediate act, as when the mother partridge issues her sharp She selves into immobility at once. They are so much less visible, almost invisible indeed, among the dead leaves and twigs which their markings "protectively imitate," that those who keep quite still escape attack. Those who do not so promptly or so perfectly obey are eaten, Thus is "the leaving no descendants. habit of obedience" developed to automatic perfection. command and the little ones flatten them.

If we were still following nature's method we too might have absolutely obedient children-by the simple expedient of killing all who were not.

The little savage and his savage mother were under this long inheritance of mutual action,-the sharp signal of the mother-the quick response of the child. If the response is not quick, or not forthcoming at all, there is a twofold distress to the mother; consciously a fear for the child, and sub-consciously a sense of balked nerve discharge-the impulse did not "go off" as intended. However accounted for, the child's failure to react properly to her impulse distresses the mother, and she punishes the child as "naturally" as a mother bear or mother cat cuffs her refractory offspring.

Such a deep-seated race habit must needs find easy expression in later groups. So soon as hunting led to teamwork and leadership, and the new power so developed expressed itself in organized war, we find obedience growing rankly as a group virtue.

In the family with a male head the already strongly developed protective obedience became mingled with the military kind, and was exacted, under heavy penalties, by the father. As he became able to form concepts he exalted such filial obedience with accompanying reverence as a requirement of religion, as we so find it in the ancient Hebrew commandments.

As the tribe developed chieftainship, and the chief became a king, we see in the long period of absolute monarchy this virtue at its apogee. There the whole social group must bow to the will of one man.

This universal submission to one resistless power, with filial reverence run mad in praise and prostration to the despot, always assisted, of course, by the priestly cult, presently came to be the main demand of religion. Our religious life is still heavily dominated by this ancient ethical concept, though in politics it is being rapidly outgrown, and weakens fast in the family. On sea-going ships and in military organizations it finds its highest surviving form to-day, and, of, course, in some lingering religions.

What has occurred to alter the position of this virtue in our ethical concepts?

The same natural causes which made obedience the best protection for little partridges, now show us that a child is best safe-guarded by developing his own powers of judgment and of will.

Obedience, whatever its object, requires the abrogation of judgment, the surrender of the will. The "obedient" races, those still under absolute despotism, make small progress; the "obedient" professions par excellence, soldiers and sailors, also make small progress. The religions which demand absolute obedience have their strongest hold among the weak and ignorant, and find it increasingly difficult to continue that hold on the growing human mind.

We are beginning to see that while obedience is assuredly a necessity at times, it has certain heavy disadvantages in its effect on both commander and obeyer.

The world's endless rebellions, its demands and struggles for liberty in thought, in speech, in action, show, to the sociologist, the healthy resistance of a growing race-mind to a race-concept which has outlived its usefulness.

The political development leading to democracy, with its appreciation first of "the common will," and later of "the common good," has had its natural effect on the whole range of ethical values. Democratic processes require free general transmission of thought and feeling, that new demands may be spread from the few to the many.

Progress in freedom begins, as it always has, in the superior vision, the deeper insight of the few. From them it must spread to the many and convince them-it cannot coerce them.

Here lies the essential value of a republic as compared to a monarchy.

In a monarchy the subject must submit.

In a democracy the citizen must agree.

In a monarchy there is small encouragement of voluntary organization whole mass stirs with this impulse-to -it is a danger. In a democracy the action, the desired end. The child, in a get together and promote, by collective monarchy, must learn to submit. The child, in a democracy, must learn to persuade and to agree.

The capacity to understand, to see and appreciate a general need, whether shared by one's self or not; the capacity to organize and act collectively--these are the prime needs of a democracy--not obedience. Therefore in a democracy we see the mind grow and the mental growth result in action. The recognition of the power of majorities and the necessity for convincing them, is a very different sort of influence from submission to the power of the king and the necessity of pleasing him.

Democracy tends to discount the ancient virtue of obedience and to demand new ones. This is why we dimly see that our children need new training to fit them for a new world They may elect to obey, as the patient obeys his doctor, or the enlisted man his officer, or like any temporary servant or employee, but it is no longer the absolute obedience of the past, nor so honored.

In studying a single virtue like this, if it were done in full detail, large historic charts would be needed, emblematic charts, whereon would be traced, in long, branching, upreaching lines, the growth, change, extension and reduction of the quality under discussion, streaming up along the ages; here fed by special conditions and thriving; here starved and dwindling, here arbitrarily preserved by law or religion in spite of changing circumstances.

And from any one quality so studied we must clearly recognize what it is which makes this quality a virtue or a vice. Our common saying speaks of "making a virtue of necessity." All virtues are made of necessity. Without necessity they would never have arisen; when the necessity ceases they cease to be virtues.

Our failure to recognize this, our arbitrarily attaching ethical values, good and bad, to certain acts, in the face of a moving world of evidence, is a proof of how the telic powers of man, greater than those of any other creature, have so often interfered with and sometimes frustrated the genetic forces which act upon him.

To show this relation of virtue and necessity most clearly, and without rousing undue antagonism, let us take one of the minor virtues, one about which we do not "feel" so intensely-hospitality.

Look at once at its excesses-where you see it most extremely developed, among savages, among the Scotch Highlanders and the Bedouin Arabs.

Where do you find it least? In large, crowded modern cities; its absolute opposite being seen in the mutually opposing coldness of dwellers in apartment houses.

Where do you find it in intermediate degree? In rural districts, especially in scattered settlements, as in our West and South.

With such bald facts as these before us, it is easy to trace the necessity which is the mother of this virtue.

Where life is hardest, exposure greatest, people fewest, there you find hospitality as a tribal virtue a pre-eminent one. In the desert, the mountains, the jungle, the polar wastes, food and shelter are given the stranger as a matter of course.

In our Southern states, in the old days of lavish hospitality, we find isolated families, having little society except in visits, with labor and supplies in plenty; and in the comparatively unsettled West, the traveler is sometimes dependent on hospitality for his life. Among these conditions, it is a valued virtue.

In the crowded cities, on the other hand, where people press and swarm, where transportation is ample and public entertainment to be had anywhere, this virtue dwindles fast.

We may safely generalize thus:

Hospitality is a virtue in proportion to the scarcity of population, and the distance, difficulty and danger of traveling.

Such an explanation we may readily admit of so moderate and worldly a virtue as hospitality, and yet hesitate before applying the same method to virtues we rate more highly.

Yet a "virtue" is only a quality, a distinguishing method and habit of action. The ability to make the abstraction "courage" came long after that quality was seen and valued. We had the virtue before we knew it was one. As with any other quality, physical or psychic, development comes only with use, and use rests on necessity.

Let us apply this test to a still more ordinary and un-sacred virtue thrift or economy.

There is throughout nature what is called "the law of parismony." Through all the apparent waste and confusion this law slowly works on, reducing the superfluous, eliminating the unnecessary, tending to give each member just the strength and weight essential to it and no more. This is wholly genetic, and hardly to be called a virtue.

With us, the tactics of the ant and the squirrel have grown to such a degree as to produce not only the virtue of thrift, but right through that virtue and on into With such bald facts as these before the vices of the niggard and miser. The great Chinese doctrine of "the golden mean" recognizes that too much virtue may be vice.

A better instance could scarcely be given; and it may be studied far and wide, without offending what we call "our finer feelings."

The fruit-fed native of a tropic land has no occasion for economy. There are plenty of nuts, plenty of fruit, the year round. Having no occasion for thrift, he does not develop it. How could he? If he did, it would not be a virtue.

On the other hand, if men are starving on short rations, as when shipwrecked, or lost in polar wastes, then the extreme of miserliness becomes a virtue, being a necessity.

There is no innate, inherent, good or bad in these qualities. Their goodness or badness is wholly dependent on other facts and circumstances.

We may here make a third generalization, following two in previous chapter:

Good and bad are relative terms, dependent on conditions.

The next general base of ethical values is distinctively human, requiring social consciousness in a considerable degree.

This is found in what we call "morals." Morals rest on customs, on ancient tribal habits. They may or may not have had an original cause in real necessity; in either case their continuing force lies not in necessity but only in long repetition. The "mores" of a tribe are merely its inherited customs.

Here we enter an entirely new field, a psychic field. Some special act has become a custom; such, for instance, as the keeping young women in ignorance of the facts of sexual life.

This is an excellent illustration, because the only tinge of necessity it could ever have had was the necessity of meeting an arbitrary standard set up by the purchaser, or future husband. This demand rested on no necessity of value to the race, but quite the contrary. It is not found among primitive peoples, but appears in proportion to the vices of later societies. As men become more sophisticated and corrupt, it is, of course, to their advantage that their late-chosen brides shall know nothing of the man's previous conduct, and that their wives. shall not understand the whole latitude of masculine conduct later. Therefore we have an adventitious virtue, called "innocence," confined strictly to women, and most especially to young girls. This "innocence" does not consist, as in innocence of theft, or murder, in not having committed these crimes; it consists in not knowing that there are such crimes as the man wishes to conceal.

We do not consider that a young girl ceases to be innocent because she knows that people steal or kill, lie, cheat, bribe and tyrannize. Even to understand the full details of a burglary does not corrupt her. But if she is acquainted with the facts of sexual immorality, or even the facts of sexual morality, she has lost that "virginal innocence" which is "her chiefest charm."

To whom? To the one whom it is to her advantage to charm if she wishes to be married.

This is as arbitrary a standard as that among certain North African peoples where a bride is preferred to be fat--and therefore girls are fed on a special diet to increase adipose tissue. Their corpulence is as much a virtue as this "innocence."

In any real sense the ignorance of young women on this subject is not a virtue at all, but a serious evil, because it injures the race by conducing to wrong marriages and continued vice; but having been arbitrarily demanded in the first instance, and having become a very general and ancient habit, it is now a virtue on the second basis, custom.

The working of the forces which modify conduct along this line is most interesting to note. On the first base, necessity, the driving pressure is that of some danger, pain, or advantage-a real one. In this second instance, the pressure lies partly in the remotely conceived and arbitrarily enforced advantage of being married, with danger and pain of not being married (these also largely arbitrary); but also on that power we commonly term "the force of habit." Merely because a thing is usually done, has been done for a long time, therefore our nerve-force is accustomed to discharge along those lines, and to check or divert it causes us mental distress.

A custom, any custom, will long survive even the most arbitrarily invented usefulness, merely by this force of habit, our sense of evil in breaking the rule being purely associative.

The student of comparative sociology may watch the entire course of history, threaded with the secondary virtues; noting their appearance, their quick spread and adoption, their long continuance, and slow, gradual disappearance.

Another conspicuous instance of this sort of arbitrary virtue lies in that peculiar quality called "honor" as confined (a) to the male, and (b) to the “upper classes."

"The honor of a gentleman" ranks among the first, if not, considered by himself, the first of all virtues. "All is lost save honor," cries the proud sufferer. This virtue, as we know it, is of quite modern appearance, though doubtless its social prototypes are to be found far down the line. Its manifestations are varied and peculiar, and bear relation, of course, to the differing conditions in different nations. An extreme feature of this virtue is shown in a gentleman's attitude toward what are called "debts of honor."

The gentleman, we will say, owes money to his tailor, his landlady, his servant-for value received. He has consumed the goods or profited by the services of these persons, and owes them payment according to that other virtue known as "common honesty." On the other hand he has been gambling, and has lost; he has wagered money on some game or bet-and owes that also.

Common honesty is too "common" for him; it is vulgar, it is no virtue at all.

But "honor" rules supreme; "the honor of a gentleman" compels him to pay a gambling debt to another gentleman who has given no value or service who does not need the money-and to let his tailor, landlady and servant-who have taken care of him-suffer and go to ruin.

In all the galaxy of arbitrary custom-based virtues, there is none shining more brilliantly than this. How is it to be accounted for? By any real necessity of advantage or pain it is not to be accounted for. But in our social psychology it is easily traced. Veblen, in his luminous book "The Theory of The Leisure Class," has shown the way.

These gentlemen belong to a class which has no true social relation in service. They have no economic position in the "body politic" except a parasitic one-society supports them. Their advantage, in the sense of being fed, clothed, and generally maintained, bears no relation whatever to their exertions, but is guaranteed them by certain social conditions. But their advantage, in the sense of having an agreeable time their pleasures-and their possible gain in still higher gentility, depend wholly on the people they play with. Having no work to do, and not wishing to spend all their time in bed, they must needs play. Being a primitive, unspecialized class, their animal instincts of the battle, and the chase, and the universal love of gaming, as well as grosser indulgences, are strongly in evidence among them. They revolve amongst one another, in a mutual exchange of civilities and entertainments, and the "rules of the game" in these amusements are the governing laws of their lives. To call some one "a good sport," "a true sport," is their highest compliment, sport being their field of life.

It is quite easily to be seen that, since gaming is a principal pastime with this class, and since if gaming debts are not paid the pleasure of the game would disappear, they must insist absolutely upon such payment. Further, since personal compulsion might not be efficacious, and since the law of the land, strangely enough, refuses to recognize the gambling debt as taking precedence of all others, they are compelled to evolve out of their own psychology an ethic of sufficient force to govern conduct. Never was it more successfully done. Having become a custom, its power has steadily increased; and, being a custom of the upper classes, and therefore to be envied and imitated, it has spread to some extent among other classes, into the more genuine fields of life.

Yet to a merely human observer, studying ethics from the standpoint of real value to society, or even to the individual, one would think that clothes, food and service were of more value than the privilege of playing games, and that to accept service without paying for it was more dishonorable than to make a wager and not back it.

This only shows how various is our estimate of ethical values, and how different their bases.

The next dominant element in ethics is the influence of religion, which will be treated at more length in the next chapter. It is difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the relative weight of these varying elements.

In some cases we may see the primal necessities triumph over all others, as when shipwrecked sailors revert to cannibalism; again we see one of these purely arbitrary elected virtues triumph over the worst necessity, as when the gentleman sacrifices his estates to pay his debts of honor; and again we find the equally arbitrary religious standard triumph over both nature and custom, as in the practice of asceticism.

Ethics as a science is so overlaid and discolored by these and other considerations that real exercise of one's mental muscles is needed to distinguish among them.

This third base is of enormous importance. It is, in a sense, the "highest," in that its hypothetical theory of advantage requires a longer range of thought to perceive, and a more permanent mental force to maintain, than the earlier ones.

But precisely because of these conditions it is open to greater eccentricities and excesses.

The first thing to note in studying the effect of religion upon ethics is the development of the abstract concept of "right" and "wrong." "Bad medicine" "Bad medicine" is a phrase used by some of our native Americans for things evil; medicine by no means indicating drugs, but "practice" or "theory" or "system"--a wrong method of conduct. A generalization is a dangerous thing to play with. For safe handling it needs to be kept in constant touch with the facts. Our first thinkers, having healthy, active young brains. to use, brains unencumbered with knowledge, launched forth with the ardor of a child in their perceptions and deductions--and there was no one to stop them.

Very early indeed we find the heavy influence of religion laid upon our dawning perceptions of ethics; very early were the terms "right" and "wrong" weighted with new significance and monopolized by the religious dictators. A complete separation was effected between the right and wrong performance of the ordinary acts of life and the "right" and 'wrong" of acts specially commanded or specially forbidden by religion.

When we speak of ethical values today we find that in most people's minds they are confined exclusively to religious requirements and prohibitions. Of all other conduct they speak as "not a question of right and wrong."

The science of ethics covers all conduct. Right and wrong may be indicated in any human act. cated in any human act. Such right and wrong varies with the relation of the act to our social advantages, varies in regard to time, place and condition, but, vary as it may, it is always there, and the teacher of ethics should be capable of pointing it out to the student.

Such universal application of ethics soon passed the limited range of savage conduct with its clear and simple code; and ages before we were able to grasp social laws, religion stepped in with its doctrine of despair as to the tangled affairs of "this world," its theory of another one where things were to be set right, and its definite, rigid, largely arbitrary system of conduct, spreading "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" over a narrow selected field of action, and leaving the whole remainder of life outside.

(To be continued)