History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

I. Forces determining the Trend of the Ethical Movement

The incoming of democracy

Of all the forces which since the rise of Christianity have given fresh impulse to the ethical movement inaugurated by the new religion, none has exerted a greater influence than modern democracy. This is so because in its essential spirit democracy is at one with Christianity. It is merely “a principle which continues ... over a wider range of institutions the same principle as Christianity introduced.”[721] It extends the Christian principle of equality from the spiritual to the political, the social, and the economic domain. It makes all men equal before Cæsar as well as before God.

And like Christianity, democracy extends the range of persons who are brothers until not only all classes within the same state but all peoples and races are included. “In the democratic union of nations,” in the words of Lecky, “we find the last and highest expression of the Christian ideal of the brotherhood of mankind.”[722]

It is this identity of the essential spirit of democracy with the essential spirit of Christianity which makes the incoming of democracy a revolution of such supreme importance in the moral history of the world. To truly democratize society, as to truly christianize it, is to moralize it.

Modern inventions and the new industrialism

“The causes,” observes Lecky, “which most disturbed or accelerated the moral progress of society in antiquity were the appearance of great men; in modern times they have been the appearance of great inventions.”[723]

In no department of morals, save the international, have modern inventions exerted a greater influence than in the department of industrial ethics. In this sphere these inventions have reacted on morals in two ways: first, they have changed fundamentally for the masses in all civilized lands the economic conditions of life, which conditions, as we have seen, are the great molders of morals; and second, through the changes they have wrought in the processes of production, and through the immense development they have given to the whole industrial system, they have caused principles and institutions once just and beneficent in their outworkings to become instruments of inequity and oppression, and have thus awakened new moral judgments respecting these maxims and conventions. The growth of these new ethical feelings and convictions constitute an important part, perhaps the most important part, of the moral history of recent times. They are the motive force in several of the most significant moral movements of to-day in the industrial world. Preëminently true is this of the present-day labor movement. “Its form,” as Professor Peabody says, “is economic, but its motives are moral. It is an effort—often blind and groping, sometimes pitifully misdirected, yet none the less proceeding from the conscience of the time—to shape economic life into an instrument of social justice and peace.”[724] Socialism, too, with all its ethical aspirations and enthusiasms, is in large part a product of the new industrialism.

The doctrine of evolution

Not less disturbing to morals than the political and industrial revolutions has been the revolution in scientific thought effected by the doctrine of evolution. This theory has been not only a powerful dissolvent of a large part of the body of medieval theology and hence of that part of morality dependent upon this system of thought, but, through the dominant place which this interpretation of the cosmic process assigns to the self-regarding motives, it has exercised in wide circles of society an unfavorable influence upon morals by seeming to give nature’s sanction to self-assertive, antisocial conduct. There are drifts in both the public and the private morality of the last half century which, as we shall see, find their explanation in the disturbance of ethical values created by the general acceptance of the Darwinian theory of progress through “the survival of the fittest.” But we shall also see this same theory, better interpreted in its profoundest intimations, giving strong support to the best ethical instincts of humanity and supplying new incentives and encouragement to humanitarian endeavor.

General intellectual progress

The moral history of the Western world since the Renaissance affords a striking illustration of the dependence of progress in morals upon progress in general intelligence. It is undoubtedly true that, fostered by a free press, by the public-school system, and by various other agencies, the average of intelligence in the modern democratic state is higher than it was in any of the states—save possibly in some of the small city states of Greece—of ancient or medieval times. This new intellectual life, speaking broadly, has reacted favorably upon the moral life. It has dispelled superstition, destroyed prejudices, widened the outlook of men, and broadened their moral sympathies. In a word, the seeing of life and things as they really are has tended to clarify the moral sense and to render clearer and truer the vision of the ethical ideal.

The decline of dogmatic theology

The body of hereditary ethical convictions and judgments upon which modern influences have been especially at work was, as has been seen, shaped and molded largely by theology. Hence nothing has influenced more positively the moral evolution in recent times than the profound modification which, during the period, has taken place in men’s religious beliefs. Under the influence of advancing intelligence, of evolutionary science, of ever closer relations between the different races and nations, and the resulting contact and comparison of different religions, there has gone on a rapid disintegration of old creeds. The effect of this upon many has been the elimination from their moral code of all purely theological elements, the erection of a new standard of moral values, and the adoption of an ideal of character which may best be described as being in the main a composite of Greek and gospel ethics.

Growing intimacy of international relations

The dependence of moral progress in modern times upon inventions, as Lecky observes, is shown perhaps even more strikingly in the domain of international than in that of industrial ethics. As in antiquity it was the world-wide extension of the Roman rule through conquest which broke the primal isolation of the Mediterranean peoples and created that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which arose the ethical universalism characterizing the cultured circles of Roman society in the later centuries of the Empire, so in this modern age it is the great inventions of the steamship, the steam railway, the electric telegraph, the ocean cable, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and the rest, which have broken the isolation of the nations, bound them together by a thousand commercial, social, and intellectual ties, and created that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which have naturally sprung those ethical feelings and convictions which form the growing international conscience of to-day.

Thus it is that inventions, whose aims were primarily to promote civilization on its material side, have become the most efficient agencies in creating a sense of ethical oneness among the nations, and thus in opening a new epoch in the moral evolution of mankind.