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

by P. V. N. Myers

II. Essential Facts of Kinship or Intratribal Morality

The life of primitive peoples largely unmoral

As students of morals our chief interest in primeval man as he emerges from the obscurity of prehistoric times is not concerning the degree of skill he has developed in making his weapons or in constructing for himself a shelter, nor concerning what advance he has made in the arts of weaving and pottery, nor yet concerning what kind of social arrangements he has worked out; our main interest in this primeval man as he appears on the threshold of the historic day is not concerning these or any like things, but rather respecting what kind of a conscience has grown up within him during those long prehistoric ages of struggle, privation, watch and ward.

The first fact that compels our notice here is that the life of the savage is largely unmoral.[31] His activities to secure food, shelter, and clothing arise from purely animal impulses, such as hunger and cold. Into all of these activities, however, there enters as time passes an ethical element.[32] The economic life, in a word, comes more and more under the dominance of moral feelings and motives.[33] Conscience becomes more and more involved in all these matters. This gradual moralization of these at first nonmoral activities of primitive man constitutes one of the most important phases of the moral evolution of the race.

The “goodness” of uncivilized races largely a negative goodness

A second fact in the moral life of savages that claims our attention is that much that is counted unto them for “goodness” is a purely negative goodness. Failure in discrimination here often results in a wrong estimate of their morality as compared with that of advanced communities. Thus in portraying the manners and customs of primitive peoples, some writers, like Tacitus in his account of the early German folk, laud their morals as superior to those of civilized men. This opinion is based rather on the absence among such peoples of the usual vices and crimes of civilized societies than on the practice by them of the higher positive virtues.[34] But the absence of the vices which characterize civilization is to be explained, of course, by the simpler organization of society and the fewer temptations to wrongdoing. Thus the single circumstance that the institution of individual property has not yet come into existence, or at least has not as yet received any great extension, accounts for the comparative absence of crimes against property, which constitute probably the greater number of criminal acts in civilized society.

The true starting point of the historic ethical development

But notwithstanding that so much of the life of primitive man is lived on the nonmoral plane, and that much which is reckoned unto him for goodness is merely negative goodness, still in certain of his activities growing out of his clan relationships we discover the beginnings of all human morality. For as we have already said, the true starting point of the moral evolution of mankind is to be sought in the altruistic sentiments nourished in the atmosphere of the kinship group. There is scarcely an ethical sentiment which does not appear here at least in a rudimentary form. Out of the most sacred and intimate relationships of the group we find springing up the maternal virtues of patience, tenderness, and self-denial,[35] and the filial virtues of love, obedience, and reverence; out of the fellowship of the men in hunting and in war[36] we see developing the manly virtues of courage, fortitude, self-control, and, above all, self-devotion to the common good; out of the hearth worship of ancestors[37] we observe springing up many of those religious-ethical feelings and sentiments which form one of the chief moral forces in civilization; out of the sacrificial meal shared with the gods and the spirits of the dead through offerings of portions of the food and drink, we see forming customs of incalculable moral value in the ethical training of the race.[38] A great part of the history of morals consists in the record of how these earliest forms of social virtues, first nourished by the customs, habits, and practices of the kinship group, have been gradually refined and developed into wider and richer forms of ethical sentiment and feeling.

Custom as the maker of group morality

There is one special feature of this germinal morality to which our attention must now be directed. It is what is often called customary morality. That is to say, the standard of right and wrong in the kinship community is custom. Custom is the lawgiver, and morality consists in following custom. The individual, in a word, follows the tribal or group conscience rather than the dictates of his own conscience. Indeed there is practically no such thing here as a private conscience. Individualism has not yet arisen. No one ordinarily has private notions of right and wrong which he feels impelled to set up against the immemorial customs and usages of the community.[39]

But there is really nothing in this fact which sets this nascent morality apart from our own. It differs from ours not in kind but only in degree. The morality of the masses is still largely customary morality. Most persons in their social relations, in business, and in religion, follow unthinkingly the tribal conscience, that is, the conventional morality of the society of which they are members, rather than their own individual sense of right and wrong. “Reflective morality” is still the morality of the few. The ever-renewed moral task of man is to change the customary tribal conscience into a reflective individual conscience.

Collective responsibility

There is still another phase of the incipient morality of the kinship group which claims our attention because of its significance for the history of the evolution of morals. It is a group morality, that is, a morality based on the idea of collective responsibility.

This conception presents one of the most striking phenomena in the history of the moral evolution of mankind. Among peoples in the earlier stages of moral development the family or clan group rather than the individual is regarded as the ethical unit, and the act of any member of this group, when such act concerns a member or members of another social group, is looked upon as the act of the whole body to which he belongs.[40] For the wrongdoing of one all are held responsible.[41]

This group morality, with which the true history of the unfolding moral consciousness of the race begins, we shall meet with as a sort of survival in every stage of the moral progress of humanity from the lowest to the highest level of culture. “It is,” in the words of Hobhouse, “one of the dominant facts, if not the dominant fact, ethically considered, in the evolution of human society.”[42] The account of that slow change in the moral consciousness of man which has gradually caused group morality, in most spheres of life and thought, to give place to individual morality, that is, to that conception of moral responsibility which holds every man responsible for his own act, and only for his own act, makes up one of the most instructive chapters in the moral history of the world.[43] We shall find significant survivals of this idea of collective responsibility, particularly in the religious domain. In truth, a large part of religious history is nothing more nor less than an account of the influence and outworkings of this notion. Men making their gods like unto themselves have imagined them as acting on this principle of communal responsibility, and as bringing upon a whole people pestilence, famine, war, or other calamity in revenge or punishment for some neglect in worship or act of sacrilege on the part of perhaps a single member of the tribe or nation.

By the early Fathers of the Church this idea of collective responsibility, embodied in the doctrine of the imputation of the guilt of the transgression of the first man Adam to all his descendants to the end of the world, was given a prominent place in Christian theology and has been a great force in molding the morality of the Western world.

Again, we find this idea of group morality embodied in the war ethics of the modern nations, which, regarded from one point of view, is largely group ethics, that is to say, the survival in the domain of international relations of ethical ideas that had their birth on the low intellectual and moral levels of barbarism.

As we follow the upward trend of the lines of the moral evolution of the race we shall hear louder and louder protests against this notion of communal responsibility, especially when this form of human morality has been transferred to the heavens and made a fundamental principle of the divine government.

The duty of revenge; the blood feud

In primitive society if a man slay a kinsman, he is punished by outlawry, that is, by expulsion from the family or clan.[44] The story of Cain, the first murderer of a kinsman in Hebrew legend, is typical.[45] If, however, a member of a clan is slain by an outsider, it is the duty of the nearest kinsman of the person killed, or of the collective body of his kinsfolk, to kill in revenge the slayer or some relative of his.[46] To ignore this obligation or to forgive the slayer of one’s kinsman is regarded as base and cowardly.

As, through the advance of society, the ties of the clan become relaxed and this group becomes more and more perfectly merged with the larger group of the tribe or state of which it has become a part, and justice comes to be administered by the tribal head or by regular tribunals, then blood revenge on the part of the kinsmen of the slain gradually ceases to be a duty and private vengeance becomes a crime. But this is a slow evolution, and within societies far advanced in civilization we often find belated groups still following with good conscience the ancient custom of blood revenge. The vendetta in Italy and the feud in some sections of our Southern states[47] are survivals or degenerate forms of this primitive virtue.

The Lex talionis

Closely related to the punishment of homicide in primitive society is punishment of lesser offenses, especially the infliction of bodily injury, within the social group. Here, too, private vengeance rules. The person wronged or injured inflicts such punishment upon the offender as passion or resentment may dictate. As time passes, however, and the sense of justice grows more discriminating, there are limits set to this private vengeance. There is established what is called the rule of equivalence. The avenger is not allowed to wreak upon the offender indiscriminate and unmeasured punishment, but is restricted to the infliction upon him of exactly such injury and pain as he has inflicted upon his victim. Hence arose the Lex talionis, limb for limb, eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.[48] This regulation thus registers an advance in moral feeling, and may be regarded as probably the first rule of the criminal code of the nations.

The virtue of courage; its altruistic element

In early society those virtues are most highly esteemed which are of service to the clan or tribe. Thus courage comes to hold a first place among the virtues. What is especially important to be noted here is that under courage is hidden the virtue of self-sacrifice, which we give the highest place in our ideal of character. It is this altruistic element in courage which lends to it its real ethical quality. In primitive society this virtue finds expression chiefly in the ready self-devotion of the individual in battle for the common good.

Throughout pagan antiquity this virtue held a central place in practically every ideal of excellence. In the words of Robertson Smith, “This devotion to the common weal was, as every one knows, the mainspring of ancient morality and the source of all the heroic virtues of which ancient history presents so many illustrious examples.”[49]