A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution

by Cora May Williams

Parental power was once held sacred and beyond interference; nevertheless the use made of it does not seem to have been always a sacred one. The Roman law allowed parents to put their children to death. The modern state has tended, on the other hand, to take away more and more power from the parents, extending its protection to the helpless child. And this is well; the child, as well as the adult, should have the right of protection against abuse. Nevertheless, the theories which would relegate the whole education and care of the child to the state must be regarded as too extreme. Whatever disadvantages there may be in the government of parents, especially at the present day when the education of women is still so inadequate, there is yet nothing which the child cannot better miss out of his education than the influence of parental love, the lack of which no state institution can ever supply. Granted that parental government is of a most mistaken sort in some cases, and that it is not perfect in any case, it still remains true that family affection furnishes one of mankind's greatest joys, and that the love of the parent should, and even does, on the average, make the best protection and educator weak and clinging childhood can have. No one who has at all studied the condition of children in orphan asylums and other institutions under the care of the state, can have failed to notice, even in those institutions managed with the greatest kindness, the immense difference in happiness and attractiveness between their inmates and the children used to family love and mother's caresses. The lack of love makes the child unlovable. The fundamental method of reform lies, not in the withdrawal of all power from parents, but rather in the better preparation of men, and especially of women, to fulfil the duties of parentage. Such a preparation must consist, however, less in any particular study than in such general physical, intellectual, and moral discipline and education as shall expand all the powers in health and harmony, thus securing to children a good physical inheritance and an early guidance both wise and moral. A higher morality must particularly emphasize the fact that not self alone or even merely the two parties to a marriage are to be considered; that the welfare of possible offspring must be regarded; and that, therefore, marriage with the morally unfit is a crime against future generations as well as against self, and marriage of the physically unfit, where offspring are permitted, is equally a wrong. The old idea, encouraged in women, that it was a good and noble use of life to "marry a man in order to reform him," is beginning to go out of vogue; and future standards will not tolerate the present social dogma that, however much of a profligate a man may have been, whatever associates he may have affected, however he may have betrayed the innocent and debauched his own moral sense, he is still fit to mate with any pure and good woman.

The necessity of a better physical and intellectual education for the mothers of the race, as a preparation for the adequate performance of their duties, must be, at the present time, especially emphasized. The task of the mother in the early training of children is one that requires practical knowledge of the world, broad views, and that power of judgment which is possible only through mental discipline. Superstition, narrowness, subjection to tradition and dogma, are incompatible with efficient motherhood. The education must, then, be real, no cramming with stale facts and staler theories; it must advance with the science of the day, and deal with its vital questions.

But the standpoint which regards women only as means to ends outside themselves, which calculates all the advantages to be permitted them by the measure alone of their usefulness to husbands or children, is a poor one. To afford to all individuals the full and free development of capacity must be the ideal of society. The ancient conceptions which laid little emphasis practically, whatever they might do theoretically, upon the woman's right to opportunities for her own sake, which made meekness and self-abnegation her chief virtues, and fixed its regard always upon future generations in her case, is one that cannot be defended from a higher ethical standpoint. If no man lives unto himself alone, neither should any man, or woman either, be expected to spend his life merely as a means to others and having no end in himself. Every human being has a right to a share in the general privileges and pleasures. For their own sake, and that of society as a whole, as well as for that of their immediate friends and family, women should share equally with men the benefits of mental culture, its æsthetic enjoyments, its consolations and distractions, and the calm and self-poise bestowed by its broad outlook. To women as well as to men applies what has already been said of the folly and sin of ignorance of the world. We have only to look at France in order to perceive the evils of a system which brings girls to maturity in a condition of seclusion, ignorance, and dependence, and then suddenly launches them upon society wholly unprepared to withstand the temptations it presents. The evil results of a less degree of the same system are visible all over the world. On the other hand, it is in just that country—America—where women have had the most freedom, that they are also most capable of enduring freedom, and that their civilizing influence is most visible. They are not the less womanly for this liberty, and society is very much the better for it. Indeed, their attractiveness and the power they wield through it is not equalled in any other country. "I wonder," writes George Eliot, "whether the subtle measuring of forces will ever come to measure the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose mind was as noble as her face was beautiful—who made a man's passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life." "It is terrible—the keen, bright eye of a woman when it has once been turned with admiration on what is severely true; but then the severely true rarely comes within its range of vision."

The questions of marriage and prostitution may be reduced to the single question of the desirability of monogamy. No one can well deny the evils attending the existence of a class of prostitutes isolated from moral associations, despised and ill-treated, daily sinking lower and lower through this isolation, and contaminating, by their influence, those who come in contact with them. The practical question is, then, would it be well for society as a whole to assume another attitude, of open approval, towards prostitution, to admit those who are now outcasts to a position on a par with faithful wives and pure maidens. This was the position of Athenian prostitutes, and it existed together with, we may suppose, comparative chastity on the part of maidens and faithfulness on the part of wives. These, however, did not take part in the social life of the men, but lived in seclusion in their homes; it would be impossible to accord a similar position to prostitutes in modern society unless with the practical surrender of any demand or expectancy of faithfulness on the part of wives, or of chastity on the part of maidens. Even in France, where the position of prostitutes most nearly approximates the Athenian, a very distinct dividing-line is drawn between the demi-monde and the rest of society; and, indeed, special precautions are taken to secure the chastity of girls. In like manner, purity might perhaps still be secured in girls, after the admission of prostitutes to a position of equality with other women, by a convent education and the greatest watchfulness; but the lack of self-dependence would be likely to be followed, as it now so often is in France, only in far greater degree, by excesses after the attainment of comparative self-direction with marriage. The profligate soon tires of the prostitute, and desires higher game; unbridled license begets morbid passion; the sense of honor is blunted; the pure cease to be safe except as far as they are able, by self-control and self-defence, to protect themselves; and for such self-poise only an education of freedom, of knowledge of the world and of self, can prepare. Nor could even such a system of seclusion as we have imagined exist for any length of time side by side with the full acceptance of prostitution as perfectly honorable and right; the two things are self-contradictory and incompatible; in France, faithfulness is not less desired of wives than in other countries. Indeed, the majority of men in civilized countries would never consent to a system of general promiscuity; they desire women, that is, a large number of women, a sufficient number to supply them with wives, to remain pure, whatever liberty they demand for themselves. The whole progress of society has been in the direction of monogamy, and the reason of this is obvious: as reason and taste develop, man ceases to be satisfied with the mere enjoyments of the animal; he develops higher powers and instincts which also demand their satisfaction; these powers, too, are not separate entities, but are organized with the more primitive capacities and the whole organization becomes another through their appearance. As the social instinct grows, and intellect comes to take a higher place, the mere or chiefly physical passion felt between the sexes of lower species becomes the higher human love, an organized instinct in which all the moral and intellectual desires, the highest aims and emotions of the individual are fused to a whole. Moreover, momentary pleasure becomes, with social progress, indeed with all evolution, less and less the ruling power; man, above all creatures, comes to demand enduring sources of satisfaction. Faithfulness in love is as necessary to perfect satisfaction as is faithfulness in friendship; and the long as well as the close companionship of congenial natures is now, and must more and more become, the spring of our highest human joys. Disappointment in marriage may incline the individual to doubt, by a universalization from his own case,—to which disappointment is prone,—whether life-long love and faithfulness are possible; but he still must feel that this is the ideal. It has been said that men are naturally polygamous, women monogamous; but this statement is obviously erroneous, since men by no means favor general polygamy; even the savage is capable of jealousy, and men have continually used the superior power they have possessed in law and public opinion to emphasize the exclusive claim they have upon the women they take to wife. It is only true that, having also had the power in their hands of refusing a like faithfulness to that which they demand from women, they have used this power to their own advantage. Women desire faithful love on the part of men quite as much as men desire it on the part of women; and women are quite as capable of physical excesses and of fickleness as are men, when the restraints of public opinion and social law are once broken over.

A condition of promiscuity is impossible in an ideal society, and can never be the goal towards which we tend. Men would not submit to it in the women they loved; and if it is not possible for wives, then we have left us only the alternative of prostitution in its present form, increasingly worse in character as the ideal of faithfulness is more universally demanded and more completely carried out in wives, and the necessary coördinate social ostracism and disgrace of the prostitute increases. But this also cannot assuredly be our ideal; the increasing misery of the class of prostitutes is not a thing to be sought. The whole theory which tolerates prostitution is, in fact, illogical and only devised as a prop for the selfishness of men, who are content to take their pleasure at the expense of so much misery. The same thing cannot be, as some one has said, at once right for the man to demand and infamous for the woman to permit. Where the act is one to which both sexes are necessary, it must, if it be right at all, be right for both, and if it is wrong, then wrong for both. And this would remain true even if it were proved that, because of greater strength or for any other reason, the sexual passion of men ought not to be restrained; for, the responsibility of the prostitute's misery is thus laid at the door of men; if the women who ply this traffic are prompted by no passion, but only compelled by destitution, then the blame of their unhappy compulsion to such a traffic rests more than ever on the heads of those who furnish the demand to which their supply answers. In any case, the man is an accessory before the fact to a thing which he acknowledges wrong on the part of its performer.

But the plea that passion is stronger in the man for an act which dates back to the point in evolution where sexual propagation first began, and which has been performed equally by both sexes through all the range of species up to man, and even equally by both sexes of the human species except during the comparatively short period of higher civilization, is absurd. The difference between the sexes in degree of sexual gratification is, among those who transmit their instincts to offspring, not great even under civilization. There is probably more excess in marriage than outside it. But apart from this fact, the fact of cross-heredity is to be taken into consideration. The sexual is no more than any other instinct a separate part of the individual character; it is organically interwoven with all other instincts and tendencies; and it is scarcely supposable that thus fused with the rest of character, it would not be subject, as all other traits, to cross-inheritance from father to daughter as well as from mother to son,—that the father's life would not, in many cases, affect his daughter's propensities, and the mother's life her son's. This a priori reasoning is supported by facts of observation, among which those of pathology and criminology are naturally the most marked. Man is an animal; but, as we have said before, he is not a beast, nor does he need to imitate the beasts. He has his own social organization and must determine his own moral laws. The old theory, that any restraint at all of sexual passion is a crime against nature, and likely to result in great physical evil, is now exploded. Even if it were true that some evil to the individual was always the result of any restraint, the good of the individual is not the absolute criterion of right, and cannot stand against the claim of society as a whole; the unrestrained indulgence of sexual passion could no more be justified on this ground, and because of the fact that it is a natural instinct, than the absolute indulgence of anger can be justified because anger is a natural passion, and its expression doubtless a great satisfaction and relief to the individual. But very many medical men, and among them such men as Professor Krafft-Ebbing, the German authority on nervous diseases, are now denying that self-restraint has such evil results as have been attributed to it. Krafft-Ebbing says, on the contrary, that while physical excess is very often the precursor of harm, self-restraint is seldom so, except in cases of abnormal and morbid appetite.[282]

In other countries than the United States and England, the plea of "poetry" or "romance" is often heard in defence of prostitution, and as an excuse for the seduction of pure women. But if this is poetry, which must so end in the bitter misery, the shame, degradation, despair, and even often the utter destruction of its heroines, then, in the name of pity, let us have less of poetry and more of common humanity. To a man of anything but selfish instincts, "poetry" or "romance" could never be an excuse for connivance at such misery, either by direct act or in any way by influence. Nor is the poetry or romance of the highest order, in any case. There is no romance so powerful, no poetry so thrilling, nor any passion so strong, as that to which all the springs of intellectual aspiration and moral aim converge, and which draws its sweetness and force from a purity tainted by no degradation of ideals, galled by no bitter and humiliating recollections, checked by no self-consciousness of concealment and deceit. Compared with such a feeling, the romance of the "man of the world" is tame and flat, his poetry but the doggerel jingle of the third-rate variety-show. Physical passion the human being shares with every dog and other brute down to nearly the lowest forms of animal life; love is as truly of higher species as the æsthetic sense of the artist is of higher nature than the delight of the savage in gauds. The old idea that strong emotion of any kind was incompatible with perfect morality has already been sufficiently discussed. But this delusion has been the excuse of many a life of profound selfishness. It has led to the theory that the artistic nature must necessarily be unrestrained in the gratification of its impulses, and has furnished the libertine with a fine sense of kinship with the poet through the imitation of his sins. Perhaps the poetry of the lives of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning has been to the world as great a gratification and of as high worth as any that they ever wrote on paper. It has dispelled once and forever the false theory of the necessities of the artistic temperament, and has enabled us to perceive the higher beauty of enduring love.

It is often urged in defence of the sexual sins of the poet or the musician, that they are natural to his temperament and that, moreover, he must be acquainted with all phases of life. But why is it not also urged, then, that he ought to be at liberty to give way to ungoverned fury, if he has inherited a tendency in that direction, or that he is justified in committing murder, arson, and all the other crimes in the catalogue for the sake of the experience and the greater power of portrayal thus gained? If the excuse suffices for one crime against the welfare of human beings, it should suffice also for others. Dickens might possibly have been able to draw the character of Bill Sykes, to depict his crime and the succeeding emotions with greater power and faithfulness, had he himself experienced all that which he wished to portray; nevertheless, society cannot concede that he would have been justified in killing for the sake of his art; and neither can it concede, from a higher ethical standpoint, that any other act in direct opposition to the general welfare is justifiable for the sake of art. It may be possible for the artist, by torturing a slave to death, to paint a more realistic picture of dying agony; but however glorious the art, the man of finer sense and stronger sympathies must be revolted by it. Society can even better miss a little of its art than take it at the price of human misery.