Object of Part and Chapter.—The history of morals manifests a twofold movement. It reveals, on one side, constantly increasing stress on individual intelligence and affection. The transformation of customary into reflective morals is the change from "Do those things which our kin, class, or city do" to "Be a person with certain habits of desire and deliberation." The moral history of the race also reveals constantly growing emphasis upon the social nature of the objects and ends to which personal preferences are to be devoted. While the agent has been learning that it is his personal attitude which counts in his deeds, he has also learnt that there is no attitude which is exclusively private in scope, none which does not need to be socially valued or judged. Theoretic analysis enforces the same lesson as history. It tells us that moral quality resides in the habitual dispositions of an agent; and that it consists of the tendency of these dispositions to secure (or hinder) values which are sociably shared or sharable.
In Part One we sketched the historical course of this development; in Part Two we traced its theoretic analysis. In the present and concluding Part, our purpose is to consider the distinctively social aspects of morality. We shall consider how social institutions and tendencies supply value to the activities of individuals, impose the conditions of the formation and exercise of their desires and aims; and, especially, how they create the peculiarly urgent problems of contemporary moral life. The present chapter will take up the general question, that of the relation of social organization to individual life.
§ 1. GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS
From one point of view, historic development represents the increasing liberation of individual powers from rigid social control. Sir John Lubbock remarks: "No savage is free. All over the world his daily life is regulated by a complicated and apparently most inconvenient set of customs (as forcible as laws), of quaint prohibitions and privileges." Looked at from another point of view, emancipation from one sort of social organization means initiation into some other social order; the individual is liberated from a small and fixed (customary) social group, to become a member of a larger and progressive society. The history of setting free individual power in desire, thought, and initiative is, upon the whole, the history of the formation of more complex and extensive social organizations. Movements that look like the disintegration of the order of society, when viewed with reference to what has preceded them, are factors in the construction of a new social order, which allows freer play to individuals, and yet increases the number of social groupings and the depth of social combinations.
This fact of historical development is well summed up in the following words of Hobhouse, set forth as a summary of a comprehensive survey of the historic development of law and justice, of the family including the status of women and children, of the relations between communities, and between classes, the rich and the poor.
He says: "Amid all the variety of social institutions and the ebb and flow of historical change, it is possible in the end to detect a double movement, marking the transition from the lower to the higher levels of civilized law and custom. On the one hand, the social order is strengthened and extended.... On this side the individual human being becomes more and more subject to social constraint, and, as we have frequently seen, the changes making for the tightening of the social fabric may diminish the rights which the individual or large classes of individuals can claim.... In this relation liberty and order become opposed. But the opposition is not essential. From the first the individual relies on social forces to maintain him in his rights, and in the higher form of social organization we have seen order and liberty drawing together again.... The best ordered community is that which gives most scope to its component members to make the best of themselves, while the 'best' in human nature is that which contributes to the harmony and onward movement of society.... The responsible human being, man or woman, is the center of modern ethics as of modern law, free so far as custom and law are concerned to make his own life.... The social nature of man is not diminished either on the side of its needs or its duties by the fuller recognition of personal rights. The difference is that, so far as rights and duties are conceived as attaching to human beings as such, they become universalized, and are therefore the care of society as a whole rather than of any partial group organization."[196]
With this statement may be compared the words of Green and Alexander. According to Green, moral progress consists in the extension of the area or range of persons whose common good is concerned, and in the deepening or intensification in the individual of his social interest: "the settled disposition on each man's part to make the most and best of humanity in his own person and in the person of others."[197] Alexander's formulæ for moral growth are the "laws of differentiation and of comprehension." The first means diversification, specialization, differentiating the powers of an individual with increased refinement of each. The law of comprehension means the steady enlargement of the size and scope of the social group (as from clan to modern national state) with its increased complexity of ways in which men are brought into contact with one another.[198]
Social Life Liberates and Directs Individual Energies.—Breadth in extent of community life goes hand in hand with multiplication of the stimuli which call out an individual's powers. Diversification of social activities increases opportunities for his initiative and endeavor. Narrow and meager social life means limitation of the scope of activities in which its members may engage. It means little occasion for the exercise of deliberation and choice, without which character is both immature and fossilized; it means, in short, restricted personality. But a rich and varied society, one which liberates powers otherwise torpid and latent, also exacts that they be employed in ways consistent with its own interests. A society which is extensive and complex would dissolve in anarchy and confusion were not the activities of its various members upon the whole mutually congruent. The world of action is a world of which the individual is one limit, and humanity the other; between them lie all sorts of associative arrangements of lesser and larger scope, families, friendships, schools, clubs, organizations for making or distributing goods, for gathering and supplying commodities; activities politically organized by parishes, wards, villages, cities, countries, states, nations. Every maladjustment in relations among these institutions and associated activities means loss and friction in the relations between individuals; and thereby introduces defect, division, and restriction into the various powers which constitute an individual. All harmonious coöperation among them means a fuller life and greater freedom of thought and action for the individual person.
Order and Laws.—The world of action as a scene of organized activities going on in regular ways[199] thus presents a public or common order and authority, with its established modes of operation, its laws. Organized institutions, from the more permanent to the more casual, with their orderly rules of conduct, are not, of course, prior to individual activity; for their elements are individual activities related in certain ways. But with respect to any one individual in his separate or distributive capacity, there is a genuine and important sense in which the institution comes first. A child is born into an already existing family with habits and beliefs already formed, not indeed rigid beyond readaptation, but with their own order (arrangements). He goes to schools which have their established methods and aims; he gradually assumes membership in business, civic, and political organizations, with their own settled ways and purposes. Only in participating in already fashioned systems of conduct does he apprehend his own powers, appreciate their worth and realize their possibilities, and achieve for himself a controlled and orderly body of physical and mental habits. He finds the value and the principles of his life, his satisfaction and his norms of authority, in being a member of associated groups of persons and in playing his part in their maintenance and expansion.
The Social and the Moral.—In customary society, it does not occur to any one that there is a difference between what he ought to do, i.e., the moral, and what those about him customarily do, i.e., the social. The socially established is the moral. Reflective morality brings with it, as we have seen, a distinction. A thoughtfully minded person reacts against certain institutions and habits which obtain in his social environment; he regards certain ideas, which he frames himself and which are not embodied in social habits, as more moral than anything existing about him. Such reactions against custom and such projections of new ideas are necessary if there is to be progress in society. But unfortunately it has often been forgotten that this distinctly personal morality, which takes its stand against some established usage, and which, therefore, for the time being has its abode only in the initiative and effort of an individual, is simply the means of social reconstruction. It is treated as if it were an end in itself, and as if it were something higher than any morality which is or can be socially embodied.