(1) The qualities of right and wrong, involved in the ethical distinction, are not merely subjective impressions or appearances, imposed on conduct by the human mind, but are objective, belonging to the external world of relations and action, real for apprehension and conformity. They are without us as well as within us. And they come within us because they are realities without us for us to know and observe. The moral qualities, as real features of required behavior of free beings in their given relations to each other, belong to the constitution of the world as well as to the faculties of the human mind. They are real qualities of action and motives to action whether men perceive or take note of them or not. As truly as the starry sky is above us, before we open our eyes to see it, so the principle of righteousness is established for life before we enter it or our faculties awake to discover it. The principle of moral law is framed into the constitution of the world and human life. It is back of the discernment of it, imbedded in the demand which the constituted relations of nature make for proper behavior of free, intelligent beings. The law of duty is fixed in these relations. It abides there to be recognized and fulfilled by all beings endowed with moral perception and freedom. Moral law is a profounder and broader thing than a simple uncertain mental fiction in personal thinking. It belongs to the immense, almost infinite realm of creature inter-relations of the universe.
The reality, however, is not to be thought of as a material entity or substantive essence, but solely as a quality of the intentions and conduct demanded by and in the relations sustained by men and other moral beings. It is the reality of an established obligation. It belongs to character.
The right, as moral law, has ever been venerated as something supersensible, absolute, and divine. The early Egyptian teaching represented its home as in Deity. Buddhistic philosophy conceives of it as an imperishable dominion over gods and men. Christianity has enforced it as based in the very nature of God, and as a principle of order ordained for the whole universe of personal life and behavior. Not more real are the solid rocks of the mountain or the strong waves of the sea. Not more real for the material realm is the law of gravitation than is the law of ethical righteousness for the spiritual realm, the realm of free conduct. And the latter is superior and of higher value than the former. This truth speaks in the old apothegm: "fiat justitia, ruat cœlum."
Not Dependent on Organization.
(2) The qualities of right and wrong in conduct are not dependent on the peculiar mental organization or temperament of the race. This results from the objectivity of the law of obligation. Only the perception of them is so dependent, while the moral qualities are abidingly real for all beings high enough in the scale of being to discern them. Just as we must believe that the sun exists as an extended body independently of our eyes or minds, and would have to be so apprehended by any inhabitant of Neptune or Jupiter endowed with capacity to perceive it as it is, so we must believe that truth and love and kindness are right, and falsehood, injustice, malignity and ingratitude are wrong, not as made so by our peculiar personal constitution, but per se, in any inhabited world of the stellar heavens; and that the only subjective condition for their so appearing is the possession of the faculty for perception of moral quality.
There may, indeed, be a doubt among finite moral agents, with limited knowledge, how far a certain thing may be true or false, kind or malignant, just or unjust, but the quality of truth or falsehood, kindness or malignity, justice or injustice being perceived in it, it is impossible that such truth, kindness and justice should not be judged right and their opposites wrong. The ethical distinction, objectively viewed, is an ethical difference, perceived as such, if perceived at all.
Immutable and Eternal.
(3) The moral distinctions, with the moral qualities involved, being thus objective, and not the product of a special temporary organization of the percipient, are immutable and eternal. This is involved in the very nature of the qualities themselves. By eternal necessity of what they are, justice and love must be unchangeably and forever right. They are not thus right because we think or feel them so, but we think and feel them so because they are so, because of the immutable and enduring nature of justice and love themselves. They hold and carry the kind of motive and action that ought to prevail in the relations of intelligent personal life, everywhere and in all time. So malignity, injustice, falsehood, and cruelty are wrong by the very nature of the qualities that make and mark them; and the personal intentions and conduct that hold them can never be right any more than a thing can be itself and yet other than itself.
Men's judgments as to whether particular conduct is fair or just or kind or honest, may change and do change. Different nations and ages class certain acts and ways of men very differently. But these are only judgments of application, and so only secondary ethical judgments. This has already been pointed out in Chap. IV, pp. [67]–[68]. They depend on the degree to which the moral qualities of the conduct may be discerned amid the complicated relations and obscurities that often perplex a right understanding of it. But while men change their judgments of the justice, benevolence, or truth of particular forms of behavior, they do not change their judgments that justice, love and truth are right—necessarily and immutably so. The behests of duty are imbedded in the necessary relations of intelligent free beings. Virtue is no shifting subjective illusion, shaped by our inner mental mould. No change of the percipient's intellectual constitution can change the realities of right and wrong. No removal from world to world can change them. No distant age in eternity can reverse them, and discover virtue to be wrong or sin right, or either as without moral quality. The distinction is eternal, and no future can arrest our responsibility with respect to it. God calls us to identify ourselves with what is right and shun all wrong, as realities with which we stand in immutable, unending relation, for good or evil.