Proximate Ground Stated.

I. The proximate ground—as becomes easily manifest if we keep our view close to the witness of consciousness in actual experience—is in a rational conformity of conduct to the relations which men sustain to one another and to other beings in the divinely constituted system of the world. These relations immediately call for fitting conduct. They create the ought of moral law. The right is found in conforming to the requirements which they develop and impose. Duty consists in fulfilling the demands which they involve and express to the moral reason.

This, it will be noticed, accords with the fundamental principle already referred to, that the conception of moral law allies itself normally only with the theistic view of the world, and the truth that the constituted human relations have been framed under a rational ideal of order and welfare. These relations form a rational system in which intelligent free activity is to actualize a divine plan of excellence and well-being. They require conduct in accordance with themselves and with the ends of well-being and happiness to which they have been adapted. The human reason reads the meaning of the relations, and the moral discernment recognizes the obligation to correspondent sentiment and action. Moral conduct thus becomes simply the conduct that actualizes the ideas of divine order to which the framework of human relations has been constituted. What is right springs immediately from the relations, as what is due in ideal moral order. The relations themselves exhibit a moral constitution as the immediate environment of the human moral personality. They bring the ethical requirement which they contain to the recognizing capacity of the reason and the obedience of the will.

It is to be noticed, further, that the term "relations" is to be understood here in its most comprehensive sense and applicability. It embraces all relations with respect to which the human personality in its freedom has to determine and harmonize itself—relations individual, social, and divine. Social relationship has often been absurdly mistaken as the only sphere of moral obligation; and the individual, if contemplated as alone and perfectly isolated, has sometimes been supposed to be entirely without ethical bonds. In what concerns himself only, he is imagined to be unbound. But this is an unwarrantable limitation of the term. For the individual, even viewed utterly apart from his race, yet sustains relations to the adaptations and intentions in his own nature. As in society he owes something to the humanity around him, even alone he would still owe something to the humanity committed to his own keeping. He cannot absolve himself from the bond that binds him to that—as in fact he cannot from that which unites him to his fellow-men. Mere pleasures or enjoyments which are apart from his essential character he may, indeed, disregard, but not what concerns its intended excellence and honor. It has been well said: "Robinson Crusoe did not become a non-moral being when thrown on the desert island; for he still owed respect to his own humanity."[59] Many a deed is wrong, not as injuring others, but as violative of the agent's relation to the purposes lodged in his own constitution. This is as real as are those that connect him with his fellow-men around him or with God above him. And it is very superficial thought that finds no relations but those that are objective. Sometimes, strangely, in popular thinking, man's relation to God is also omitted from a place in morality, by a relegation of it to the sphere of religion. But this relation is the most fundamental and vital of all human relations and most replete with moral obligations and responsibilities.

This view of the immediate ground of right is fully established by the following additional considerations:

Sustained by Moral Conscious­ness.

1. It is directly sustained by the moral consciousness itself, in constant experience. As a question of psychological metaphysics the point must be settled in harmony with the testimony of consciousness. Appealing to this, there can be no doubt that these relations do develop and call for the duties which the conscience is constantly discerning and enforcing. This is simply a fact—a fact which speculations about the origin of conscience or the education of its judgments, must not be allowed to obscure. It assures that actual morality is no abstraction, but concrete conduct rightly answering to each person's relations in real life. Beyond all question, as thus witnessed in the universal moral consciousness, these relations from the most general, that of man to man, down through all special connections, as between parents and children, husband and wife, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, rulers and citizens, employer and employé, rich and poor, capable and helpless, and all the other human interrelations in their thousands of diversified forms, do determine and impose both general and specific duties. The duties come into view as developed by the relations, and change as they are modified and changed. This basing of what is right and obligatory for men on their relations to one another, to God, and to appointed ends, is not a mere theory, but an unquestionable reality in their consciousness.

And this accords with the best cosmic philosophy. For this holds all these relations as parts of a rationally designed system of world-order for universal well-being, and the moral reason as capacitated to discern, with more or less clearness and fulness, the moral requirement which they involve and present for observance. We know of no morality that exists, or can exist, in human life, apart from them. Strike them all away, and all duties disappear. Take, as illustration, the most generic virtue of all the virtues recognized by the ethical judgments, that of good-will or love. The moral reason recognizes this as resting, according to eternal fitness, in the broadest and most generic of all relations, that of one intelligent sentient being to another. In the inter-human connection it is based in the brotherhood of man. And this generic good-will, thus required in ideal moral right by the generic relation, becomes differentiated and modified in thousands of special types and forms by the endlessly diversified particular relations of life.

Presupposi­tions in Responsibil­ity.

2. It is implied in the logical presuppositions to all moral responsibility. Among such presuppositions, as conceded by all, are intelligence to know, and freedom to conform to these relations. These prerequisites are essential to the very conception of moral action and amenability. It is the universal sense of the race that creatures that cannot know themselves and the relations they sustain, and are without free-will to fulfil them, are morally irresponsible and incapable of virtue or vice. To them the moral realm becomes a blank, and the moral judgments become impossible. And equally universal is the admission that the moral insight is helped and responsibility increased by every increase of light giving larger and truer knowledge of the complex and intricate connections of human life. With every broadened and clarified vision of these connections fresh obligations appear. "A defective apprehension of the relations in which we stand to God and to our fellow-men, will prevent our seeing our specific duties."[60] This fact furnishes direct evidence that right conduct must be held as a certain intelligent adjustment to the relations sustained.