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

by P. V. N. Myers

Thus in the development of the guest right we see morality broadening, the circle of moral obligation enlarged, and the stranger, ordinarily counted as an enemy and as rightless, brought for a moment within the sacred pale of ethical sentiment and duty.[56] A new ground of moral obligation other than that of kinship has been established. Morality is now something more than clan morality. We witness the rise of intertribal morality. The first step in the moral unification of the human race has been taken.

Beginnings of the ethics of war

Even in the domain of war we discover traces of the awakening of an intertribal conscience in races that are still in what we may regard as the kinship stage of culture. Speaking broadly, primitive man, whose chief occupations are hunting and fighting,[57] makes no distinction between war and the hunt. All persons not belonging to his own group are regarded by him just as he regards wild game. In his efforts to kill or capture them, all means are right. Once in his power, he may do with them as he likes; he may make slaves of them, he may torture them, or he may eat their flesh as he would that of animals taken in the chase. Conscience lays upon him not the least restraint. Only slowly do the moral feelings make conquests in this province.

One of the earliest mitigations of the barbarities of primitive warfare is probably to be found in the discontinuance of the practice of eating the bodies of the slain.[58] It is this practice of cannibalism as a concomitant of war by peoples in the earlier stages of their development that perhaps more than any other circumstance gives such a repellent aspect to human life on the lower levels of culture. But as Montaigne observes, the wrong consists in killing men, not in eating them after they are dead[59]—a very just observation, and one which should awaken reflection in us who, while piously abstaining from eating our enemies, still persist in killing them.

The discontinuance of the practice of cannibalism—the practice seems invariably to be left behind by all peoples as soon as they have made any considerable advance in civilization[60]—may with little hesitation be attributed in part at least to the growth and refinement of the moral feelings. In one case at least we have historical evidence that among a wide reach of savage tribes the custom was abolished by the action of a more civilized people, who did just what the more advanced European nations, under the impulsion of moral feeling, are doing in regard to the slave trade and cannibalism in Africa to-day. The Incas of Peru, before granting to conquered tribes terms of peace, forced them to abandon the practice of cannibalism.[61]

The disuse of poisoned arrows marks another significant mitigation of a common barbarity of early warfare. We know that in the Greek world by the opening of the historic period there were communities that had come to look on the use of poisoned weapons with abhorrence, and to regard the practice as a crime that aroused the anger of the gods. Thus Homer represents Ilus of Ephyra, when asked by Odysseus for the fatal poison wherewith to smear the tips of his arrows, as refusing his request because he feared the immortal gods.[62]

In these mitigations and prohibitions of the barbarities of war on the lower levels of savagery we have probably the earliest articles of the war code of the nations. They mark the first steps taken in the humanization of war. They indicate the birth of those sympathetic and moral feelings which, though of painfully slow growth and of intermittent action, have during the course of the historic ages effected great ameliorations of the cruelties of primitive warfare, and foreshadow a time when war between civilized nations shall have become an inconceivable thing.

The reaction of intertribal upon intratribal morality

There is a heart of good in things evil. Even the habitual intertribal wars of primitive communities contain a germ of good. The pressure exerted by these life-and-death struggles upon the clan or tribe has a good effect upon the inner relationships of the group. Many of the social virtues, such as loyalty to comrades and self-devotion to the common weal, are called into constant and keen activity. For this reason we usually find these social virtues well developed among peoples in the clan or tribal stage of civilization. Such peoples may even be stronger in these special virtues than civilized peoples.

But there is another side to this. Intertribal wars, though they may in the very earliest stages of human culture be positively promotive of some of the social virtues, in later and more advanced stages exert a decidedly unfavorable influence upon the moral development. The low backward standard of intertribal ethics, reacting upon the higher and more advanced intratribal standard, tends to make it like unto itself. As Spencer expresses it, the life of internal amity is assimilated to the life of external enmity. “Taken in the mass the evidence shows,” he says, “as we might expect, that in proportion as intertribal and international antagonisms are great and constant, the ideas and feelings belonging to the ethics of enmity predominate; and conflicting as they do with the ideas and feelings belonging to the ethics of amity proper to the internal life of a society, they in greater or less degree suppress these, or fill with aggressions the conduct of man to man.”[63] Thus tribes engaged habitually in war are characterized by the frequency of homicide within the group. Tribes that regard the robbery of strangers as honorable come to regard stealing within the tribe as irreproachable.[64] Revengefulness, inhumanity, and untruthfulness within each tribe characterize warlike communities.[65] On the other hand, peaceful tribes are characterized by their superior intratribal morality. Tribes among whom war is infrequent or unknown are scrupulously honest.[66] Among such people crimes of violence are rare.[67]