Growing intimacy of international relations
The dependence of moral progress in modern times upon inventions, as Lecky observes, is shown perhaps even more strikingly in the domain of international than in that of industrial ethics. As in antiquity it was the world-wide extension of the Roman rule through conquest which broke the primal isolation of the Mediterranean peoples and created that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which arose the ethical universalism characterizing the cultured circles of Roman society in the later centuries of the Empire, so in this modern age it is the great inventions of the steamship, the steam railway, the electric telegraph, the ocean cable, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and the rest, which have broken the isolation of the nations, bound them together by a thousand commercial, social, and intellectual ties, and created that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which have naturally sprung those ethical feelings and convictions which form the growing international conscience of to-day.
Thus it is that inventions, whose aims were primarily to promote civilization on its material side, have become the most efficient agencies in creating a sense of ethical oneness among the nations, and thus in opening a new epoch in the moral evolution of mankind.
II. Expressions of the New Moral Consciousness in Different Domains of Life and Thought
1. The Ethics of Democracy
The democratic revolution a moral movement
The great history-making upheavals and readjustments in human society are moral in their causes as well as in their effects. They arise from a divergence between what is and what ought to be. The democratic revolution which began in France in 1789 affirms with emphasis the correctness of this ethical interpretation of the great passages of human history. What superficially viewed appears to have been primarily a political or economic revolution was in truth, in its deepest motives and impulses, a moral revolution. “It was moral enthusiasm for the rights of man ... and not the breakdown of an economic system, which created modern democracy.”[725] The watchwords of the Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—are all words of moral import. They are tremulous with righteous wrath at age-long oppression, contempt, and abuse; and they are instinct with the living forces of a noble moral ideal. They express the essential spirit of the Revolution, which each day, where it has free course, finds fuller embodiment in political, social, and moral reforms, in humanitarian institutions and altruistic effort.
The ethics of democracy rejects class morality
Democracy tends in various ways to purify and ennoble morality, but especially by destroying all invidious class distinctions, and thereby destroying that class morality which through all periods of history has hampered the moral progress of the race. All the civilizations known to history before the incoming of modern democracy had their superior class, including only the few, who alone were regarded as possessing capacity for the highest virtues; and their inferior classes, embracing the many,—sudras, slaves, or serfs,—persons regarded as created for the use of others and capable of nothing more than a qualified or servile morality.
Now democracy, recognizing “human capacities in all and not merely in a few,” throws down the partition walls between classes and puts all on the same level of opportunity and privilege. It thus establishes the conditions of a common moral life and of a progressive moral evolution; for if history teaches any truth, it teaches that a civilization dominated by a privileged class that uses the masses selfishly or thoughtlessly for the enhancement of its own interests and pleasures is foredoomed to moral stagnation and decadence—so true is it that society is an organic body and that if one member suffers the whole body suffers with it.