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

by P. V. N. Myers

Especially intolerable to the more sensitive conscience of to-day is the assumption that nations may at will suspend or abrogate the ordinary moral code. For, as Lord Morley truly says, “To declare war is to suspend not merely habeas corpus but the Ten Commandments, and some other good commandments besides.”[782] That is to say, war is a suspension of a great part of those rules of morality which, slowly and painfully formulated by the growing moral consciousness of man, have become the guide and standard of ordinary conduct. In war the conscience of the commander is inhibited. “The commander who lost a battle through the activity of his moral nature,” once cynically declared United States Senator Ingalls, “would be the derision and jest of history.” And that is so. The world has not yet ceased to deride those Jews who lost their city to the Romans because their consciences forsooth would not let them fight on the Sabbath day. War cannot be conducted by the rules of ordinary morality.

With a great part of the ordinary moral code suspended, there is substituted for it a war code every maxim of which reveals its archaic, vestigial character, stamps it as a survival from an early savage stage of human development, as a legacy from a long-past age of the historical evolution when morality was as yet only an intratribal thing, that is, when men felt that they owed duties only to members of their own tribe or social group.[783]

Unfavorable reaction of the ethics of war upon the ethics of peace

In many ways, some obvious and others subtle and hidden, war works “moral damage” to society, but we here confine ourselves to emphasizing merely the moral loss and hurt resulting from the reaction of its low archaic code upon the more advanced peace code. For, as Professor J. Neville Figgis justly observes, “It is impossible to remove the very notion of morality from international affairs without in the long run undermining it in private life.”[784] What is regarded as right and proper in war will come to be regarded as right and proper in peace. That is to say, the maintenance of a double standard in morals is just as impossible as the maintenance of a double standard in money. By a sort of Gresham’s Law the lower standard will drive out the higher or drag it down to its own low level.

This reaction of the war code upon the ordinary moral code is well illustrated by what takes place when society metes out to persons convicted of crime ferocious and barbarous punishments. In the medieval centuries in Europe when the penalties for offenses were often fiendishly cruel mutilations of the body, such as cutting off the ears, the hands, the lips, or the nose, this judicial procedure was imitated to such a degree by individuals seeking private vengeance that mayhem, that is, the mutilation of an enemy by depriving him of a member, became a crime of such frequent occurrence that it was necessary to make special and severe enactments against it.[785] After society stopped mutilating the bodies of offenders against its laws, this offense of mayhem virtually dropped out of the calendar of private crimes.

In a similar way does the war ethics of the nations react disastrously upon private morality. The slow moral progress of European civilization during the last two or three centuries, compared with its wonderful intellectual and material progress, may with little hesitation be attributed in large part to the unfavorable influence of its war ethics upon its everyday moral code. The war code is applied to politics, to ordinary business, and to the relations of industrial classes. The politician as a politician does a hundred things he would not think of doing as a man, and justifies his acts by appealing to the adage, “Politics is war.” The business man, citing the like maxim, “Business is business,” which means that competition is a species of war and must be conducted on war principles, flings his Christian code to the winds and, pitilessly pushing his competitor to the wall, compasses his financial ruin. It is the same in the struggle between labor and capital. In this struggle acts of violence, like those of the McNamaras, are committed, and the persons who do these things absolve themselves in the forum of their own consciences on the plea that a state of war exists between capital and labor and that this justifies the adoption of war methods. Here doubtless we have the moral psychology of the suffragette movement in England. Indeed, the leaders of this startling propaganda tell us frankly that they are waging war, and that this justifies their suspension of the ordinary rules of conduct. In the light of this avowal the alleged inscrutability of their acts disappears. The movement is simply another illustration of the truth that so long as nations act under the illusion that they may without moral wrong employ violence to obtain justice, just so long will there be individuals who with good conscience will seek justice through violence.

At the same time, however, these same classes and persons who thus in various important spheres of activity adopt the lower standard of war ethics, in all other domains and relationships—in the family, in the Church, and in social intercourse—act in accordance with the higher moral code. The result is a loose synthesis of the two systems, the establishment of a sort of bi-moral code made up of rules and practices mutually inconsistent and irreconcilable. The moral damage resulting from such moral confusion is beyond estimate. It is the inconsistencies and hypocrisies involved in such a bi-moral code that is one ground of Nietzsche’s bitter attack on the ethics of Christendom. Yet, as Professor Figgis says, “Nietzsche deserves the gratitude of all friends of humanity for the service he has done in ... showing that the whole sphere of private life cannot in the long run be different from the ideals accepted in public affairs.”[786]

Obsolescence of war as a school of morals: the war system an anachronism in modern civilization

The arraignment of the war system by the awakening conscience of the civilized world has led its advocates to lay the stress of their argument on the moral uses of war. They eulogize war as the nurse of the sturdy, heroic virtues, and hence as an indispensable agency in the moral education of the race. War has, it is true, in past ages been “the supreme theater of human strenuousness,” and it may be true, as is assumed by Professor William James in his Moral Equivalent of War, that the qualities of courage, fortitude, and self-devotion to common interests were in the beginning evoked and fostered in the race by war; but whatever may have been the moral uses of war in the past stages of human development, the time is past when the war system can serve the highest ends of civilization. It is an anachronism in the modern world. It has become a drag upon the moral progress of the race. By an ethical necessity the day of its abolition approaches. At a time not remote, as history reckons time, the common conscience of the world will brand war between civilized nations as the greatest of crimes, and will regard the nation that assaults another with intent to commit general slaughter as a criminal nation—as a common enemy of the human race. In that coming and better age men will look with the same incredulous amazement upon our infernal engines and devices for wholesale man-killing that we of this age look upon “the iron virgin of Nuremberg” and the other medieval instruments of torture in the museums of Europe.

To many this optimistic forecast, in the face of the prevailing war spirit and the ever-growing armaments of the nations, may seem oversanguine and incredible. But to think despairingly of the future argues a failure to discern what is really most significant in the international situation to-day. The most significant thing in the ongoings of life at Rome on that memorable day of the year 404 of our era which saw the last gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum was not that, four hundred years after the incoming of Christianity with its teachings of the sanctity of human life, gladiators fought on the arena to make a holiday for Rome; the significant thing was the protest made by the Christian monk Telemachus and sealed by his martyr death,[787] for that announced the birth into the Roman world of a new conscience, and that, through an ethical necessity, meant the speedy abolition of “the human sacrifices of the amphitheater.”