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

by P. V. N. Myers

Aristotle and his ethics

Aristotle makes Plato’s classification of the virtues the basis of his well-rounded system of ethics. In one important respect, however, he differs from Plato; he did not believe that knowledge of the right necessarily leads to its practice. He recognized the fact that man though knowing the good often perversely follows evil.

The great defect of Aristotelian ethics is its failure to rise to the ethical conception of collective humanity. In the moral inequality of men, which he assumes as the presupposition of his ethics, he even exaggerated the common Greek view. He divided men so rigorously into classes with varying grades of moral capacity that his moral system was ethically like the caste system of the Indian Brahmans. To affirm the moral equality of men seemed to him to be a species of treason against the true humanity, a crime against Greek civilization.

According to Aristotle the slave was a being so morally different from the freeman as to constitute practically another species. He was not wholly incapable of virtue, but could practice only such servile virtues as obedience and humility. The last, though a virtue in a slave, was in a freeman an unworthy weakness.

Barbarians were slaves by nature. Hence it was right for the Greeks to make war on them and reduce them to slavery, because “for that end they were born.”[507] Plato had in his Laws accepted slavery as a political necessity; Aristotle proclaimed it as a part of the natural order of things. This doctrine had far-reaching historical consequences. Aristotle’s declaration that slaves are merely animated instruments, are men incapable of virtue, worked as powerfully in destroying ancient slavery as the obiter dictum of Chief Justice Taney of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott case, that negro slaves have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, worked for the destruction of negro slavery in the Southern states. For, as Professor Denis says, by pushing too far the argument, by founding slavery on natural right, Aristotle provoked thought and protest, and led the Stoics to reject with indignation his theories and to proclaim the moral equality of master and slave, of Greek and barbarian.[508]

Aristotle’s ethics exercised very little influence either upon the actual moral life or the ethical speculations of antiquity; but in the medieval time it came to exert a profound influence upon Christian ethics.[509] The schoolmen made it the trunk into which they grafted Christian morals—with incongruous results, as we shall see later.

Decay of the Greek city state and the accompanying decay of the Greek ideal of character

The political revolution in Hellas in the fourth century B.C. had deep import for Greek morality. That century saw the triumph of Macedonia over the Greek cities. This meant the triumph of despotic monarchy over city democracy. This revolution in the political realm meant a great revolution in the realm of morals, for the reason that, as we have seen, the old Greek ideal of excellence was largely based upon the relation of the individual to the state. With the loss of Greek liberty the very basis of the Greek ideal of character was removed, and the virtues of the type tended to disappear.[510]

In the despotic monarchies of the successors of Alexander there was little room for the growth and exercise of those virtues of citizenship which had been nourished in the free air of the ancient city. The virtues now in vogue and fostered by the new monarchical régime were no longer those of the patriot citizen and the patriot warrior, but those of the pliant subject, the servile courtier, and the mercenary soldier. In Plutarch’s Lives, out of the twenty heroes and worthies whom the biographer selected as the noblest representatives of the virtues most highly esteemed by the Greeks, we find only two who lived after the general loss of Greek freedom, and these[511] were men whose characters were formed in the cities of the Achæan League, in which the ancient liberties of Hellas were maintained till the rise of the Roman power. It could not be otherwise, so completely were the fortunes of the Greek moral ideal bound up with the fortunes of the Greek city state.

But besides the decay of the free city there were other causes contributing to the moral decadence which marked Hellenism in the Alexandrian Age. The close contact of Greek culture with the corrupt society of the Orient had disastrous consequences for Greek morality. The principal courts of the Hellenistic East were plague spots of moral contagion. The virus of gross sensual immorality was communicated to Greece, and Greek society was fatally infected. The Orontes emptied into the Ilissus and the Eurotas, as later it emptied into the Tiber.