If it is wrong to inflict needless injury upon our fellows, it is right to defend our fellows and ourselves from the attacks of those who would needlessly injure us.
Any act which inflicts "needless" injury upon a fellow creature is immoral; but no act which does not inflict needless injury upon a fellow creature is immoral.
That is the root of my moral code. It may at first seem insufficient, but I think it will be found to reach high enough, wide enough, and deep enough to cover all true morality. For there is hardly any act a man can perform which does not affect a fellow creature.
For instance, if a man takes to drink, or neglects his health, he injures others as well as himself. For he becomes a less agreeable and a less useful member of society. He takes more from the common stock, and gives back less. He may even become an eyesore, or a danger, or a burden to his fellows. A cricketer who drank, or neglected to practise, would be acting as immorally towards the rest of the team as he would if he fielded carelessly or batted selfishly. Because, speaking morally, a man belongs not only to himself, but also to the whole human race.
WHERE DID MORALS COME FROM?
Morals do not come by revelation, but by evolution. Morals are not based upon the commands of God, but upon the nature and the needs of man. Our churches attribute the origin of morals to the Bible. But the Egyptians and Babylons had moral codes before Moses was born or the Bible written. Thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, perhaps millions of years before Abraham, there were civilisations and moral codes.
Even before the coming of man there were the beginnings of morals in the animal world.
When I was a boy, we were taught that acts were right or wrong as they were pleasing or displeasing to the God of the Hebrew Bible.
There were two kinds of men—good men and bad men. The good men might expect to succeed in business here and go to heaven hereafter. The bad men were in peril of financial frosts in this world, and of penal fires in the world to come.
As I grew older and began to think for myself, I broke from that teaching, and at last came to see that all acts were wrong which caused needless injury to others; that the best and happiest man was he who most earnestly devoted himself to making others happy; that all wrong-doing sprang from selfishness, and all welldoing from unselfishness; that all moral acts were social acts, and all immoral acts unsocial acts; and that therefore Socialism was good, and Individualism was evil.