Ethics and natural law
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| Ethics and natural law |
a reconstructive review of moral philosophy applied to the rational art of living
Excerpt from the introduction:
The principles of ethics have been discussed in many comprehensive volumes. A new discussion cannot be attempted without causing the intelligent reader to ask why it is needed. Without referring to other reasons, a sufficient answer to this may be found in the fact that the war just closing has directed attention, as, perhaps, nothing before ever has, to the influence upon public sentiment and private character of specific ethical theories; and, in connection with this, to the importance of making, if possible, a more careful study than has hitherto been attempted of the practical effects of all such theories.
It has come to be recognized more universally than up to this time has been the case, that none of these can be supposed to have merely a speculative or philosophic value. A reconstructive review of them, therefore, in accordance with this conception of their influence seems necessarily suggested, if not demanded.
To recall the facts with reference to the origin and development of the conception, the reader needs merely to be reminded that there has been no charitable way of explaining the alarming innovations in warfare and government which have been adopted in Germany and Russia except by attributing them less to the inherent nature of their inhabitants than to false opinions inculcated among them for many years through educational training and popular literature.
Through only such agencies could whole communities have been induced to believe that the state is the source of moral authority, and that, in case of conflict between it and individual opinion and conscience, the latter must invariably be made to yield, even if this involves such clear violations of the principles of the personal moral sense as are manifested in the worst results of warfare.
In Germany, the extent to which the theory that a man's first duty is to obey the dictates of someone at the head of the state, or of some official representing him, had been accepted by even the most intelligent people was_ shown early in the war by ninety-three of its foremost university professors who signed a statement with reference to the causes of the conflict, and to the methods of conducting it in Belgium which few, if any of them, could have had the opportunity to verify, and which, subsequently, was proved to be false.
How could men with previous high reputations as historians and teachers of ethics have been induced to exhibit themselves as victims of one of the worst effects of national tyranny?
How could they have been made to convict themselves of being either willing to swear to what was false, or afraid to keep silent? The only reason which can be conceived for this is that the evil spirit of which, to use the language of Scripture, they were temporarily possessed, was in some way connected with a false ethical theory with reference to the relation of the state to its own people and to those of other nationalities.
As for the Russians, their acceptance of a similar theory was manifested by what happened when the Czar who was at the head of their church as well as the state was removed. After the people had lost him, many of them seem to have lost everything that had the slightest influence on the direction of morality. Apparently, in some communities almost every man who owned a gun and nothing else went shooting for his neighbour and his neighbour's property; or, if, now and then, he <£d consider the rights of others, these were those alone of his own class, working for whom he could have the gratification of feeling that he was really working for himself. Toward persons of other classes, he manifested still less courtesy, consideration, helpfulness, sympathy, to say nothing about truthfulness, justice, rationality, self-denial, and self-control, than had the official autocrat whom the revolution had removed. How much better, the reader is probably now inclined to exclaim, are the conceptions and characteristics of the people of our own country!
But are they so much better? Or do we merely imagine that they are so because the facts with reference to them have been more or less concealed? Let us recall how close is the connection, in these days, be- tween other countries and our own; and how inevitably any thought that originated in one of them is communicated to all.
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