CHAPTER XXXVI. ETHICS AND OTHER DISCIPLINES
165. Sciences that Concern the Moralist. 166.
Ethics and Philosophy. 167. Ethics and Religion.
168. Ethics and Belief. 169. The Last Word.
THE ACCEPTED CONTENT OF MORALS
IS THERE AN ACCEPTED CONTENT?
1. THE POINT IN DISPUTE.—Is there
an accepted content of morals? Can we use the
expression without going on to ask: Accepted where,
when, and by whom?
To be sure, certain eminent moralists have inclined
to maintain that men are in substantial agreement
in regard to their moral judgments. Joseph Butler,
writing in the first half of the eighteenth century,
came to the conclusion that, however men may dispute
about particulars, there is an universally acknowledged
standard of virtue, professed in public in all ages
and all countries, made a show of by all men, enforced
by the primary and fundamental laws of all civil constitutions:
namely, justice, veracity, and regard to common good.
[Footnote: Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue.]
Sir Leslie Stephen, writing in the latter half of
the nineteenth, tells us that “in one sense moralists
are almost unanimous; in another they are hopelessly
discordant. They are unanimous in pronouncing
certain classes of conduct to be right and the opposite
wrong. No moralist denies that cruelty, falsity
and intemperance are vicious, or that mercy, truth
and temperance are virtuous.” [Footnote:
The Science of Ethics, chapter i, Sec. 1.]
In other words, these writers would teach us that
men are, on the whole, agreed in approving, explicitly
or implicitly, some standard of conduct sufficiently
definite to serve as a code of morals. But that
there is such a substantial agreement among men has
not impressed all observers to the same degree.
Locke, who wrote before Butler, based his arguments
against the existence of innate moral maxims upon the
wide divergencies found among various classes of men
touching what is right and what is wrong. [Footnote:
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I,
chapter iii.] The historian, the anthropologist and
the sociologist reinforce his reasonings with a wealth
of illustration not open to the men of an earlier
time. They present us with codes, not a code;
with multitudinous standards, not a single standard;
with what has been accepted here or there, at this
time or at that; and we may well ask ourselves where,
amid this profusion, we are to find the one and acceptable
code.
