Handbook of Ethical Theory | Page 3

the State.


CHAPTER XXXV.
INTERNATIONAL ETHICS 159. What is Meant by the Term. 160.
Our Method of Approach to the Subject. 161. Some Problems of
International Ethics. 162. The Other Side of the Shield. 163. The
Solution. 164. The Necessity for Caution.


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.
NOTES
INDEX


PART I
THE ACCEPTED CONTENT OF MORALS

CHAPTER I
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.
2. WHAT CONSTITUTES SUBSTANTIAL AGREEMENT?--To be
sure, we may be very generous in our interpretation of what constitutes
substantial agreement; we may deny significance to all sorts of
discrepancies by relegating them to the unimpressive class of "disputes
about particulars." Such an impressionistic indifference to detail may
leave us with something on our hands as little serviceable as a
composite photograph made from individual objects which have little
in common, a blur lacking all definite outline and not recognizable as
any object at all. No man can guide his conduct by the common core of
many or of all moral codes. Taken in its bald abstraction, it is not a
code or anything like a code. Who can walk, without walking in some
particular way, in some direction, at some time? Who can mind his
manners without being mannerly in accordance with the usages of
some race or people?
Those who content themselves with enunciating very general moral
principles may, it is true, be of no little service to their fellow-men; but
that is only because their fellow-men are able to supply the details that
convert the blur into a picture. Some twenty-four hundred years ago
Heraclitus told his contemporaries "to act according to nature with
understanding"; we are often told today that the rule of our lives should
be "to do good." Had the ancient Greek not possessed his own notions
of what might properly be meant by nature and by understanding, did
we not ourselves have some rather definite conception of what actions
may properly fall under the caption of doing good, such admonitions
could not lead to the stirring of a finger. Who would appeal to his
physician for advice as to diet, if he expected from him no more than
the counsel to eat, at the proper hours, enough, but not too much, of
suitable food?
If, then, we confine our admonitions to the group of abstractions which
constitute the universally acknowledged standard of virtue when all the
individual differences which characterize different codes have been
ignored, we preach what, taken alone, no man can live by, and no

community