no relation at all with other sentient beings, _we_ could not say
that it was moral or immoral for him to eat, drink, sleep, breathe,
wash himself, take exercise, cough, sneeze, and the like, just as
much or as little, when or where he felt inclined. His conduct in
these activities must appear to us absolutely indifferent. We may
have some vague reflected suppositions as to what is necessary for
the dignity and development of the man’s “self,” as we might call
it; but this is a matter about which the man may pretend to know
as much as we do; and we have really no valid ground for prejudice
against the habits of the recluse Indian fakir, who has, on the
other hand, considerable claims to be regarded as a peculiarly holy
individual. But of every man living in society we can say, that if he
starves himself into inefficiency; if he gorges or fuddles himself;
if he sleeps unseasonably; if he abstains from the fresh air, the
cleanliness, and the exercise, necessary to keep his body healthy and
his presence pleasant; if he destroys his powers by over-work; then he
is acting wrongly, immorally, unreasonably, in extreme cases insanely.
(Insanity is only the name we give to abnormal deviation from what
are accepted as reasonable and intelligible desires and behavior.)
And if this is the case with actions of the kind loosely described as
self-regarding, with those which most nearly concern the agent’s own
person, much more is it so with the kind of actions which necessarily
and invariably affect other persons. Those relations of the individual
with his fellows in which subjective morality is chiefly recognized,
have no existence at all apart from society. Subjective morality,
then, being only distinguishable in the State, the extent of our
panorama is already much diminished; for in every gentile or national
society, and to some degree in the World-State of to-day, we find the
individualist activity, the desire and passion of the human unit, very
largely exercising itself in accordance with what we call a moral
habit. Innumerable types of society have been formed in the process of
life-development. In the oldest of these we recognize the elements of a
conventional morality, similar to that by which our own human society
is held together. We consider the ways of the ant; and we see that they
are wise.
We find that in all societies those actions and habits are approved as
moral which tend to preserve the existence of society and the cohesion
and convenience of its members; and that those which are or seem to be
fraught with contrary tendencies are considered immoral. It is plain
that no society in which these judgments were habitually reversed
could continue in existence; and this fact will account for much of
that general inherited disposition to actions socially beneficial,
and inherited repugnance to those presumably the reverse, which form
so large a part of what we speak of as conscience. So deep in grain
have many of these common judgments come to be that their influence
has passed out of consciousness; and they are obeyed automatically or
instinctively without any reflexion as to their moral aspect arising in
the agent’s mind. It is, for example, so necessary for the existence
of society that the citizen should abstain from slaughtering at large,
such self-restraint is so evidently reasonable, its non-observance
so contrary to common sense, that when we find a murder done for
mere desire of bloodshed and under the impulse of no other passion
whatsoever, we do not think of the murderer as immoral, but rather
as insane, judging the man who would destroy the life of society as
coroners’ juries by their habitual verdict upon suicides pronounce of
the man who destroys his own.
Most of the habits of activity and avoidance, necessary for the mere
physical existence of the individual as moral actions and abstentions
are necessary for the existence of society, have long ago become
automatic, and are sunk, so far as common opinion is concerned,
permanently out of the purview of moral criticism. All the involuntary
functions of the human body which conduce to its nutrition and
maintenance in health have been gradually acquired in the course of
ages, as the conditions necessary for the expression of the mere animal
will to live the largest and freest life permitted by the physical
environment. And as the bodily form and functions of the typical
individual of each species have accrued and become established as the
indispensable mechanic of the mere determination to exist, so the form
and institution of society, and the relations and mutual behavior of
its individuals, have been adjusted and established as the equally
indispensable conditions for the expression of the determination to
exist more fully, for the enlargement of freedom and opportunity for
the gratification of those passions and aspirations, the display of
those energies and activities which characterize the more complex forms
of life as it passes from the inorganic and vegetative to the conscious
and self-conscious stages of its evolution.
The primitive forms of human society we must infer to have grown up
and survived simply because they increased the efficiency of man
as a feeding and a fighting animal, just as did those of the wolf,
the beaver, and the ant. Society has now grown to be for man the
indispensable guarantee not only of nutrition and protection, but of
the opportunity to imagine and attain a thousand varieties of more
refined satisfaction. So far as man has attained freedom to do and
be as he desires, he has attained it only through the evolution of
society. When a society perishes, as societies organically weak among
stronger competitors have done and will do, the individual perishes
with it, or is forced backwards with impaired freedom until a fresh
social integration renews and extends his powers of self-development.
Societies, as has been pointed out by Sidney Webb on page 51, must
safeguard their existence to-day for the very same reasons for which
society has formed itself. It has grown up for the convenience of
individuals, for their defence and relief under the pressure of
all that was not themselves--of Nature, as we call it--beasts, and
competing men, to give a little breathing space, a little elbow
room, amid the storm and stress of primæval existence; and from
that beginning it has been unfolded and elaborated, each step of
progress effected for the convenience of active individuals, until the
individual of to-day is born as a leaf upon a mighty tree, or a coral
insect in a sponge, himself to live his individual life, and in living
it to modify the social organism in which he has his being.
Reviewing the development in society of the conditions for the
satisfaction of the individual will to live, and to live in the best
way conceivable, we see in the progress of moral ideas the progress of
discovery of the most reasonable manner of ordering the life of the
individual and the form of social institutions under the contemporary
environment. It has already been pointed out that some kinds of
anti-social action are so unreasonable, so obviously prejudicial
to the attainment of the common end of conscious individuals, that
we brand them unhesitatingly as insane. Instances suggested were
extreme personal uncleanliness or dissipation, and extreme cruelty
or blood-thirstiness. The reason why other anti-social or indirectly
suicidal kinds of action are not yet classed as madness, though there
is a steady tendency towards so treating them, is plainly that some
activities of the individual, though hurtful to other citizens just
as the activity of a pack of wolves or a predatory tribe is hurtful
to adjacent societies, are commonly aimed at gratifying impulses and
passions which are not yet grown so rare as blood-thirst, are not yet
recognized as irrational or valueless, or even are acknowledged to be
in their proper scope harmless, desirable, or necessary.
It is an established social convention (in England) that it is immoral
to steal or to defraud. Only in very extreme cases do we account these
pursuits as evidences of mania; for though injustice and dishonesty are
incompatible with the health of society, and thus actually unreasonable
and indirectly suicidal, the desires which prompt men to them are only
at worst exaggerations of the desire for wealth or subsistence, which
everyone recognizes as a necessary condition of the mere continuance
of life. Nay, where the alternative is death for lack of subsistence,
many consider that neither are immoral. At the other extreme, when the
instinct prompts aggression in defiance of the conscious reason and
without assignable purpose of gain, when Jean Valjean robs the little
Savoyard, or a noble earl pockets the sugar-tongs, we speak of mental
aberration or of kleptomania.
The case of self-defence is similar. Quarrelsomeness and violence
are destructive of social existence, or at best impede its higher
elaboration. But readiness of resentment and quickness of fist were
for ages and ages necessities for individual survival; and for ages
and ages more their kindred social qualities or spirit and valor were
necessary for social survival, and accordingly ranked as virtues. The
instruction to turn the other cheek to the smiter is even now, perhaps,
an exaggeration of the precept commendable to Socialists when charged
by the London police: to suffer one’s self to be killed without reason
is clearly and unmistakably immoral. As the western world advances
out of warfare into industry, more and more of what was once military
virtue becomes immorality in the individual; until an habitual ferocity
which might once have qualified its subject for chieftainship may
nowadays consign him to penal servitude or Bedlam.
The foregoing illustrations have been treated, for the present purpose,
with reference only to the effect of the behavior of the individual
upon society. It is indeed certain that anti-social action does not,
as a rule, effect permanent satisfaction for the individual (isolated
instances, of the type of Shelley’s Count Cenci, notwithstanding); but,
independently of this, the actions and propensities of the individual
have always, it appears, been judged by his fellows moral or immoral
chiefly according to their supposed effects upon society. The object of
every living creature being to do as he pleases, if what he pleases to
do incommodes other people they will take measures to restrain him from
doing it. This they strive to effect by means of laws and conventional
codes of morality, the main difference between the two being that the
code of law is enforced by the infliction of direct personal punishment
by the officers of the State. This acceptance of codes of laws and
conventions of morality leads to a secondary series of judgments as
to right and wrong; for it comes to be accounted immoral to break the
law whether the law itself be good or not, and reprehensible to depart
from convention whether convention be any longer reasonable or not.
This secondary morality is as it were the bud-sheath of the individual,
which support he cannot dispense with until he has come to his full
powers, but which he must dispense with if he is to fully realise his
own freedom. Customary morality prevents him during the process of his
education from pursuing his own satisfaction across the corns of his
fellow creatures. In the process of education he learns that for the
unit in society the word _self_ includes more than the individual:
the infant very soon finds out that what disagrees with his mother
disagrees with him; the child, that the failure of his father’s income
means misery and hunger to the family. To say nothing of the facts
of sympathy, every man born into an advanced society is early made
aware that the satisfaction of his mere material needs depends upon
the activities of that society around him quite as much as upon his
own. All through the growth of nations and societies the complexity
of this interdependence of individuals has increased, the areas of
social consciousness have been extended and unified, from the solitary
cave-dweller to the family or horde, from the tribe to the nation, and
from the nation, by commerce, to the world, till the fortunes of each
people have power over the hopes and fears of workers in every other,
and the arts, the learning, and the literature of a hundred painful
civilizations are available for us to-day, all the kingdoms of the
earth and their glory displayed in a moment of time.
But not by bread alone does mankind live. Very early in the course of
human evolution must the type of individual to whom all society was
repugnant have been eliminated and suppressed by natural selection.
The social instinct, the disposition to find comfort in comradeship
independently of its material advantages, is of such evident
antiquity in Man that we are justified in speaking of it as one of
his fundamental and elementary characteristics. It is easy enough to
suggest theories of the origin of this adhesiveness, this affection,
this sympathy, in the conditions of racial survival: the important fact
for us is its remarkable susceptibility of cultivation and extension.
The individual in society does that which is pleasant to his friends,
and abstains from doing that which is unpleasant, not because he likes
to be thought a good fellow, or expects benefits in return, but simply
because it gives him immediate pleasure so to act. He is sensitive to
that which hurts them, not because he fears that his own defences are
weakened by their injury, but because they have actually become part of
himself by the extension of his consciousness over them. This social
instinct, this disposition to benevolent sympathy, appears almost
as inextinguishable as the personal desire of life: in innumerable
instances it has proved far stronger.
The recognition by each individual of his dependence on society or
sensitiveness to his own interest, and his affection towards society
or sensitiveness to its interest: these two faces of the same fact
represent an intricate tissue of social consciousness extremely
sensitive to all kinds of anti-social, or immoral, action. The moral
education of the individual appears formally as the process of
learning, by sheer extension of knowledge and experience, and nothing
else, how he may harmonise and follow out his own desires in these two
aspects and their combinations. He has to learn how to provide for the
needs of his bodily life in a manner that will not interfere with the
freedom of others to do the same. Laws and conventions of morality
guide him at first in this respect; but the man cannot be said to be
free until he acts morally because, foreseeing that on the satisfaction
of these primary needs new desires will emerge whose satisfaction
will give him a more exquisite contentment, he perceives that it is
reasonable so to act. The existence and stability of society are the
indispensable guarantee for the general satisfaction of the primary
desires of individuals, therefore it is unreasonable to weaken society
by immoral action; but much more are the existence and health of
society indispensable conditions for the common birth and satisfaction
of the secondary desires, the desires which have created all that is
most valuable in civilisation and which find their satisfaction in
art, in culture, in human intercourse, in love. The moral education
of the individual is the lesson, not that desire is evil, and that he
can only attain his freedom by ceasing to desire, for this is death,
or desertion, and the army of the living presses on to fuller life;
but that the wider, fuller satisfaction is built upon the simpler, and
common morality a condition of its possibility; that there are certain
manners and methods in which, if he goes about to save his life, he
most infallibly will lose it; and that love, the social instinct, and
science, which is ordered knowledge, are his only reliable tutors in
practical morality.
But man in society not only lives his individual life: he also
modifies the form of social institutions in the direction indicated by
reason--in such a manner, that is, as it seems to his understanding
will render them more efficient for securing freedom for that life
of his. And just as certain forms of individual activity, in their
passage into and through the field of positive criticism, appear first
as indifferent, because they seem to concern the individual only, then
as moral or immoral, because recognized as affecting society, later
as simply rational or insane, morality having here formally attained
its identification with reason and immorality with folly, and at
last become habitual, instinctive, and unconscious; so institutions,
originating in modes apparently accidental, come to be recognized
as useful and valuable additions to the machinery of existence, are
buttressed with all the authority and sanction of religion, and finally
pass into unquestioned acceptance by the common-sense of men. In time
some fundamental change in the conditions of the life of individuals
is introduced by causes similarly unforeseen: the form of the old
institution ceases to subserve the common end: it begins to cramp the
freedom of the majority, who no longer require its support. Meanwhile
it has established a minority, ostensibly controlling it for the
common weal, in a position to administer it in the sole interest of
their class. These, as their existence appears dependent on their
so administering it, cannot be untaught the habit except by such
modification of the institution as will render it again impossible for
any class to have a special interest in its contemporary form.
This process is so familiar in history that it would be a waste of
time here to illustrate it by tracing it in the growth of monarchies,
aristocracies, priesthoods, chattel slavery, feudal bondage,
representative government, or others of its innumerable manifestations.
The institution of private property in certain things is in many
respects so reasonable and convenient for the majority of mankind,
and was so conspicuously advantageous for those stronger individuals
under whose leadership the beginnings of tribal civilisations were
developed, that very early in their history it received the sanction
of moral convention, religion, and law. It was obviously necessary
for the establishment of industrial society, that each man should own
the product of his labor and the tools necessary for him to labor
effectually. But the Industrial Revolution described in the third paper
of this series has entirely changed the conditions under which men
produce wealth, and the character of the tools with which they work,
while the sanctions of law and conventional morality still cling to
all that has been imported under the old definition of property. If
the idea so constantly appealed to in justification of property law
is to be realised; if the fruits of each man’s labor[68] are to be
guaranteed to him and he is to own the instruments with which he works;
if the laws of property are not to establish a parasitic class taking
tribute from the labor of others in the forms of Rent and Interest,
then we must modify our administration of property. We must admit that
as the agricultural laborer cannot individually own the farm he works
on and its stock, as the factory hand cannot individually own the mill,
land and industrial capital are things in which private property is
impossible, except on condition of a small minority owning all such
property and the great majority none at all.
Socialists contend that this system of private property in land and
capital is actively destructive of the conditions in which alone the
common morality necessary for happy social life is possible. Without
any demand upon the faith of those persons who deny the capacity of
average human nature for the temperance and kindliness indispensable
for the success of a true co-operative commonwealth, they assert that
this modern development of the property system (a development of the
last few generations only, and unprecedented in the history of the
world), is more and more forcing the individual into anti-social
disposition and action, and thereby destroying the promise of free and
full existence, which only the health and progressive development of
the social organism can give him. It has become plainly reasonable that
when this is the effect of our property system, we should modify our
institutions in the directions which will give us freedom, just as we
modified the institutions which subjected us to a feudal aristocracy,
and abolished for ever the laws which enabled one man to hold another
as his chattel slave.
There is on record a Greek proverb, that so soon as a man has ensured
a livelihood, then he should begin to practise virtue. We all protest
that he will do well to practise virtue under any circumstances;
but we admit on reflection that our judgment as to what is virtuous
action, depends upon the circumstances under which action is to be
taken. Whether we approve the killing of one man by another, depends
entirely on the circumstances of the case; and there is scarcely one
of the acts which our laws regard as criminal, which could not, under
imaginable circumstances, be justified. Our laws, and our conventional
opinions, as to what conduct is moral or immoral, are adapted to the
ordinary circumstances of the average man in society, society being in
them presumed to be homogeneous, not to contain in itself essential
distinctions between classes, or great contrasts between the conditions
of individuals.
But that element in our private property system which is at present
the main object of the Socialist attack, the individual ownership of
the instruments of production, land and capital, in an age when the
use of those instruments has become co-operative, results, and must
inevitably result, as the foregoing dissertations have sought to prove,
in the division of society into two classes, whose very livelihood is
ensured to them by methods essentially different. The livelihood of
the typical proletarian is earned by the exercise of his faculties for
useful activity: the livelihood of the typical capitalist, or owner of
property, is obtained, without any contribution of his or her activity,
in the form of a pension called rent, interest, or dividend, guaranteed
by law out of the wealth produced from day to day by the activities of
the proletariat.