MORAL RULES
The practical need of morals arises from the conflict of desires,
whether of different people or of the same person at different times
or even at one time. A man desires to drink, and also to be fit for
his work next morning. We think him immoral if he adopts the course
which gives him the smaller total satisfaction of desire. We think ill
of people who are extravagant or reckless, even if they injure no one
but themselves. Bentham supposed that the whole of morality could be
derived from “enlightened self-interest,” and that a person who always
acted with a view to his own maximum satisfaction in the long run would
always act rightly. I cannot accept this view. Tyrants have existed
who derived exquisite pleasure from watching the infliction of torture;
I cannot praise such men when prudence led them to spare their victims’
lives with a view to further sufferings another day. Nevertheless,
other things being equal, prudence is a part of the good life. Even
Robinson Crusoe had occasion to practise industry, self-control, and
foresight, which must be reckoned as moral qualities, since they
increased his total satisfaction without counterbalancing injury to
others. This part of morals plays a great part in the training of young
children, who have little inclination to think of the future. If it
were more practised in later life, the world would quickly become a
paradise, since it would be quite sufficient to prevent wars, which
are acts of passion, not of reason. Nevertheless, in spite of the
importance of prudence, it is not the most interesting part of morals.
Nor is it the part that raises intellectual problems, since it does not
require an appeal to anything beyond self-interest.
The part of morality that is not included in prudence is, in essence,
analogous to law, or the rules of a club. It is a method of enabling
men to live together in a community in spite of the possibility that
their desires may conflict. But here two very different methods are
possible. There is the method of the criminal law, which aims at a
merely external harmony by attaching disagreeable consequences to acts
which thwart other men’s desires in certain ways. This is also the
method of social censure: to be thought ill of by one’s own society is
a form of punishment, to avoid which most people avoid being known
to transgress the code of their set. But there is another method,
more fundamental, and far more satisfactory when it succeeds. This is
to alter men’s characters and desires in such a way as to minimize
occasions of conflict by making the success of one man’s desires as
far as possible consistent with that of another’s. That is why love is
better than hate, because it brings harmony instead of conflict into
the desires of the persons concerned. Two people between whom there is
love succeed or fail together, but when two people hate each other the
success of either is the failure of the other.
If we were right in saying that the good life is inspired by love and
guided by knowledge, it is clear that the moral code of any community
is not ultimate and self-sufficient, but must be examined with a
view to seeing whether it is such as wisdom and benevolence would
have decreed. Moral codes have not always been faultless. The Aztecs
considered it their painful duty to eat human flesh for fear the light
of the sun should grow dim. They erred in their science; and perhaps
they would have perceived the scientific error if they had had any love
for the sacrificial victims. Some tribes immerse girls in the dark from
the age of ten to the age of seventeen, for fear the sun’s rays should
render them pregnant. But surely our modern codes of morals contain
nothing analogous to these savage practices? Surely we only forbid
things which really are harmful, or at any rate so abominable that no
decent person could defend them? I am not so sure.
Current morality is a curious blend of utilitarianism and superstition,
but the superstitious part has the stronger hold, as is natural,
since superstition is the origin of moral rules. Originally, certain
acts were thought displeasing to the gods, and were forbidden by law
because the divine wrath was apt to descend upon the community, not
merely upon the guilty individuals. Hence arose the conception of sin,
as that which is displeasing to God. No reason can be assigned as to
why certain acts should be thus displeasing; it would be very difficult
to say, for instance, why it was displeasing that the kid should be
seethed in its mother’s milk. But it was known by Revelation that
this was the case. Sometimes the Divine commands have been curiously
interpreted. For example, we are told not to work on Saturdays, and
Protestants take this to mean that we are not to play on Sundays. But
the same sublime authority is attributed to the new prohibition as to
the old.
It is evident that a man with a scientific outlook on life cannot let
himself be intimidated by texts of Scripture or by the teaching of
the Church. He will not be content to say “such-and-such an act is
sinful, and that ends the matter.” He will inquire whether it does
any harm, or whether, on the contrary, the belief that it is sinful
does harm. And he will find that, especially in what concerns sex, our
current morality contains a very great deal of which the origin is
purely superstitious. He will find also that this superstition, like
that of the Aztecs, involves needless cruelty, and would be swept away
if people were actuated by kindly feelings towards their neighbours.
But the defenders of traditional morality are seldom people with
warm hearts, as may be seen from the love of militarism displayed by
Church dignitaries. One is tempted to think that they value morals as
affording a legitimate outlet for their desire to inflict pain: the
sinner is fair game, and therefore away with tolerance!
Let us follow an ordinary human life from conception to the grave,
and note the points where superstitious morals inflict preventable
suffering. I begin with conception, because here the influence of
superstition is particularly noteworthy. If the parents are not
married, the child has a stigma, as clearly undeserved as anything
could be. If either of the parents has venereal disease, the child
is likely to inherit it. If they already have too many children for
the family income, there will be poverty, underfeeding, overcrowding,
very likely incest. Yet the great majority of moralists agree that the
parents had better not know how to prevent this misery by preventing
conception. To please these moralists, a life of torture is inflicted
upon millions of human beings who ought never to have existed, merely
because it is supposed that sexual intercourse is wicked unless
accompanied by desire for offspring, but not wicked when this desire is
present, even though the offspring is humanly certain to be wretched.
To be killed suddenly and then eaten, which was the fate of the Aztecs’
victims, is a far less degree of suffering than is inflicted upon a
child born in miserable surroundings and tainted with venereal disease.
Yet it is the greater suffering which is deliberately inflicted by
Bishops and politicians in the name of morality. If they had even the
smallest spark of love or pity for children they could not adhere to a
moral code involving this fiendish cruelty.
At birth, and in early infancy, the average child suffers more from
economic causes than from superstition. When well-to-do women have
children, they have the best doctors, the best nurses, the best diet,
the best rest, and the best exercise. Working-class women do not enjoy
these advantages, and frequently their children die for lack of them. A
little is done by the public authorities in the way of care of mothers,
but very grudgingly. At a moment when the supply of milk to nursing
mothers is being cut down to save expense, public authorities will
spend vast sums on paving rich residential districts where there is
little traffic. They must know that in taking this decision they are
condemning a certain number of working-class children to death for the
crime of poverty. Yet the ruling party are supported by the immense
majority of ministers of religion, who, with the Pope at their head,
have pledged the vast forces of superstition throughout the world to
the support of social injustice.
In all stages of education the influence of superstition is disastrous.
A certain percentage of children have the habit of thinking; one of the
aims of education is to cure them of this habit. Inconvenient questions
are met with “hush, hush” or with punishment. Collective emotion is
used to instil certain kinds of belief, more particularly nationalistic
kinds. Capitalists, militarists, and ecclesiastics co-operate in
education, because all depend for their power upon the prevalence of
emotionalism and the rarity of critical judgment. With the aid of
human nature, education succeeds in increasing and intensifying these
propensities of the average man.
Another way in which superstition damages education is through
its influence on the choice of teachers. For economic reasons, a
woman-teacher must not be married; for moral reasons, she must not have
extra-marital sexual relations. And yet everybody who has taken the
trouble to study morbid psychology knows that prolonged virginity is,
as a rule, extraordinarily harmful to women, so harmful that, in a sane
society, it would be severely discouraged in teachers. The restrictions
imposed lead more and more to a refusal, on the part of energetic and
enterprising women, to enter the teaching profession. This is all due
to the lingering influence of superstitious asceticism.
At middle- and upper-class schools the matter is even worse. There are
chapel services, and the care of morals is in the hands of clergymen.
Clergymen, almost necessarily, fail in two ways as teachers of morals.
They condemn acts which do no harm, and they condone acts which do
great harm. They all condemn sexual relations between unmarried people
who are fond of each other but not yet sure that they wish to live
together all their lives. Most of them condemn birth-control. None of
them condemn the brutality of a husband who causes his wife to die of
too frequent pregnancies. I knew a fashionable clergyman whose wife
had nine children in nine years. The doctors told him that if she had
another she would die. Next year she had another and died. No one
condemned him; he retained his benefice, and married again. So long as
clergymen continue to condone cruelty and condemn innocent pleasure,
they can only do harm as guardians of the morals of the young.
Another bad effect of superstition on education is the absence of
instruction about the facts of sex. The main physiological facts
ought to be taught, quite simply and naturally, before puberty, at
a time when they are not exciting. At puberty, the elements of an
unsuperstitious sexual morality ought to be taught. Boys and girls
should be taught that nothing can justify sexual intercourse unless
there is mutual inclination. This is contrary to the teaching of the
Church, which holds that, provided the parties are married and the man
desires another child, sexual intercourse is justified however great
may be the reluctance of the wife. Boys and girls should be taught
respect for each other’s liberty; they should be made to feel that
nothing gives one human being rights over another, and that jealousy
and possessiveness kill love. They should be taught that to bring
another human being into the world is a very serious matter, only to
be undertaken when the child will have a reasonable prospect of health,
good surroundings, and parental care. But they should also be taught
methods of birth-control, so as to insure that children shall only come
when they are wanted. Finally, they should be taught the dangers of
venereal disease, and the methods of prevention and cure. The increase
of human happiness to be expected from sex-education on these lines is
immeasurable.
It should be recognized that, in the absence of children, sexual
relations are a purely private matter, which does not concern either
the State or the neighbours. Certain forms of sex which do not lead to
children are at present punished by the criminal law: this is purely
superstitious, since the matter is one which affects no one except the
parties directly concerned. Where there are children, it is a mistake
to suppose that it is necessarily to their interest to make divorce
very difficult. Habitual drunkenness, cruelty, insanity are grounds
upon which divorce is necessary for the children’s sake quite as
much as for the sake of the wife or husband. The peculiar importance
attached, at present, to adultery is quite irrational. It is obvious
that many forms of misconduct are more fatal to married happiness than
an occasional infidelity. Masculine insistence on a child a year, which
is not conventionally misconduct or cruelty, is the most fatal of all.
Moral rules ought not to be such as to make instinctive happiness
impossible. Yet that is an effect of strict monogamy, in a community
where the numbers of the two sexes are very unequal. Of course, under
such circumstances, the moral rules are infringed. But when the rules
are such that they can only be obeyed by greatly diminishing the
happiness of the community, and when it is better they should be
infringed than observed, surely it is time that the rules were changed.
If this is not done, many people who are acting in a way not contrary
to the public interest are faced with the undeserved alternative of
hypocrisy or obloquy. The Church does not mind hypocrisy, which is
a flattering tribute to its power; but elsewhere it has come to be
recognized as an evil which we ought not lightly to inflict.
Even more harmful than theological superstition is the superstition of
nationalism, of duty to one’s own State and to no other. But I do not
propose on this occasion to discuss this matter, beyond pointing out
that limitation to one’s compatriots is contrary to the principle of
love which we recognized as constituting the good life. It is also,
of course, contrary to enlightened self-interest, since an exclusive
nationalism does not pay even the victorious nations.
One other respect in which our society suffers from the theological
conception of “sin” is the treatment of criminals. The view that
criminals are “wicked” and “deserve” punishment is not one which a
rational morality can support. Undoubtedly certain people do things
which society wishes to prevent, and does right in preventing as far
as possible. We may take murder as the plainest case. Obviously, if
a community is to hold together and we are to enjoy its pleasures
and advantages, we cannot allow people to kill each other whenever
they feel an impulse to do so. But this problem should be treated in
a purely scientific spirit. We should ask simply: What is the best
method of preventing murder? Of two methods which are equally effective
in preventing murder, the one involving least harm to the murderer is
to be preferred. The harm to the murderer is wholly regrettable, like
the pain of a surgical operation. It may be equally necessary, but it
is not a subject of rejoicing. The vindictive feeling called “moral
indignation” is merely a form of cruelty. Suffering to the criminal can
never be justified by the notion of vindictive punishment. If education
combined with kindness is equally effective, it is to be preferred;
still more is it to be preferred if it is more effective. Of course
the prevention of crime and the punishment of crime are two different
questions; the object of causing pain to the criminal is presumably
deterrent. If prisons were so humanized that a prisoner got a good
education for nothing, people might commit crimes in order to qualify
for entrance. No doubt prison must be less pleasant than freedom; but
the best way to secure this result is to make freedom more pleasant
than it sometimes is at present. I do not wish, however, to embark
upon the subject of Penal Reform. I merely wish to suggest that we
should treat the criminal as we treat a man suffering from plague.
Each is a public danger, each must have his liberty curtailed until
he has ceased to be a danger. But the man suffering from plague is an
object of sympathy and commiseration, whereas the criminal is an object
of execration. This is quite irrational. And it is because of this
difference of attitude that our prisons are so much less successful in
curing criminal tendencies than our hospitals are in curing disease.