The habit of conceiving moral action as a certain kind of action, instead of all action so far as it really is action, leads us to conceive of morality as a highly desirable something which somehow ought to be brought into our lives, but which upon the whole is not. It gives rise to the habit of conceiving morality as a vague ideal which it is praiseworthy for the individual to strive for, but which depends wholly for its existence upon the individual's wish in the matter. Morality, that is, is considered as a relation existing between something which merely ought to be, on one hand, and the individual's choice, or his conscience on the other. This point of view has found typical expression in Bishop Butler's saying: "If conscience had might as it has right, it would rule the world."
But right is not such a helpless creature. It exists not in word but in power. The moral world is, here and now; it is a reality apart from the wishes, or failures to wish, of any given individual. It bears the same relation to the individual's activity that the 'physical world' does to his knowledge. Not till the individual has to spin the physical world out of his consciousness in order to know it, will it be necessary for him to create morality by his choice, before it can exist. As knowledge is mastery in one's self of the real world, the reproduction of it in self-consciousness, so moral action is the appropriation and vital self-expression of the values contained in the existing practical world.
The existence of this moral world is not anything vaguely mysterious. Imagine a well organized factory, in which there is some comprehensive industry carried on—say the production of cotton cloth. This is the end; it is a common end—that for which each individual labors. Not all individuals, however, are doing the same thing. The more perfect the activity, the better organized the work, the more differentiated their respective labors. This is the side of individual activity or freedom. To make the analogy with moral activity complete we have to suppose that each individual is doing the work because of itself, and not merely as drudgery for the sake of some further end, as pay. Now these various individuals are bound together by their various acts; some more nearly because doing closely allied things, all somewhat, because contributing to a common activity. This is the side of laws and duties.
This group of the differentiated and yet related activities is the analogue of the moral world. There are certain wants which have constantly to be fulfilled; certain ends which demand coöperating activities, and which establish fixed relations between men. There is a world of ends, a realm of definite activities in existence, as concrete as the ends and activities in our imagined factory. The child finds, then, ends and actions in existence when he is born. More than this: he is not born as a mere spectator of the world; he is born into it. He finds himself encompassed by such relations, and he finds his own being and activity intermeshed with them. If he takes away from himself, as an agent, what he has, as sharing in these ends and actions, nothing remains.
This world of purposes and activities is differentiated into various institutions. The child is born as a member of a family; as he grows up he finds that others have possessions which he must respect, that is, he runs upon the institution of property. As he grows still older, he finds persons outside of the family of whose actions he must take account as respects his own: society, in the limited sense as meaning relations of special intimacy or acquaintanceship. Then he finds the political institutions; the city, state and nation. He finds an educational institution, the school, the college; religious institutions, the church, etc., etc. Everywhere he finds men having common wants and thus proposing common ends and using coöperative modes of action. To these organized modes of action, with their reference to common interests and purposes, he must adjust his activities; he must take his part therein, if he acts at all, though it be only negatively or hostilely, as in evil conduct. These institutions are morality real and objective; the individual becomes moral as he shares in this moral world, and takes his due place in it.
Institutions, then, are organized modes of action, on the basis of the wants and interests which unite men. They differ as the family from the town, the church from the state, according to the scope and character of the wants from which they spring. They are not bare facts like objects of knowledge; they are practical, existing for the sake of, and by means of the will—as execution of ideas which have interest. Because they are expressions of common purposes and ideas, they are not merely private will and intelligence, but, in the literal sense, public will and reason.
The moral endeavor of man thus takes the form not of isolated fancies about right and wrong, not of attempts to frame a morality for himself, not of efforts to bring into being some praiseworthy ideal never realized; but the form of sustaining and furthering the moral world of which he is a member. Since the world is one of action, and not of contemplation like the world of knowledge, it can be sustained and furthered only as he makes its ends his own, and identifies himself and his satisfaction with the activities in which other wills find their fulfillment.
This is simply a more concrete rendering of what has already been said about the moral environment (see Sec. 33).
An institution is, as we have seen the expression of unity of desires and ideas; it is general intelligence in action, or common will. As such common will, it is, as respects the merely private or exclusive wants and aims of its members, absolutely sovereign. It must aim to control them. It must set before them the common end or ideal and insist upon this as the only real end of individual conduct. The ends so imposed by the public reason are laws. But these laws are for the sake of realizing the common end, of securing that organized unity of action in which alone the individual can find freedom and fullness of action, or his own satisfaction. Thus the activity of the common will gives freedom, or rights, to the various members of the institution.
Every institution, then, has its sovereignty, or authority, and its laws and rights. It is only a false abstraction which makes us conceive of sovereignty, or authority, and of law and of rights as inhering only in some supreme organization, as the national state. The family, the school, the neighborhood group, has its authority as respects its members, imposes its ideals of action, or laws, and confers its respective satisfactions in way of enlarged freedom, or rights. It is true that no one of these institutions is isolated; that each stands in relation with other like and unlike institutions. Each minor institution is a member of some more comprehensive whole, to which it bears the same relation that the individual bears to it. That is to say, its sovereignty gives way to the authority of the more comprehensive organization; its laws must be in harmony with the laws which flow from the larger activity; its rights must become aspects of a fuller satisfaction. Only humanity or the organized activity of all the wants, powers and interests common to men, can have absolute sovereignty, law and rights.
But the narrower group has its relations, none the less, although, in ultimate analysis, they flow from and manifest the wider good, which, as wider, must be controlling. Without such minor local authorities, rights and laws, humanity would be a meaningless abstraction, and its activity wholly empty. There is an authority in the family, and the moral growth of the child consists in identifying the law of his own conduct with the ends aimed at by the institution, and in growing into maturity and freedom of manhood through the rights which are bestowed upon him as such a member. Within its own range this institution is ultimate. But its range is not ultimate; the family, valuable and sacred as it is, does not exist for itself. It is not a larger selfishness. It exists as one mode of realizing that comprehensive common good to which all institutions must contribute, if they are not to decay. It is the same with property, the school, the local church, and with the national state.
We can now translate into more concrete terms what was said, in Part I, regarding the good, obligation and freedom. That performance of function which is 'the good', is now seen to consist in vital union with, and reproduction of, the practical institutions of which one is a member. The maintenance of such institutions by the free participation therein of individual wills, is, of itself, the common good. Freedom also gets concreteness; it is the assured rights, or powers of action which one gets as such a member:—powers which are not mere claims, nor simply claims recognized as valid by others, but claims re-inforced by the will of the whole community. Freedom becomes real in the ethical world; it becomes force and efficiency of action, because it does not mean some private possession of the individual, but means the whole coöperating and organized action of an institution in securing to an individual some power of self expression.
Without the idea of the ethical world, as the unified activity of diverse functions exercised by different individuals, the idea of the good, and of freedom, would be undefined. But probably no one has ever attempted to conceive of the good and of freedom in total abstraction from the normal activity of man. Such has not been the lot of duty, or of the element of law. Often by implication, sometimes in so many words, it is stated that while a physical law may be accounted for, since it is simply an abstract from observed facts, a moral law stands wholly above and apart from actual facts; it expresses solely what 'ought to be' and not what is; that, indeed, whether anything in accordance with it ever has existed or not, is a matter of no essential moral importance theoretically, however it may be practically. Now it is evident that a law of something which has not existed, does not and perhaps never will exist, is essentially inexplicable and mysterious. It is as against such a notion of moral law that the idea of a real ethical world has perhaps its greatest service.
A moral law, e. g., the law of justice, is no more merely a law of what ought to be than is the law of gravitation. As the latter states a certain relation of moving masses to one another, so the law of justice states a certain relation of active wills to one another. For a given individual, at a given time and circumstances, the law of justice may appear as the law of something which ought to be, but is not:—is not for him in this respect, that is to say. But the very fact that it ought to be for him implies that it already is for others. It is a law of the society of which he is a member. And it is because he is a member of a society having this law, that is a law of what should be for him.
Would then justice cease to be a law for him if it were not observed at all in the society of which he is a member? Such a question is as contradictory as asking what would happen to a planet if the solar system went out of existence. It is the law of justice (with other such laws) that makes society; that is, it is those active relations which find expression in these laws that unify individuals so that they have a common end, and thus mutual duties. To imagine the abolition of these laws is to imagine the abolition of society; and to ask for the law of individual conduct apart from all relationship, actual or ideal, to society, is to ask in what morality consists when moral conditions are destroyed. A society in which the social bond we call justice does not obtain to some degree in the relations of man to man, is not society; and, on the other hand, wherever some law of justice actually obtains, there the law is for every individual who is a member of the society.
This does not mean that the 'is', the actual status of the moral world, is identical with the 'ought', or the ideal relations of man to man. But it does mean that there is no obligation, either in general or as any specific duty, which does not grow out of the 'is', the actual relations now obtaining.[1] The ethical world at any given time is undoubtedly imperfect, and, therefore, it demands a certain act to meet the situation. The very imperfection, the very badness in the present condition of things, is a part of the environment with reference to which we must act; it is, thus, an element in the law of future action that it shall not exactly repeat the existing condition. In other words, the 'is' gives the law of the 'ought', but it is a part of this law that the 'ought' shall not be as the 'is'. It is because the relation of justice does hold in members of a stratum of society, having a certain position, power or wealth, but does not hold between this section and another class, that the law of what should be is equal justice for all. In holding that actual social relations afford the law of what should be, we must not forget that these actual relations have a negative as well as a positive side, and that the new law must be framed in view of the negatives, the deficiencies, the wrongs, the contradictions, as well as of the positive attainments. A moral law, to sum up, is the principle of action, which, acted upon, will meet the needs of the existing situation as respects the wants, powers, and circumstances of the individuals concerned. It is no far-away abstraction, but expresses the movement of the ethical world.
One example will help define the discussion. Take the case of a street railway conductor, whose union has ordered a strike. What determines the law of his conduct under the circumstances? Evidently the existing ethical institutions of which he is a member, so far as he is conscious of their needs. To determine what he should do, he does not hunt up some law of an 'ought' apart from what is; if he should hunt for and should find such a law he would not know what to do with it. Just because it is apart from his concrete circumstances it is no guide, no law for his conduct at all. He has to act not in view of some abstract principle, but in view of a concrete situation. He considers his present wage, its relation to its needs and abilities; his capacity and taste for this and for that work; the reasons for the strike; the conditions of labor at present with reference to winning the strike, and as to the chance of getting other work. He considers his family, their needs and developing powers; the demand that they should live decently; that his children should be fairly educated and get a fair start in the world; he considers his relationships to his fellow members in the union, etc. These considerations, and such as these, give the law to his decision in so far as he acts morally and not instinctively. Where in this law-giving is there any separation from facts? On the contrary, the more right the act (the nearer it comes to its proper law), the more it will simply express and reflect the actual concrete facts. The law, in other words, of action, is the law of actual social forces in their onward movement, in so far as these demand some response in the way of conduct from the individual.
We may restate from this point of view, what we have already learned: A moral law is thoroughly individualized. It cannot be duplicated; it cannot be for one act just what it is for another. The ethical world is too rich in capacity and circumstance to permit of monotony; it is too swift in its movement to allow of bare repetition. It will not hold still; it moves on, and moral law is the law of action required from individuals by this movement.
The consideration of specific institutions, as the family, industrial society, civil society, the nation, etc., with their respective rights and laws, belongs rather to political philosophy than to the general theory of ethics.