Practical Ethics

A Sketch of the Moral Structure of Society

Mary Sturt, Margaret Hobling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000073577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Originally published in 1949, this book covers both psychological and sociological aspects of moral life in Western society in the first half of the 20th Century and the historical influences on its thinking and way of behaviour. It discusses education, art, social structure, law and religion and ethical failure.

PART I

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF ETHICS

INTRODUCTION

THE first section of a book on practical ethics must inevitably be a psychological one. Till we have decided whether man’s nature is inevitably wicked or whether it is capable of improvement, we can go no farther. If man is hopelessly and irremediably wicked there is nothing more we can do, except build up around him such a barrier of restraints and punishments that fear, if nothing else, keeps him on the right path. Man, on this view, is condemned either to break out into riot or to peer, tidy and helpless, from his confining walls. On the other hand, it may be that man’s nature only needs training to become, if not perfect, at least a great deal better; and that we can safely allow him an ever-increasing measure of freedom in which to practise his virtues.

The first important point to realize in the study of man’s nature is that it is very complex. This complexity is the cause of his moral struggles, and it is the reason why life presents so many problems to those who try seriously to understand it. It has, on the other hand, the advantage of enabling him to act effectively in a great number of different circumstances, and has given him his peculiar adaptability. It has enriched his life. For example, man shares his quality of gregariousness with many other animals, but man’s gregariousness seems to include all animal types, from the mere desire of co-presence that we see in cows, to the co-operative hunting of wolves or the sociable chattering of monkeys. Nor is man simply gregarious. Many individuals have the quality only slightly, and are nearer the cat than the dog in their reaction to the world. Besides, important as gregariousness is in man, there are other impulses equally powerful. A bee, we must suppose, does not have to struggle against temptations which lead it astray from its duty to the hive: man must continually balance his desire for the welfare of himself and his family against the demands of the community.

The second point is that man’s nature is very plastic; far more plastic than the nature of any other animal. Not only will men learn to live very different material lives, they will also learn to live very different spiritual ones. The insects represent a low level of adaptability. Bees will not modify their way of life, nor, presumably, their natures. A dog will learn to live either in a town or in the country, as a pet or as a working dog; and its character can be considerably modified by the treatment it receives. Man is still more variable, and the gap which separates one type of life from another, the best from the worst in any type, is far larger.

When all the variables are considered it is not strange that men are so different. The only limiting factor is the pattern of a man’s culture. Any one of man’s impulses may predominate, and lead to action that may be good or bad, and vary farther with the other powers a man possesses. Thus a man acting egoistically may be a black-market racketeer, or a virtuous politician who strives to satisfy his craving for power by a benevolent domination of others. These are two of the choices offered to an egoist by our culture. There are a great many others. In a different culture there might be a diverse choice, and a man might elect to achieve distinction as a magician or a head-hunter.

In consequence it is very difficult to say dogmatically what man’s nature is. It is even harder to say if it is good or bad. All we are trying to do in this section is to point out, in very general terms, what are the main impulses that motivate man’s behaviour, and to show how they are affected by his early experiences. It is these early experiences that first set the mark of good or ill on a man’s character. They determine to a large extent whether he will be benevolent or the reverse, well disposed to society or its enemy. Through them he learns the particular forms of behaviour that are customary in his society, and from his experience he becomes either a conforming member of his group, or a rebel.

Chapter 1

BENEVOLENCE AND EGOISM

IF we consider the content of the moral mind we may distinguish three elements. There is a simple, unanalysable character that we can call benevolence. This consists partly of an expectation of good from our fellows, partly of an impulse to do good in our turn. These expectations and intentions are not formulated in the mind of the person, and are not matters of deliberate thought. Benevolence can be observed in others and felt in ourselves. It exists in animals. They show it to each other, and those that are domesticated show it also to man. In mankind it is one of the most easily distinguished characteristics in those with whom we have dealings. Without this characteristic, as we shall see later, other forms of morality are apt to turn to tyranny and oppression. The second element is the will to be good. This is a matter of reason and conscious thought. It arises at a much later stage than simple benevolence, but, for all that, it can be seen in the nursery. It appears as a voluntary conformity with the customs of the group in which the child finds himself, and it develops, as the child grows, into a desire to observe regulations as well as definitely to perform such acts as may be considered “good”. The third element is the truly intellectual one, that concerned with the laws and customs of the particular society in which the man lives. The man knows what is done and what is enjoined. Some of this knowledge is acquired early, but much is learnt only as he grows to manhood, and moves through ever-widening fields of social life.

From the psychological standpoint of these early chapters it is the first two elements that are important, and it is in regard to them that modern understanding of children has made us so much more powerful than our ancestors. In general we now know how to produce in a child both benevolence and a will to conformity: and we can do it painlessly, if not positively pleasantly. At the same time we know how to prevent his developing the opposite vices: hostility, aggression, destructiveness, revolution.

Although we know this, we do not, of course, as yet always manage to use our knowledge. The child is not always in expert hands. Many parents have not learned the technique, either because no one has tried to teach them, or because, having been warped in their youth, they cannot now learn. In schools many teachers, working under bad conditions, fail to do for the children what they might; but, above all, society is so organized that frustration is inflicted in countless ways, and standards of value are taught that are contrary to the best elements in human nature.

Of simple benevolence we can say that it is merely the reflection in the child’s mind of the environment. It is a characteristic producible in all animals that can be influenced by man. Cats, dogs, horses, even the larger carnivores, if caught young, can be made friendly and kindly. This is done simply by kind treatment. A cat brought up from a kitten without maltreatment does not scratch or bite, except by accident or under extreme provocation. It will even allow itself to be medically treated in quite a painful way without attacking the doctor. In the same way a dog, well treated from youth, is full of general benevolence, and will take active steps to please those with whom it comes in contact. An experienced breeder of racehorses will never allow a colt to be hit in any way, and the pretty shy creatures become docile and easy to train. In exactly the same way children take their general attitude to life from the treatment they receive. They could not learn it in any other way.

So easy is it to produce this characteristic that a child’s experience need not be wholly good. If the good treatment extends over only one part of a child’s life it will have its results in that part. A school that is well run and in which the children are consistently well treated has good, well-behaved children, whatever they may be at home. A school differently conducted may have quite unmanageable pupils. A change of method will, inside six months, change the one into the other. A child will even change in a few minutes on a change of environment, and from being a little devil at home become a pattern of virtue when he goes to tea with his grandmother three hundred yards away.

This apparently simple and obvious fact is really a modern discovery, or at least a discovery in so far as it is now consciously understood. Perhaps it would be truer to say a rediscovery, because there were educators of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance who practised such methods at least on the children of the aristocracy. It was the intervening ages of Puritanism and Calvinism that brought such misery to the child. When Shakespeare wrote of the primrose path that led to the everlasting bonfire he was expressing the belief that virtue was a thing of pain; and this belief showed itself in the management of life. The treatment of children was, particularly among the more religious parents, so harsh and unyielding that general benevolence had no chance to develop. The “good” man who had taken his character from his early training tended to be hard. He committed no sins himself and would pardon none in others. He would cast his erring daughter from the house, and burn her letters for the rest of his life. This hardness but reflected a religious conviction held up to horror by Robert Burns:

Oh Thou, wha in the heavens dost dwell,
Wha, as it pleases best thysel’,
Sends ane to Heaven and ten to Hell,

A’ for thy glory,

And no for ony guid or ill
They’ve done afore thee….¹

If God was like that, clearly man could be as capricious and unyielding. Quite simple kindliness would come as a surprise to a child reared in the harsh methods of a consciously virtuous household. In The Way of all Flesh, that brilliant indictment of Victorian morality, the point is well made. The narrator was out with Theobald and the family buying eggs from a cottage woman.

“A little boy, a lad much about Ernest’s age, trod upon one of the eggs that was wrapped in paper and broke it.

“‘There now, Jack’, said his mother, ‘see what you’ve done. You’ve broken a nice egg and cost me a penny. Here, Emma’, calling to her daughter, ‘take the child away, there’s a dear’.

“Emma came at once, and walked off with the youngster, taking him out of harm’s way.

“‘Papa’, said Ernest after we had left the house, ‘Why didn’t Mrs. Heaton whip Jack when he trod on the egg?’

“I was spiteful enough to give Theobald a grim smile which said as plainly as words could have done that I thought Ernest had hit him rather hard.

“Theobald coloured and looked angry. ‘I dare say’, he said quickly, ‘that his mother will whip him now we are gone’.

“I was not going to have that, and said I did not believe it. And so the matter dropped, but Theobald did not forget it.”

It was because so many people were cruel on principle, as part of their religious and social duty, that Tennyson could contrast the relative merits of kind hearts and coronets as if possession of the latter advantage completely precluded the former.

In countries where there is no tradition of unkindness and where children live under good psychological conditions, as in West Africa, and are hardly ever punished, the greatest friendliness prevails, and the adults are one of the most charming human types. Benevolence is, in essence, natural. It is not so much produced by training, it is allowed to develop by the absence of those conditions which make its development impossible; wherever it is permitted it will spring up. But for its fullest growth it needs positive affection and a sense of love and care.

¹ “Holy Willie’s Prayer.”

This sense of being loved is, it seems, necessary for all satisfactory development, even physical. Charlotte Buhler records an experiment in which comparable groups of young children were treated with different degrees of affection, though the physical conditions were the same. The development of the two groups was measured at the end of six months and the petted group were found to be superior in every way.¹

There has been a school of thought that has depreciated the showing of affection to children. This attitude is a not unnatural reaction from the excessive and hampering affection to which children were often subjected; and which by interfering with their actions and unduly stimulating their emotions had a very bad effect on their psychic make-up. The patients of many a psychological clinic have clearly suffered in this way in youth. But because there may be an excess, there need not necessarily be a defect in a mode of treatment; and for the development of true benevolence the child needs positive love, a little petting and the firm confidence that he will receive help in achieving his purposes, and will not have to fight for himself against a world that is in essence hostile.

All this means that, in the writers’ view, man is benevolent if he is allowed to be. The more pessimistic and cynical writers do not share this view. Anatole France writes of the strongest forces “in human nature, pride and cupidity”, and many another suggests that unbridled egoism, with all the attendant vices of greed and cruelty, is only held in check in each of us by fear and the pressure of a punitive system. We wish, therefore, in the rest of this section to show that man need not be bad, and that in fact he is generally made bad by mistreatment, either by his home environment or by the general arrangement of society. The first step in practical ethics is to understand man’s nature and how it is acted upon by the conditions of life.

The first thing to realize about man’s nature from this point of view is its composite character. There are roughly three sets of impulses that give the pattern of man’s mind, and they are not consistent one with the other. It is this inconsistency that makes it possible to produce such very diverse results by different kinds of training.

¹ Birth to Maturity, p. 65.

First, and earliest in development, are the egoistic impulses, those directed to securing the survival of the individual. Next appear the impulses of the group; and thirdly those connected with sex and parenthood that ensure the continuance of the race. It can be seen at once that egoism may easily be at variance with both group impulses and parental feeling, and if we are to believe the statement that “fathers of families are capable of anything”, group and family loyalties may also conflict. When men are accused of being entirely egoistic, of being actuated solely by considerations of gain or suchlike, the speaker has forgotten the facts of human nature, or is speaking, of a class or individual that has been vitiated by bad training. If we begin by considering egoism and its development we can see something of how this happens.

The tiny baby is, before all else, an egoist. He wishes, if he is a good baby, to live and thrive, and he is eager for food and anxious to avoid harm. His one weapon is the cry, and his powers are so limited that he must obtain all he wishes from others. He thus of necessity tries to control his environment, using the only means at his disposal. If he is hungry, wet, cold, tired, uncomfortable, he screams, and the success of his cries in bringing relief strengthens his impulse to use such means. Thus, unless the child is brought up on a regular system, he will begin to control his environment while still a baby, and will continue trying to do so as he grows older.

Adler would interpret this as a will to power based on a craving for security. It may be this, but it is also something simpler, the attempt, characteristic of all living creatures, to satisfy needs. In the child, as we have said, his helplessness makes it necessary for him also to control others if his wants are to be supplied.

This egoism of the baby is not absolute when once he has attained a certain age. From a few months old he makes contacts of quite a different kind with those about him, contacts that are essentially social and not egoistic in the narrower sense. A baby is sensitive to signs of emotion in those about him, and when well fed and comfortable likes to exchange smiles and inarticulate sounds of satisfaction with another. The curious toothless smile that the young baby gives in return for the adult greeting is very charming, and has no relation to any expected food or benefit.

Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem

bids the poet, and most babies fulfil this first filial duty.

This emotional responsiveness appears in the child’s imitation of the intonations of speech and his eagerness, when he is a year or so old, to include others in his activities and interests. A child sitting on its mother’s lap and given a lump of sugar will offer it all round the table for every one to make movements of sharing before eating it himself. Or another, having listened to a ticking watch, will hold it up to his mother so that she too may enjoy the strange sound. Two-year-old babies puttogether in a cot will initiate frie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• A Sketch of the Moral Structure of Society
• Part I The Psychological Basis of Ethics
• Part II The Organization of Society in Relation to Morals
• Part III The Education of Children in Virtue
• Index