CHAPTER XI

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL PROGRESS

§ 1. AMBIGUITY OF THE TERM PROGRESS

MORAL progress as an ethical postulate or a belief prerequisite to a healthful and progressive moral life is constantly being confused with moral progress as a fact in the history of morals. The problem of moral progress, therefore, suffers from the disabilities peculiar to such problems as freedom of the will, immortality, or good and evil. The demands of human nature have weighted the scales in favor of an affirmative answer. An unbiased and scientific attitude towards any problem implies a willingness to face all the facts and abide by whatever conclusions they indicate. But the world has always refused to listen to the moral pessimist, scientific or otherwise, and that not without good reasons. For, obviously, no incentive to moral effort, not even the moral order itself, would long endure in any community, the members of which had been convinced that moral progress neither exists nor is possible. The moral pessimist is tolerated because he is hopelessly in the minority. There may be a semblance of justification for him in the salutary check he exercises upon the exuberant and undisciplined moral enthusiasms of his fellows. Men often find him interesting, sometimes they pity him, uniformly they discredit him because his conclusions are patently incompatible with the demands of life.

The question of moral progress has also suffered from the illusions that have always beset the question of progress in general. The sheer fact of change has been mistaken for progress. This is due mainly to the mobility of our modern world and the unparalleled liberation of energies giving us the control over time and space and the production and distribu

tion of material and intellectual goods. We have been taught that the international ties born of commercial and industrial development, the financial necessities arising from a worldwide credit, the costliness and destructive nature of scientific warfare, not to mention the effects of science and art upon human relations, have combined to create a progressive civilization in which war is impossible. To-day we are sadly disillusioned because we failed to see that mere change or increased facilities for change do not insure progress. Progress, and especially moral progress, is something that must be achieved. It does not follow automatically upon the skilful mastery of the economic or mechanical instrumentalities for the satisfaction of human needs. It implies a goal, a plan of socially constructive work.

Again the triumph of the theory of evolution in modern thought has had much to do with the spread of an illusory notion of progress. We have smuggled in under the notion of evolution as a cosmic force all the old complacent optimism associated with the great idealists or the Christian doctrine of Providence. Evolution has filled us with the conceit that we are the heirs of all the ages. It has encouraged a sentimental and shallow attitude that inclines us to take a "moral holiday" which we have not earned. It is not difficult to show that evolution, whether biologic, social, or moral, cannot be identified with progress. In fact one of the earliest and most brilliant of the exponents of evolution arrives at thoroughly pessimistic conclusions when he comes to discuss the selective effects of social environment upon moral progress.1

§ 2. THEORIES OF MORAL PROGRESS

It is possible to state the problem of moral progress from three different points of view. Since we have to do with character primarily we may seek to measure progress in terms of the absolute improvement in the moral fiber of the race. The criteria of progress in this case will be found in the constitution of human nature itself. It is possible, furthermore,

1 Wallace, Social Environment and Moral Progress, pp. 36, 153.

that progress may be a matter of a clearer insight into the nature of the moral experience. This is the contention for the most part of the idealists from the days of Plato to T. H. Green. Finally there have been thinkers who have felt that moral progress is essentially a social matter. For, given the fixed hereditary endowment of instincts and emotions, moral advance is largely a question of shaping this through the social setting. Certainly for the Greeks moral progress presupposed the peculiar institutions of the ancient city-state of which Athens was the type. Hence it is possible to find the criterion of moral progress in the harmony of interests, the intelligent balancing of contending wills in the social order. In this sense moral progress is the last and supreme test of social progress.

Theories of moral progress based upon the notion of absolute improvement in the constitution of human nature are the most difficult to support. Moral progress is now no longer considered as involving the elimination of an hereditary taint in the instinctive equipment through original sin or otherwise, as was taught by Christian theologians, Tertullian, Augustine, or John Calvin. We have little to support the contention that the moral character of the race has been improved through the selective influence of war, eliminating the pugnacious and bloodthirsty and preserving the peaceful and sympathetic types. The instinctive equipment is in fact neither moral nor immoral. It is unmoral or only potentially moral. Hence we cannot say that sympathy or the tender emotions are any more or any less ethical than the fighting instinct. Moral progress is not a matter of cultivating the one and of eliminating the other. The problem of moral progress arises only when we face the question of rationalizing and socializing this instinctive equipment.

Granting the assumption of absolute idealism that there is a general drift towards moral betterment running through the centuries, we find the problem of measuring that drift exceedingly difficult. We have little tangible evidence of an "orderly improvement on a great scale ". Let us take the status of woman as a test. In the English law of Blackstone's day, who

published his Commentaries on the Laws of England in 176568, "A married woman can scarcely be said to have had a legal personality ", says Hobhouse, " so great is the number of her disqualifications as to holding of property, as to capacity to give evidence, as to the custody of her children, even as to her legal responsibility for crimes; and many of these disqualifications lasted on down to the present generation. If we turn to the oldest code of laws in the world, the recently discovered laws of Hammurabi, we shall find that few of these disqualifications applied to married women in Babylonia some 2,000 years before Christ; yet it would be unfair to infer that the civilization of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was on the whole inferior to that of Babylonia in the third millennium before Christ ". These and other facts of history seem to show that in so far as moral improvement is a reality it appears to be irregular, spasmodic, local; moral advance in one respect is often accompanied by moral deterioration in other respects.

It is doubtful, furthermore, whether we can establish unequivocally the idealistic thesis that the highly developed civilizations are the most moral or that the conditions making for the development of society always make for the improvement of moral character. The industrial revolution that laid the basis for England's commercial supremacy was purchased at the price of a moral deterioration of her lower classes from which she has hardly yet recovered. At no period of our national history has material prosperity been so great or the accumulation of wealth so rapid as during the last generation. Yet a recent writer remarks, "During the last quarter of a century general relaxation of American moral fiber has unquestionably been taking place; and in spite of the increasing use of disciplinary measures, the process of relaxation has not as yet been fairly checked "2 It can hardly be denied that the tremendous pitch of scientific, economic and political advancement to which Prussian statecraft brought modern Ger

1 Morals in Evolution, p. 31 f.

2 H. Croly, Progressive Democracy, p. 207.

many has been accompanied by an insidious poisoning of the very fountain heads of the moral and spiritual life of the nation.1

Finally, the various criteria of moral progress that have been sought by the idealists in the general traits of the mature moral character have at best merely a formal or metaphysical value. They do not offer us a practical test of moral progress. These characteristics are, to be sure, relatively permanent in moral experience. The mature moral character, for example, always takes on the form of selfrealization or self-perfection; it suggests authoritative and categorical forms of group experience and tradition that may very easily be identified with an absolute moral order. But Kant's famous doctrine of an innate principle, a will that is good absolutely in and of itself, which reflects the moral economy of the universe, is an ethical fiction. For obviously a will is good only as it functions in a certain social situation and this varies with the individual and with the age. The good will demanded by the famous regula of Benedict of Nursia (480-543 A.D.) can hardly be identified with the good will outlined in Plato's Republic or in Calvin's Institutes. Good in every case is a function of the social order in which the individual lives.

The most profound and metaphysically sustained attempt of recent times at a theory of moral progress measured in terms of self-realization gives the impression of an argument that is eternally doubling back upon itself. We are told, "It is the consciousness of possibilities in ourselves, unrealized but constantly in process of realization, that alone enables us to read the idea of development into what we observe of natural life, and to conceive that there must be such a thing as a plan of the world". To be sure, we can never formulate accurately and finally this ultimate criterion of moral progress. "Of a life of completed development, of activity with the end attained, we can only speak or think in negatives, and thus only can we speak or think of that state of being in

1 This is the thesis of Holmes' brilliant work, The Nemesis of Docility.