A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of EvolutionWilliams, Cora May
Philosophy
A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution
Williams, Cora May
Ethics, Evolutionary
The natural division of Ethics is into Individual Ethics and Social
Ethics. It has sometimes been assumed that the whole duty of man could
be summed up in Individual Ethics. However, it is not necessarily true
that that which assists the best development of the individual serves
society as a whole also. When the attention is directed so excessively
to oneself, the general welfare is likely to be forgotten. On the other
hand, a too great subjection of individual interests makes a man a mere
parasite, robbing him of all self-dependence. When Ethics condemns the
instinct of self-preservation, it condemns its own means. If the impulse
to self-preservation, self-assertion, and self-development were evil,
then our essential nature would be evil, and Ethics would be impossible.
The right relation of the two principles is given in the principle of
welfare. Mill's book "On Liberty" denies the ethical significance of
self-development and forgets the individual's oneness with his kind, in
declaring personal vices of no importance to the general welfare. That
which Mill wished to defend was the freedom of the individual, the loss
of which through the compulsion of society and the "moral police" he
feared. But he might have accomplished this purpose without denying the
ethical value of self-development. There is nothing that is a ground for
greater solicitude than the mistake that public opinion and Ethics are
one, and that a condition of things is no longer a subject for ethical
condemnation when no outer power has the right to denounce it.
The first question which presents itself in Individual Ethics is: How is
the individual to educate himself to an ethical personality? Here the
development and strengthening of the ethical principle as governing and
determining the life of the individual is concerned. The problem is one
with the determination of the chief virtue which includes all other
ethical qualities. This virtue is justice, which includes in itself the
two groups contained under Self-assertion and Self-sacrifice.[78]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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