Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social SubjectsHousman, Laurence
Philosophy
Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects
Housman, Laurence
Social ethics; Social sciences
Leaving it to the individual is not to say that your views as to
the desirability of such conduct will not influence your social
intercourse, and perhaps even affect your calling list. A great many
things affect our calling lists, without any necessity for us to be
self-righteous and bigoted about the principle on which we make our
own circle select. There are some people who will call upon the wives
of their doctors, but not of their dentists; there are others who will
not call upon the organist who conducts them to the harmonies of Divine
Service on Sunday, but would be very glad to call upon Sir Henry Wood,
who conducts their popular concerts for them during the week. We make
our selection according to our social tastes and aspirations, and
sometimes those social tastes may include a certain amount of moral
judgment. But that moral judgment need not make us interfere; if it
keeps us at a respectful and kindly distance from those whom we cannot
regard with full charity, it keeps us sufficiently out of mischief.
Take the public hangman, for instance. I, personally, would not have
him upon my calling list. I would like to put a graduated tax upon
him and tax him out of existence. I think he is lending himself to a
base department of State service; but I also think that the State is
tempting him; and I think that, in a symbolical way, all of you who
approve of capital punishment ought to put the public hangman upon
your calling list--or not exclude him because of his profession (which
you regard as useful and necessary), but only because he happens to
be personally unattractive to you. If you exclude him, because of
his profession, while you consider his profession a necessity--you
are guilty, I think, of discreditable conduct, and in order to stand
morally right with yourselves you had better go (I speak symbolically)
and leave cards on him to-morrow.
What I mean seriously to say is this: there is a great danger to
moral integrity in any acceptance of social conditions which you
would refuse to interpret into social intercourse. If you believe
prostitution to be necessary for the safety of the home--which is the
doctrine of some--you must accept the prostitute as one who fulfils an
honourable function in the State. If you accept capital punishment,
you must accept the hangman. If you accept meat, you must accept the
slaughterman; if you accept sanitation you must accept the scavenger.
If you accept dividends or profit from sweated labour, you must
accept responsibility for sweated conditions, and for the misery, the
ill-health, the immorality and the degradation which spring from them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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