The origin and development of the moral ideasWestermarck, Edward
Philosophy
The origin and development of the moral ideas
Westermarck, Edward
Ethics; Ethics -- History; Prehistoric peoples
The Chinese doctrine of responsibility is to a great extent based
upon family solidarity; in great crimes all the male relatives of the
offender are held responsible for his deed. Every male relative, of
whatever degree, who may be dwelling under the roof of a man guilty of
treason, is doomed to death, with the exception of young boys, who are
allowed their lives, but on the condition that they are made eunuchs
for service in the imperial palace.[119] In ancient Mexico, traitors
and conspirators were not only themselves killed, but their children
and relatives {46} were made slaves to the fourth generation.[120]
According to an Athenian law, a man who committed sacrilege or
betrayed his country was banished with all his children.[121]
Aristotle mentions a case of sacrilege in which "the bones of the
guilty dead were disentombed and cast beyond the borders of Attica;
the living clan were condemned to perpetual exile, and the city was
subsequently purified."[122] The Macedonian law involved in punishment
the kindred of conspirators against the monarch.[123] Dionysius of
Halicarnassus states that some of the Greeks "think it reasonable to
put to death the sons of tyrants together with their fathers, whereas
others punish them with perpetual banishment"; and he contrasts this
with the Roman principle that "the sons shall be exempted from all
punishment, whose fathers are offenders, whether they happen to be the
sons of tyrants, of parricides, or of traitors."[124] But after the
end of the Marsic, and civil wars, this rule was transgressed;[125]
and later on Arcadius, though expressly ordaining that the punishment
of the crime shall extend to the criminal alone,[126] took a different
view of the punishment for treason. By a special extension of his
imperial clemency, he allows the sons of the criminal to live,
although in strict justice, being tainted with hereditary guilt, they
ought to suffer the punishment of their father. But they shall be
incapable of inheritance; they shall be abandoned to the extreme of
poverty and perpetual indigence; they shall be excluded from all
honours and from the participation of religious rites; the infamy of
their father shall ever attend them, and such shall be the misery of
their condition, that life shall be a punishment and death a
comfort.[127] Among the Anglo-Saxons, before the time of Cnut, the
child, even the infant in the cradle, was liable to be sold into
slavery for the payment of penalties incurred by the father, being
"held by the covetous to be equally guilty as if it had
discretion."[128] Even later, the child of an outlaw, following the
condition of the father, also became an outlaw; and this grievance was
only partly remedied by Edward the Confessor, who relieved from the
consequences of the father's outlawry such children as were born
before he was {47} outlawed, but not such as were born afterwards.[129]
During the Middle Ages it was the invariable rule to confiscate the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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