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Integrated Design Engineering: Interdisciplinary and Holistic Product Development Sándor Vajna
Sustainable Design and Manufacturing 2019 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Sustainable Design and Manufacturing KES SDM 19 Peter Ball
1Introduction:ProductionTechnologiesandProduct Development ........................................1 V.Monnerjahn,S.Gramlich,P.Groche,M.Roos, C.Wagner,andT.WeberMartins
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all kinds of antisocial action. And, indeed, the doctrine has been used as a justification and excuse not only of individual self-assertion and egotism but of national and race self-assertion and egotism as well. Modern imperialism has sought to justify aggression upon weaker and so-called “inferior races” by an appeal to this law of evolution as it works on the lower levels of life. Thus the doctrine has in a certain measure fostered national egotism, and has stood right in the way of the development of a true international morality.
Altruism versus egotism in the cosmic process
But these drifts toward egotism in modern philosophy and life induced by evolutionary science are more than compensated by opposing movements of ethical thought created by a truer interpretation of the facts of evolution and a deeper insight into the cosmic process.735
The philosophy of Nietzsche is a strange misreading of nature. To say that self-sacrifice is “in open defiance of nature,” is to overlook the dominant fact in evolution, namely, maternity; for maternity, motherhood, is only another name for self-sacrifice. And it is further to overlook the fact that the principle of coöperation is even more dominant and controlling in the cosmic process than the principle of competition. Social animals, those in which the altruistic instincts are most strongly developed, greatly outnumber the unsocial, solitary animals.736 The Carnivora, those animals that live by preying upon others, are becoming extinct. On the plane of human life this principle of coöperation, of mutual helpfulness, has supplanted, or is gradually supplanting, the lower principle of competition. In the struggle for existence between tribes and peoples those groups have gained supremacy that have developed the strongest social instincts; that is, those within which the principle of coöperation and the virtue of the self-devotion of the individual to the welfare of the whole have been dominant forces in the life of the community. From these facts we are justified in assuming that it is the altruistic and not the egoistic instincts and motives that nature aims to make the permanent and controlling factors in the cosmic evolution.
Again, that nature is ethical in her aim is disclosed by the fact that she has brought forth such a being as man. Her preferences are shown in the preferences of the being she has produced.737 Man prefers good to evil; he loves justice and hates injustice; he reveres the truth and detests falsehood; he recognizes that self-sacrifice is nobler than selfishness; he divines the final triumph of his ethical ideals. In man—at his best—nature reveals her preferences. Man is the answer to the question, “Is Nature good?”738
Viewed thus from a higher standpoint the cosmic process of evolution has reënforced faith in a moral order of the universe and has been an inspiration and an incentive to humanitarian effort.739
Evolution and animal ethics740
In Brahmanic India and in all Buddhist lands religious beliefs have, as we have seen, placed the whole animal creation under the protection of the moral feelings. In ancient Persia it was religious ideas which caused one half of the lower animal world to be regarded as sacred and thus to be brought within the protective pale of morals.
Dogmatic Christianity, falling far short of the ethics of Judaism in this domain, created a vast rift in the organic world between man and the lower animals. The dumb creatures were declared to be made solely for man’s use and enjoyment. Psychical relationship between them and man was denied, though the ancient world had very generally assumed this. Indeed, this attitude of the Christian dogmatists toward the animal creation was made a matter of reproach by their pagan critics.
These teachings were not without their influence on practice. Humanity to animals became a less prominent virtue than it had been in pre-Christian times. The closeness to nature of the lives of the medieval hermits and monks often caused, it is true, a feeling of tenderness to be awakened in them for their “brothers,” the birds and animals, which found expression in many beautiful legends. But in general the attitude of the Christian world toward the lower animals has been unsympathetic.
The doctrine of evolution, however, teaching the kinship of all life, has bridged the gulf between man and the lower animal world, and has brought all dumb creatures more positively than ever before in the Western world under the protection of the moral sentiment. Societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals have sprung up and increased in number as in no other epoch of the Christian era. The new moral feeling condemns all inhumanity to dumb creatures, and looks with disapproval upon such sports as cockfighting, bear baiting, and bullfights, which were favorite amusements only a few generations ago. 741 Hunting for pastime is also coming under the condemnation of this growing moral sentiment. Thus “through the portals of spiritual kinship,” in the words of Professor Evans, ... “our elder brothers enter into the temple of justice, and enjoy the privilege of sanctuary against the wanton or unwitting cruelty hitherto authorized by the assumptions and usurpations of man.”742
Import for morals of psychical research
It is undeniable that the earlier tendency of modern science was agnostic and materialistic. It caused in many minds an attenuation or an absolute destruction of the belief in a supersensuous world and a life after death. The practical effect of this fading from the eyes of men of the vision of another world was, upon certain temperaments, a loss of faith in the ethical character of the cosmic process and a consequent lessening of moral enthusiasm.
This attitude of mind, which is still that of a large class, can be changed only by the reaffirmation by science of the assumptions and teachings of all the great world religions respecting the existence of a supersensuous world and a future life. It is therefore a matter of immeasurable import to morality that these assumptions of religion are coming to be regarded by an ever-growing number of scientists as well founded in reality. Psychical research has given a new trend to large sections of scientific speculation.743 It is no longer crassly materialistic. It even assumes the existence of a supersensuous world. Thus at the conclusion of a careful survey of the evidence of man’s survival gathered by the English Society for Psychical
Research, the distinguished physicist Sir Oliver Lodge writes: “The boundary between the two states—the known and the unknown—is still substantial, but it is wearing thin in places; and like excavators engaged in boring a tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we are beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side.”744
Incontrovertible proof of man’s survival after bodily death would mark the opening of a new era in the moral life of humanity; for, in the minds of many, “ethics can be rendered ethical only on the assumption that there is a reality deeper than the phenomenal world of sense, truer than the world we know and better.”745 It was doubtless a conviction that the future of both religion and morality is in large measure dependent upon a firm belief in a future life which led William Ewart Gladstone to say of psychical research that it is “the most important work which is being done in the world—by far the most important.” Indisputably, the reaction of another world lying clear and distinct in the light of science beyond the frontiers of earth would give new meaning to life and a fresh impulse to the moral progress of the race. The effect upon the moral life of the modern world would be not less profound than that produced upon the moral life of the ancient world by the incoming of Christianity with its glad affirmation of a life beyond the tomb.
4. The Ethics of Theology
The progressive moralization of the idea of God
In an admirable chapter entitled “Ethics and Theology” the author of Moral Evolution, after noting how religious ideas and beliefs exert an influence on moral ideas and conduct, remarks: “Now we are to observe that moral ideals have, in their turn, modified and clarified doctrine, or, in other words, that there has been an ethical development of theology, and that contempt of creed is really the substitution of a moral for an immoral or a nonmoral theology.”746 The same truth is expressed by Newman Smyth in these words: “Reformations have grown out of the
ethical protest of the Christian mind against inherited dogmas. Old theology is always becoming new in the vitalizing influence of ethics.”747
As a result of the growth and refinement of the moral feelings, there has been going on in wide circles in Western Christendom just such a change in men’s conception of the character of God as marked the best Hebrew thought during the later centuries of the history of the people of Israel. The idea of God inherited by the modern from the medieval age was an incongruous blending of ideas derived from three different sources. There was, first, the crude archaic notion of deity derived from the Old Testament records of what conduct in his chosen people Yahweh approved; second, the dogmas of Augustinian theology respecting imputed sin, election, everlasting punishment, and other supposed principles of the divine government; and third, conceptions wholly inconsistent with these drawn from the New Testament narratives of the life and teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth.
Gradually, through the growth of the moral feelings, this conception of the divine character has been purged of its grosser, archaic, and immoral elements. The early Hebrew ideas have been rejected as the immature and unworthy notions of deity of a race still on a low plane of religious development; the Calvinistic idea of God has become “the supreme incredibility”; while the Gospel teaching of deity has been received by the instructed reason and conscience as the only credible ideal of the divine.748
Since, as we have repeatedly had brought to our attention, religious ideas exert a profound influence on moral ideas and on conduct, this moralization of the conception of the divine character has deep significance for the progressive purification and refinement of the moral life of man.
The moralization of the conception of future punishment
Closely connected with these changes in men’s idea of God, indeed forming a part of that conception, are the changes which have taken place in their ideas of the divine government in the hereafter.
At different stages of our study we have noted how the classifications and arrangements of the invisible world are the work of the moral faculty, and how the developing moral feelings of the historic peoples have, with the lapse of time, ever modified anew the topography and moralized afresh the government of the world of spirits.749
Now one of the most important modifications ever effected in man’s conceptions of the other world was brought about by the Protestant Reformation. The reformers abolished purgatory, and thus left only two separate realms, heaven and hell, in the world of souls. But in abolishing purgatory and thereby making all suffering in the hereafter punitive and eternal, and in failing to recognize gradations of guilt in human sin by consigning all evildoers, unbelievers, and misbelievers to the same awful and everlasting torments, the reformers made still more unethical the government which the popular medieval imagination had created for the unseen world.
The gradual clarification and growing sensitiveness of the moral feelings could not long leave unchallenged such a grossly immoral notion of the divine government. During the last two generations a notable change has passed over men’s conceptions of the netherworld of spirits. The hell of the reformers’ imagination has become, like much else in the Augustinian theology, “the supreme incredibility.” The blurring of that awful vision is one of the most significant changes which, during the Christian era, have passed over that world which is at once the creation and the creator of human morality
Exchange in rank of the theological and the natural Gospel virtues
The advance in religious ethics during the last few decades is registered again in the exchange in rank of the theological and the natural gospel virtues in the moral ideal of Protestant Christendom. During this period there has taken place here a genuine “transvaluation of moral values.” Many representative religious teachers have come to assign a dominant place in the ethical standard to the natural social virtues, and have relegated to a lower place the purely theological virtues,
such as right religious belief and ritual observances. In the case of many the rejection of that part of the moral code resting upon theological dogmas is as complete as was the rejection by Christianity of the morality based on the ceremonial laws of the Jews. With these the saving virtue is no longer acceptance of a prescribed creed, but loving, self-denying service of humanity.750
This transvaluation of moral values within the Church itself is one of the most important movements going on in the moral life of the modern world.
Extension to theological ethics of the principle of individual responsibility
Further illustration of progress in Church ethics in recent times is found in the extension of the principle of individual responsibility to the domain of religion.751 It will be recalled how completely the law of collective responsibility dominates the morality of primitive peoples.752 With the growth and clearing of the moral sense the injustice of this is perceived, and the principle of individual responsibility comes to be established.
This moral movement is consummated earlier in the civil than in the religious domain; that is, the civil-law codes are first modified in accordance with the demands of the truer ethical feeling, and not until later does the religious code, more conservative, undergo a like change. Thus gradually during the medieval time the civil law of the more advanced nations of Western Christendom abrogated the principle of collective responsibility, while the ecclesiastical code retained it far into the nineteenth century. During the last fifty years, however, the best conscience of the Church has rejected the principle as the embodiment of a gross inequity The doctrine that all the generations of men sinned in the first parent and justly suffer for his transgression has been repudiated by the modern instructed conscience as incredible, untrue, and immoral.
This repudiation of the principle of collective responsibility by the ethics of religion harmonizes in this respect Church morality with the morality of the civil codes of the civilized world, and marks the
consummation of an ethical evolution which, commencing in the dawn of civilization, covers all the millenniums of human history.
5. Social Ethics: the New Social Conscience
(a) As manifested in the history of the African slave trade
By the phrase “social conscience,” as we shall use it here, we mean those ethical feelings and judgments which cover the relations of master and slave and the relations of society to its unfortunate and erring members.
In the entire history of the moral evolution of humanity there is no chapter which reveals so plainly the upward trend of the ethical movement in civilization as that which tells the story of the beginnings and the final suppression of the African slave trade, and of the rise and fall of the institution of negro slavery among Christian peoples.753 Restricting our survey for the moment to the slave trade as distinct from slavery, the amazing fact which meets us here at the outset is that until late in the modern period the peoples of Western Christendom had practically no conscience whatsoever in regard to the African slave trade, and this notwithstanding that the conscience of the age was in many other matters true and sensitive. The whole subject lay practically outside the realm of morals. The slave trade was looked upon as a perfectly legitimate business.754 Practically no one thought it wrong to go to Africa, kidnap or purchase a shipload of the natives, bring them in stifling holds—where sometimes half the unhappy victims died on the passage—to the West Indies or to the Spanish and English mainland of the Americas and sell them as slaves.755 What little opposition to the traffic existed, arose in general from other than feelings of moral disapproval.756
The movement for the abolition of the trade constitutes an important phase of the social and moral life, particularly of England and of the English colonies in America, during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the nineteenth. In England
the wave of humanitarian feeling which swept away the obstacles set in the way of the abolition of the traffic by selfish interests was raised by the great religious revival led by Whitefield and the Wesleys. The leaders of the reform were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. After twenty years of agitation a bill was passed abolishing the trade (1807). This marked as great a moral victory as ever was won in the English Parliament, for it was the aroused moral sentiment of the nation which was the main force that carried the reform measure through the Houses.
In America there had arisen among the Quakers of Pennsylvania, even before the Revolution, a protest against the trade on purely moral grounds. By the time the Federal Convention met in 1787 sufficient sentiment had been developed in the matter to secure the adoption of a provision in the Constitution to the effect that the importation of slaves should cease in 1808. From that year on, the slave trade, as distinct from slavery, was under the ban both of the law and of the public conscience; but it continued to be carried on clandestinely until the Civil War.
(b) As manifested in the antislavery movement
Even before the consummation of the movement for the suppression of the negro slave trade there had sprung up an agitation for the suppression of the negro-slave system itself. England abolished slavery in her colonies in 1833, paying £20,000,000 for the emancipation of 800,000 slaves in her West India possessions. In the United States there was very little antislavery feeling prior to 1830.757 At that time the great majority of the peoples of the Northern as well as of the Southern states, if they did not look upon negro slavery as wholly proper and right, at least regarded as reprehensible any interference with the institution where established. Even the Church in general denounced the abolitionists as infidels and pronounced their conduct fanatical and wicked.758 But notwithstanding this opposition the abolition movement and the movement for the restriction of slavery to the states where already established gained impetus steadily, and the heated debate led up quickly to the Civil War.
The most significant thing in that passage of our history is not the revolt of the South, but the revolt of the conscience of the North. Had there been no moral revolt in the North, there would have been no slaveholders’ revolt in the South.
The development of moral feeling respecting the wrongfulness of slavery did not cease with the emancipation of the slaves as a result of the Civil War. Indeed, with the reform an accomplished fact, the clarification of the moral sense of the people has gone on uninterruptedly until a gulf has come to separate the present-day conscience of the great majority of the instructed and thinking classes in both sections of the Union from the conscience of the same classes one or two generations ago.
(c) As manifested in society’s treatment of its unfortunate and delinquent members
The record of society’s treatment of its dependent and erring members forms another inspiring chapter in the history of the growth of the new social conscience. In a little over one hundred years the Christian world has advanced from harsh vagrant laws to associated charities; from the burning of witches to asylums for the insane; from noisome dungeons to penitentiaries and institutions of rescue and correction.759 The numerous and costly private and public institutions established and maintained by the new humanitarian sentiment is one of the most distinctive characteristics, ethically viewed, of modern civilization. So multiform are the expressions of this new spirit that it is impossible in so brief a survey as the present to exhibit in more than barest outline this phase of the ethical evolution.
The recent history of charity, taken in the sense of relief given to the poor, is a record of change both in motive and method. There has always been a great deal of almsgiving in the world, since this has been a duty especially enjoined by religion. But because charity has had this religious motive, it has often been sullied by self-love, alms being given not so much for the sake of the poor as for the benefit of the soul of the donor. In recent times this religious motive has become less operative, but the amount of almsgiving has
undoubtedly increased, and we are justified in the conclusion that it is motived as never before by genuine altruistic feeling. It is probably true, however, that there is less indiscriminate, emotional almsgiving now than formerly. But there is greater “social compunction,” a deeper sense of society’s responsibility for the existence of poverty, and an earnest inquiry respecting the primary social causes of it. Hence effort is directed not merely to the immediate relief of want and misery through organized charity, but to the cure of poverty through the removal of the causes of destitution. At this point the investigations and labors of the philanthropist merge with those of the sociologist, the economist, and the statesman.
In society’s treatment of the defective and the insane, as compared with its treatment of these same classes scarcely more than a century ago, is registered an ethical progress truly remarkable. A hundred years or less ago in England and in all the European countries the idiot and the oddly formed human prodigy were exhibited to afford amusement to the people. The growth in humanitarian feeling has rendered all this a thing of the past. “The passing of the freak is not a casual incident in the history of the circus, but a striking illustration of the tendency which has been in progress for centuries toward the humanizing of our amusements.... To spend a merry afternoon at the madhouse watching the antics of the maniacs in their chains seemed natural and reasonable to civilized Englishmen not so many generations ago. It has become absolutely unthinkable.”760 The history of the stage offers like testimony. “Not so very long ago,” writes David Belasco, in giving advice to the amateur playwright, “the entrance of a cripple or a hunchback was sufficient to get a laugh from the audience. In these humanitarian times there is no fun to be made out of physical deformity.”761
But it is in society’s treatment of the criminal class that there is to be traced the greatest progress in humanitarianism. In the preNorman period in England the punishments for crime were characterized by a barbarity incredibly callous. “Men branded on the forehead, without hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an
example of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a churl.... The eyes were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper lips were cut off; the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there is reason to believe, the whole body was flayed alive.”762
What was true of English law was true of the laws of every other European country. And there was little or no essential amelioration of these savage law systems before the last quarter of the eighteenth century Seventy thousand executions took place in England during the reign of Henry VIII.763 “In the reign of William III there does not appear to have been any consciousness that the penal laws were, in many respects, disgraceful to any community but a tribe of savages.”764
If a definite point of departure of the movement for the humanizing of the criminal laws of Europe and the putting of the treatment of criminals on an ethical basis be sought, it will be found in the life and writings of the Italian jurist Beccaria,765 who maintained that the effect of cruel punishments is to increase crime by indurating the sensibilities of the people.766
A great impulse to the humanitarian movement initiated by Beccaria was given by the devoted labors of the great philanthropist John Howard (1726–1790), who, with his eyes opened to the awful conditions of prison life through official connection with Bedford jail, where Bunyan dreamed, spent his life in visiting all lands inspecting prisons and jails and dungeons and lazar houses, and “taking the gauge and dimension of misery, depression, and contempt.”
The crusade of John Howard marks the real beginning of practical prison reform, which has “transformed prisons from hells into hospitals for recovery,” and revolutionized the entire theory and administration of judicial punishment.767 The aim and purpose of the modern penitentiary system is to develop self-respect and manhood.768 To this end the lock-step and striped clothing have
The development of international morality foreshadowed by the earlier development of intranational morality been abolished in many prisons, and along with them all cruel and humiliating punishments. The establishment of reform schools, reformatories, and penitentiaries, the introduction of the indeterminate sentence, the proposed creation of courts of rehabilitation, and the founding of the juvenile court,769 mark the ethical advance which the last century has witnessed in this domain.770
6. International Ethics: the New International Conscience
One of the most significant of phylogenetic laws is formulated by Haeckel in these words: “The short, quick history of an individual organism is a compressed story of the long, slow history of the species to which the organism belongs.” Now this law holds good for the history of the human species as well as for that of the lower tribes of life. And here it embraces not only the history of the bodily but also that of the psychical development. Consequently the law under which the moral evolution of man is going on may be stated in this way: The history of the development of conscience within a social group (clan, tribe, nation) is a compressed story of the long, slow history of the development of conscience in humanity at large, that is to say, between the groups composing the human race. And since law codes, private and public, are essentially embodiments of the growing and clarifying conscience, this mode of the ethical evolution may be expressed in strictly juristic terms as follows: “The development of international law follows step by step the earlier development of municipal law.”771
With this law in mind we may define moral progress in the international domain as the gradual assimilation of international to intranational ethics, or, in other words, the growing conformity of the standard of public morality to that of private morality
The gradual moralizing of the relations of the advanced to the backward races: The White Man’s Burden
As thus defined, a special expression of progress in international morality is found in the growing recognition by governments that the obligations of the strong toward the weak are the same for nations as for individuals. A public conscience that is like the best private conscience is constantly becoming more and more a regulative force in the relations of the superior to the inferior races. 772 Unhappily that exploitation of the weaker by the stronger races, which makes up so large a part of the history of the past ages, still goes on; but it is, in general, less grossly unethical than ever before, while with each succeeding generation the protest of the common conscience of the civilized world against all unfair and oppressive treatment of the backward by the more advanced races grows more earnest and insistent.
Good illustrations of this quickening of the public conscience are found in England’s dealings with India and China. In the year 1813 a resolution declaring that England’s first duty in legislating for India was to promote the interests of the people of India was proposed in Parliament, but was defeated. Twenty years later (in 1833) this principle was definitely embodied in a Government of India Act.773 In 1841–1842 England, at the end of what has been justly characterized as “one of the most dishonorable and detestable wars that ever stained her annals,” compelled China to keep her ports open to the iniquitous opium traffic. Two generations later (in 1906) the House of Commons by resolution unanimously declared the Indian opium trade with China to be “morally indefensible,” and requested the Government to bring it to a speedy end.774 Five years later England entered into an agreement with China, according to the terms of which the importation of Indian opium into China will cease on or before 1917. This is a notable triumph of the new international conscience.
Our dealings with the island of Cuba since its liberation—opinions may differ in regard to the rightness of our original act of intervention —affords another encouraging illustration of the progress the world has made in international morality And the same is true of our
dealings with the Filipinos, notwithstanding the utterly painful character of the earlier chapters of the story. There has been no responsible official utterance on this subject that has represented our task in our acquired dependency as other than a public trust, as a guardianship to be exercised solely in the interest of the Filipinos as the nation’s wards. The better moral feeling of the nation, intensified in many by deep compunction, has indignantly repudiated all those unofficial utterances which have cynically represented the islands as an inviting field for selfish exploitation by American capitalists, and has demanded that our government in the islands should be inspired and controlled by the spirit of unselfish service. And this ethical spirit has in general marked our administration of the affairs of the islanders. “I believe that I am speaking with historic accuracy and impartiality,” declares ex-President Roosevelt, “when I say that the American treatment of and attitude toward the Filipino people, in its combination of disinterested ethical purpose and sound common sense, marks a new and long stride forward in advance of all steps that have hitherto been taken along the path of wise and proper treatment of weaker by stronger races.” This ethical purpose is especially manifested in the sending out, in the early period of our rule, of five hundred young American teachers to carry to this deeply wronged people the best we have to give—a national act without a parallel in all the history of the past.
It inspires hope in the future to note how far this last step forward carries us away from the starting point on this line of ethical advance. At first the fate of the weaker race was extermination or slavery; then its fate was to be reduced to the condition of a tributary; still later, to be subjected to commercial and industrial exploitation by the conquering people; and lastly, to be made, in theory if not yet in actual practice, the beneficiaries of a benevolent self-sacrificing service, which finds lofty expression in Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden:
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need.
This sentiment would scarcely have found any such response in the common heart and conscience of any past age of human history as it finds in the heart and conscience of our own. But, it must be admitted, the sentiment embodies an ideal yet to be realized, rather than something already attained.
Progress in war ethics: Hugo Grotius
But it is in the changes effected in men’s feelings respecting what is morally permissible in warfare that is to be observed the most encouraging progress in international ethics in modern times. This progressive clarification of the moral consciousness may be distinctly traced from the close of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany In no period of Christian history had war been waged with greater ferocity or with greater contempt of moral rules than during the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What little gains had been made in the humanization of war during preceding eras seem to have been lost.
This barbarizing of war, however, produced, as all retrogressions in morality do if the moral life is still on the whole virile and sound, a reaction which found expression in the epoch-making work, De Jure Belli et Pacis, by the distinguished Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius775 —a work that has been pronounced “the most beneficent of all volumes ever written not claiming divine inspiration.”776 The aim of Grotius was not to abolish war,—he did not think universal peace an attainable ideal,—but simply to moderate its excesses and lessen its atrocities, to set limits to the rights of the victor. The age of nationalism had come, and an ethics for nations in their mutual relations must be formulated. Grotius sought a law that all would recognize as binding. The law to which he appealed was the Stoic Law of Nature.777 As the Stoics had made this law the instrument for the reform of the Roman civil law, so now would Grotius make it the instrument for the reform of the laws of war.778
The influence of the work of Grotius was profound and widespread. From the time of its appearance dates a new departure in the humanization of war, and a fresh moral advance in
The humane provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the establishment of the Red Cross Society, which on the field of battle cares without discrimination for the stricken, are inspiring illustrations of the growth of this new humanitarianism.
Movement for the abolition of war— a moral issue
Now this growing sensitiveness of the public conscience which has effected so many mitigations of the barbarities of war has resulted in a widespread and insistent demand that war between civilized nations shall not merely be humanized but that it shall be abolished, that disputes between nations shall be settled as disputes between individuals are settled—by courts of justice.
Without doubt many influences, political, social, and economic,781 have concurred in creating this great world-wide movement, and in calling into existence the Hague Conferences and the international and national peace congresses of the last decade or two; but among all these forces and motives the one of greatest potency is the awakened and instructed conscience of the world in regard to the criminality of war as an established and legalized method of settling controversies between civilized nations. It is this new conscience and not the new dreadnought to which we must look to abolish war and to keep it abolished. For, like the question of slavery two generations ago, this question of war has become a moral issue, and, like the slavery question, it will give the world no rest until settled in accordance with the demands of the new conscience.
War an abrogation of international law.779 “His ideas,” says Dr. Andrew D. White, “found their way into current discussion, into systems of law, into treaties; and as generations rolled by, the world began to find itself, it hardly knew how, less and less cruel, until men looked back on war as practiced in his time as upon a hideous dream—doubtless much as men in future generations will look back upon the wars of our times.”780
the ordinary moral code
Especially intolerable to the more sensitive conscience of to-day is the assumption that nations may at will suspend or abrogate the ordinary moral code. For, as Lord Morley truly says, “To declare war is to suspend not merely habeas corpus but the Ten Commandments, and some other good commandments besides.”782 That is to say, war is a suspension of a great part of those rules of morality which, slowly and painfully formulated by the growing moral consciousness of man, have become the guide and standard of ordinary conduct. In war the conscience of the commander is inhibited. “The commander who lost a battle through the activity of his moral nature,” once cynically declared United States Senator Ingalls, “would be the derision and jest of history.” And that is so. The world has not yet ceased to deride those Jews who lost their city to the Romans because their consciences forsooth would not let them fight on the Sabbath day. War cannot be conducted by the rules of ordinary morality.
With a great part of the ordinary moral code suspended, there is substituted for it a war code every maxim of which reveals its archaic, vestigial character, stamps it as a survival from an early savage stage of human development, as a legacy from a long-past age of the historical evolution when morality was as yet only an intratribal thing, that is, when men felt that they owed duties only to members of their own tribe or social group.783
Unfavorable reaction of the ethics of war upon the ethics of peace
In many ways, some obvious and others subtle and hidden, war works “moral damage” to society, but we here confine ourselves to emphasizing merely the moral loss and hurt resulting from the reaction of its low archaic code upon the more advanced peace code. For, as Professor J. Neville Figgis justly observes, “It is impossible to remove the very notion of morality from international affairs without in the long run undermining it in private life.”784 What is regarded as right and proper in war will come to be regarded as right and proper in peace. That is to say, the maintenance of a double standard in morals is just as impossible as the maintenance of a double
standard in money By a sort of Gresham’s Law the lower standard will drive out the higher or drag it down to its own low level.
This reaction of the war code upon the ordinary moral code is well illustrated by what takes place when society metes out to persons convicted of crime ferocious and barbarous punishments. In the medieval centuries in Europe when the penalties for offenses were often fiendishly cruel mutilations of the body, such as cutting off the ears, the hands, the lips, or the nose, this judicial procedure was imitated to such a degree by individuals seeking private vengeance that mayhem, that is, the mutilation of an enemy by depriving him of a member, became a crime of such frequent occurrence that it was necessary to make special and severe enactments against it.
785 After society stopped mutilating the bodies of offenders against its laws, this offense of mayhem virtually dropped out of the calendar of private crimes.
In a similar way does the war ethics of the nations react disastrously upon private morality. The slow moral progress of European civilization during the last two or three centuries, compared with its wonderful intellectual and material progress, may with little hesitation be attributed in large part to the unfavorable influence of its war ethics upon its everyday moral code. The war code is applied to politics, to ordinary business, and to the relations of industrial classes. The politician as a politician does a hundred things he would not think of doing as a man, and justifies his acts by appealing to the adage, “Politics is war.” The business man, citing the like maxim, “Business is business,” which means that competition is a species of war and must be conducted on war principles, flings his Christian code to the winds and, pitilessly pushing his competitor to the wall, compasses his financial ruin. It is the same in the struggle between labor and capital. In this struggle acts of violence, like those of the McNamaras, are committed, and the persons who do these things absolve themselves in the forum of their own consciences on the plea that a state of war exists between capital and labor and that this justifies the adoption of war methods. Here doubtless we have the moral psychology of the suffragette movement in England. Indeed, the leaders of this startling
propaganda tell us frankly that they are waging war, and that this justifies their suspension of the ordinary rules of conduct. In the light of this avowal the alleged inscrutability of their acts disappears. The movement is simply another illustration of the truth that so long as nations act under the illusion that they may without moral wrong employ violence to obtain justice, just so long will there be individuals who with good conscience will seek justice through violence.
At the same time, however, these same classes and persons who thus in various important spheres of activity adopt the lower standard of war ethics, in all other domains and relationships—in the family, in the Church, and in social intercourse—act in accordance with the higher moral code. The result is a loose synthesis of the two systems, the establishment of a sort of bi-moral code made up of rules and practices mutually inconsistent and irreconcilable. The moral damage resulting from such moral confusion is beyond estimate. It is the inconsistencies and hypocrisies involved in such a bi-moral code that is one ground of Nietzsche’s bitter attack on the ethics of Christendom. Yet, as Professor Figgis says, “Nietzsche deserves the gratitude of all friends of humanity for the service he has done in ... showing that the whole sphere of private life cannot in the long run be different from the ideals accepted in public affairs.”786
Obsolescence of war as a school of morals: the war system an anachronism in modern civilization
The arraignment of the war system by the awakening conscience of the civilized world has led its advocates to lay the stress of their argument on the moral uses of war. They eulogize war as the nurse of the sturdy, heroic virtues, and hence as an indispensable agency in the moral education of the race. War has, it is true, in past ages been “the supreme theater of human strenuousness,” and it may be true, as is assumed by Professor William James in his Moral Equivalent of War, that the qualities of courage, fortitude, and self-devotion to common interests were in the beginning evoked and fostered in the race by war; but whatever may have been the moral uses of war in the past
