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Lesson IX: More About Dharma.407
heard, sooner or later. No people have a yoke imposed upon them, unless
their necks are bent to receive the yoke—when they outgrow the yoke, it is
thrown off. We are speaking of the average of the people, remember, not
of individuals. So you see, the laws of a country generally represent the
needs of the average citizen of that country, and are the best of which he is
capable, and consequently, those which he needs at the present moment—
tomorrow he may be worthy of and need better forms. The law is fallible
and imperfect, but is necessary as a supporting pillar to the temple of ethics.
It is the average conception of ethics, crystallized into a temporary shape,
for the guidance of the people making the shape. Every law is a compromise
and bears more or less upon some one. The theory is “the greatest good to
the greatest number.”
The advocates of the Utilitarian school of ethics point out that man calls
a thing “wrong” because it gives him pain or discomfort to have that thing
done to him. For instance, a man doesn’t like to be murdered or robbed,
and consequently gains the idea that it is a crime for any one to kill or rob,
and gradually enacts laws to prevent and punish the same, he agreeing to
refrain from robbing and killing in return for the immunity from such things
granted him by the general acceptance of the conception of the thing as
“wrong,” and the enacting of laws prohibiting the same. In the same way he
sees that the community is harmed by the neglect of a man to support his
children, and so he grows to call that thing “wrong,” and moral sentiment
causes laws to be passed to punish and prevent this offense. And so on—
this is the reasoning of the Utilitarian, and his reasoning is all right so far as it
goes, for indeed this is the history of laws and lawmaking, as well as one side
of the growing conceptions of right and wrong. But there is something more
to it than this selfish idea (which though selfish is right in its time and place,
as, indeed all selfish things are or have been). The Utilitarian overlooks the
fact that the unfoldment of the race soul causes it to feel the pain of others,
more and more, and when that pain of others grows intolerable, then new
ideas of right and wrong present themselves—new laws are passed to meet