GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

448
ETHICS
first, an answer in terms of social ethics, stresses the obvious
influence of training and environment. All human beings,
I have suggested, possess a natural tendency to approve
of certain characters as moral and of certain forms of
conduct as right; but what characters they will approve
of, what actions they will call right, depends very largely
upon their environment and training. As Plato insisted,
the ordinary man does not make his morals any more than
he makes his politics or his religion for himself; he takes
them ready made, as he takes his boots and his clothes,
from the social shop. If he is born in Balham, he thinks
it wrong to have more than one wife, and looks upon
Mahommedans as heretics; if in Baghdad, he considers
it right to have four wives, provided he can afford their maintenance
and believes that Allah is God and Mahommed is
His prophet; if in contemporary Russia, that Capitalism is
that there is no God and that Karl Marx is His
wicked,
prophet To this extent and in this sense morality is topographical,
what a man will think right and good depending
on the latitude and longitude of the house in which he
happens to be born.
Where there are so many conflicting opinions about right
and good, they cannot, it is obvious, all be correct; some of
them, at least, must be mistaken in the sense that they
will take to be good that which is not and ignore the good
which is* These mistakes of insight are often due to faulty
training and to bad environment. As Aristotle pointed
out, it is impossible to be a really good man in a really
bad State, 1 if only because the content of one's morality
comes to one so largely from the community to which one
belongs.
Nor is it only for mistakes of insight that social-environment
may be responsible. As I have several times had
occasion to point out, the ethical problem is a double one;
not only may a man fail to see his duty, he may fail,
through weakness of will, to do the duty that he sees.
Now the will can, it is obvious, be strengthened by right
1 See Chapter IV, pp. 91,92.