Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman [epub read online books .txt] 📗

needs of society, as a whole, are the basis of ethics. In every age and race this may be studied, and a clear connection established always between the virtues and vices of a given people and their local conditions. The principal governing condition in the development of ethics is the economic environment. This may seem strange to one accustomed to consider moral laws as not of this world, and to see how often virtue costs its possessor dear. The relative behavior of a given number of people depends, first, upon the existence of those people. Such conduct as should tend to exterminate them would exterminate their ethics. Such conduct as should tend to preserve and increase them is the only conduct of which ethical value can be predicated. Ethics is, therefore, absolutely conditioned upon life and the maintenance thereof. From the lowest and narrowest view which calls an act right or wrong, according to its immediate effects upon one’s present life, to the clear vision of ultimate results which calls a course of conduct right or wrong, according to its final effects upon one’s eternal life, our ethics, small and great, is the science of human conduct measured by its results.

It is inevitable, then, that in all races we should find those acts whereby men live considered right, and should see a high degree of approval awarded to him who best performs them. In the hunting and fighting period the best hunter and fighter was the best man, praised and honored by his tribe. The virtues cultivated were such as enabled the possessor to hunt and kill most successfully, to maintain himself and be a credit and a help to his friends. Savage virtues are the simple reflection of savage conditions. To be patient and self-controlled was an economic necessity to the hunter: to bear pain and arduous exertion easily was a necessity to the fighter. Therefore, the savage, by precept and example, cultivated these virtues.

In the long agricultural and military periods we see the same thing. In the peasant the virtues of industry and patience were extolled: it takes industry and patience to raise corn. In the soldier the virtues of courage and obedience were extolled, and in everyone the virtue of faith was the prime requisite of the existing religion. It took a great deal of faith to accept the religions of those times. The importance of faith as a virtue declines as religion grows more intelligible and applicable to life. It requires no effort to believe what you can understand and do. Slowly the industrial era dawned and grew, from the weak, sporadic efforts of the cringing packman and craftsman, the common prey of the dominant fighting class, to our colossal industrial organization, in which the soldier is ruthlessly exploited to some financial interests. With this change in economic conditions has changed the scale of virtues.

Physical courage has sunk: obedience, patience, faith, and the rest do not stand as they did. We praise and value today, as always, the virtues whereby we live. Every animal develops the virtues of his conditions: our human distinction is that we add the power of conscious perception and personal volition to the action of natural force. Not only in our own race, but in others, do we call “good” and “bad” those qualities which profit us; and the beasts that we train and use develop, of necessity, the qualities that profit them⁠—as, for instance, in our well-known friend, the dog.

The dog is an animal long since cut off from his natural means of support, and depending absolutely on man for food. As a free, wild dog, he was profited by a daring initiative, courage, ferocity. As a tame, slave dog, he is profited by abject submission, by a crawling will-lessness that grovels at a blow, and licks the foot that kicks it. We have quite made over the original dog; and his moral nature, his spirit, shows the change even more than his body. The force which has accomplished this is economic⁠—a change of base in the source of supplies and the processes of obtaining them.

Let us briefly examine the distinctive virtues of humanity, their order of introduction and development, and see how this one peculiar relation has affected them.

The main distinction of human virtue is in what we roughly describe as altruism⁠—“otherness.” To love and serve one another, to care for one another, to feel for and with one another⁠—our racial adjective, “humane,” implies these qualities. The very existence of humanity implies these qualities in some degree, and the development of humanity is commensurate with their development.

Our one great blunder in studying these things lies in our failure to appreciate the organic necessity of such moral qualities in human life. We have assumed that the practice of these social virtues involved a personal effort and sacrifice, and that there is an irreconcilable contest between the cosmic process of development and the ethical process, as Huxley puts it. Social evolution brings with it the essential qualities of social relation, and these are our much boasted virtues. The natural processes of human intercourse and interrelation develop the qualities without which such intercourse would be impossible; and this development is as orderly, as natural, as “cosmic,” as the processes of organic activity within the individual body. It is as natural for an industrial society to live in peace as for a hunting society to live in war; and this peace is not the result of heroic and self-sacrificing effort on the part of the industrial society; it is the necessity of their condition.

The course of evolution in human ethics is marked by a gradual extension of our perception of common good and evil as distinct from our initial perception of individual good and evil. This becomes very keen in the more socialized natures among us, as in the farseeing devotion of statesmanship, patriotism, and philanthropy. Each of these words shows in its construction that the quality described is social⁠—the statesman, one who thinks