Ethics · John Dewey
A GENERAL COMPARISON OF CUSTOMARY AND REFLECTIVE MORALITY
Sec. 5. MORAL DIFFERENTIATION AND THE SOCIAL ORDER Two processes went on side by side in the movement we have traced. (1) The primitive group, which was at once a kinship or family, an economic, a political, a religious, an educational, and a moral unit, was broken down and replaced by several distinct institutions, each with its own special character. (2) The moral, which was so largely unreflective that it could be embodied in every custom and observance, became more personal and subjective. The result of this was either that the moral was now more consciously and voluntarily _put into_ the social relations, thereby raising them all to a higher moral level, or that, failing such a leavening of the distinct spheres of the social order, the latter were emptied of moral value and lost moral restraints. We notice very briefly certain illustrations of this, leaving a fuller treatment for Part III.
The differentiation of the moral from the religious is often difficult to trace. For the religious has often been the agency through which certain of the characteristics of the moral have been brought about. The inward and voluntary aspect of the moral, as compared with the verdicts of law or public opinion, has been emphasized. But this is often developed by the religious conceptions of an all-seeing God, an all-wise judge. "Man looketh on the outer appearance, but the Lord looketh upon the heart" has its literary parallels in Xenophon and Plato and Shakspere. The distinction between higher and lower values has received its most impressive symbol in the conception of "another world," in which there is neither pain nor sin, but eternal blessedness and eternal life. Ideals of character, when embodied in divine persons, command love, reverence, and devotion in supreme degree. A society in which love and justice are the law of life has seemed more possible, more potent to inspire sacrifice and enthusiasm, when envisaged as the Kingdom of God. But in all these illustrations we have, not the religious as distinct from the moral, but the religious as modified by the moral and embodying the moral in concrete examples and imagery. We can see the two possible types of development, however, in the concrete instances of the Hebrews and the Greeks. In Israel religion was able to take up the moral ideals and become itself more completely ethical. The prophets of religion were at the same time the moral reformers. But in Greece, in spite of the efforts of some of the great poets, the religious conceptions for the most part remained set and hence became superstition, or emotional orgy, or ecstasy, while the moral found a distinct path of its own. Religion at present is confronting the problem of whether it will be able to take up into itself the newer ethical values--the scientific spirit which seeks truth, the enhanced value of human worth which demands higher types of social justice.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.