I appreciate very highly the honour which you have done me by inviting me to join the ranks of the thinkers and scholars who have lectured on the Gifford Foundation; but the feeling which is uppermost in my mind as I rise to address you is an overwhelming sense of insufficiency to the trust which you have so generously reposed in me. And this feeling is intensified by the recollection of the succession of illustrious philosophers who have taught in this place—Ferrier and Pringle-Pattison, Henry Jones and Bernard Bosanquet, Burnet and Taylor and Stout—men from whom I have tried to learn, but whose standards I cannot hope to maintain worthily.

In considering how I should try to carry out the duties of the lectureship, I thought that I could best repay your confidence by concentrating on one of the many topics prescribed by Lord Gifford rather than by attempting to construct a metaphysical system which would cover them all. In making my selection from these topics, I was guided by two considerations which Lord Gifford placed in the forefront of his requirements: (1) that the lecturer should speak from genuine conviction—that the knowledge which he seeks to impart should be ‘true and felt, not merely nominal’; and (2) that it should contribute to human well-being. Now among the convictions to which I have been led by the experiences of a lifetime one stands out sharp and clear. It is that of the goods which can be achieved by man the greatest, indeed the only one which is absolutely and unconditionally good, is moral goodness—the goodness of doing that which he believes to be right because he believes it to be right. I might have started from this conviction, tried to work out its metaphysical and theological implications, and argued that moral goodness is the path to God; but I have decided rather to consider the nature of our moral convictions themselves, to state them as clearly and simply as I can, and to examine their grounds with the sincerity and frankness which Lord Gifford rightly requires of those who lecture on the Foundation which he created. Accordingly, from among the topics which he prescribes, I have chosen as the subject which I wish to discuss with you, “The Knowledge of the Nature and Foundation of Ethics or Morals and of all Obligations and Duties thence Arising”. In dealing with this subject I shall try to take account of the relevant evidence from all sources; but I propose to pay special attention to the light thrown on it by the researches and conclusions of recent social anthropologists. In this first lecture I want to indicate the nature of the problem, and to explain why, and in what ways, I regard the work of the anthropologists as relevant to the solution of it.

Our enquiry concerns the nature of morality, and in order to get the enquiry started, morality or moral conduct must be identified as a definite phenomenon. In practice this does not present any real difficulty. There are certain general characteristics of moral conduct which enable us to identify it sufficiently for our present purpose. No doubt these characteristics provide only a provisional and tentative description, which will have to be made more exact as our enquiry proceeds, but they will suffice to set our enquiry going.

In order that there may be morality, or that conduct may be regarded as moral, there must be not only behaviour or action or conduct. There must be reflection on behaviour, ideas about and attitudes towards action, and beliefs about conduct, which find expression in judgements that the actions are right or wrong, the conduct good or bad. Moral conduct then is the conduct of selves, self-conscious persons, beings who know what they are doing and have reasons for doing it; conduct pervaded by ideas and ideals, motives and attitudes, in the light of which judgement can be passed on it.

There are at least three points of view from which we may look at any piece of conduct, and from each of them moral judgements may be passed on it. It involves the pursuit of certain ends or the initiation of certain states of affairs; there are certain rules or principles with which it complies or fails to comply; and it is the expression or manifestation of a certain spirit or attitude of mind. Many ethical theorists tend to regard one of these aspects as more fundamental, and try to express or explain the others in terms of it; but, in fact, not only the moral life as a whole but every piece of moral conduct has all three aspects. It is the pursuit of an end or ends, from a motive or motives, according to a rule or rules. These three aspects give us the three fundamental ethical concepts, the right, the good and the morally good. What these are and how they are related to one another is one of the main questions which ethics has to answer. Moreover, as we shall see later, the principles on which judgements are passed on ends as good or bad, on rules as right or wrong, on motives or attitudes of mind as morally good or bad, are different; and another of the main problems of ethics is to discover what these principles are, what authority they possess, and whence it is derived; how we get to know them, and what sort of knowledge we have of them. These, it seems to me, are some of the main questions which we have to discuss, if we would comply with Lord Gifford's request to consider the knowledge of the foundation of morals or ethics.

From the point of view of trying to discover the nature of morality, we may say then that a people's morality1 is the way they think about, or the attitude they adopt towards conduct, the beliefs and convictions they entertain about actions as right or wrong, good or bad. But not all judgements about conduct as right or wrong are moral judgements; not all good ends are moral ends; not all right rules are moral rules. We have, therefore, to ask which of them are moral, and how they are to be distinguished from those which are not. For example, there are right and wrong ways of constructing a road, conducting an argument, carrying on a business, or playing a game; and there are good and bad roads, arguments, businesses and games. But however good a road may be, and however right the method of constructing it, we may say that the conduct of those constructing it is morally bad if they are building it, let us say, as a means of invading the territory of a peaceful neighbouring people. However good a business may be, however well conducted from an economic point of view, however high the profits to its promoters, and the standard of living which it provides for its employees, however urgent even the demand for its products, we may say it is morally bad if it is engaged in, say, the manufacture of opium. However well a game is played, we may say that the conduct of those engaged in playing it is morally wrong, if in playing it they are amusing themselves at the expense of neglecting important duties. In other words, the goodness or rightness of such conduct, whether in engineering, industry or sport, is relative to a particular purpose or point of view, and the purpose itself may be morally wrong; the point of view may be too limited to give us a final judgement. The judgement which we pass may therefore have to be reconsidered and, it may be, reversed from a more inclusive point of view. Thus the rightness or goodness which we attribute to such conduct is conditional or hypothetical. The utmost we would be justified in saying is: if it is right to build a road, it should be made according to sound engineering principles; if it is right to carry on a business, it should be conducted on sound economic lines; if it is right to play a game, it should be done according to the proper rules and in the right spirit. But in certain circumstances it may not be right to do these things at all. Moreover, even if it is right to do them, considerations other than those dealt with by engineering or economics are relevant in deciding how they ought to be done.

Now the moral judgement differs from these hypothetical judgements of rightness or goodness in being absolute or categorical. It is not subject to review by any higher court; for there is no higher court to which appeal can be made against it. The end which is morally good is ultimately good; the judgement that a course of action is morally right is a final judgement. It may, of course, be mistaken and on further consideration it may have to be reversed, but only in favour of another moral judgement, that is, a judgement which appeals to or is based on the same ultimate principle, not in the sense in which the moral judgement overrides the economic or legal or other relative judgement. Other aspects of the relation between the moral and these other judgements we shall have to consider later. All I want to note at present is that the distinguishing characteristic of the moral judgement is that it is the final judgement, the principle to which it appeals the ultimate principle, the good in the light of which it is passed the ultimate good. The work of ethics is to discover and make explicit what good or system of goods is ultimately or morally good; what principles or rules are ultimately or morally right; what motives or attitudes of mind are morally good.

We may say, then, that a people's morality consists of the beliefs and convictions they entertain about conduct as ultimately or morally right or wrong, ultimately or morally good or bad. The judgements in which these beliefs and convictions find expression supply us with our data for the study of morality. Of such data there is no scarcity. We find them by introspection in the beliefs we ourselves entertain, the emotional attitudes we adopt and the judgements of approval or disapproval which we pass on our own and other people's actions. We find them also in the judgements passed and the attitudes adopted by those around us, and in the literature and laws and institutions of our people. It is true that even if we confine our study to such data, that is, to the deliverances of the moral consciousness as we find it among ourselves, the data of ethics are not so definite or precise as those of most other sciences. For some of our ordinary moral beliefs and convictions may be, and indeed often are, confused and inconsistent one with another; and the judgements in which they find expression can, therefore, be only partially true. Accordingly, we have to subject our moral judgements to critical scrutiny and only those which survive this scrutiny provide the real moral facts, by which ethical theories are suggested and by reference to which they are tested and either confirmed or disproved. No doubt, the distinction between facts or data and hypotheses or theories is difficult to draw in any field, but the difficulty is greater in the case of moral phenomena than it is in the case of the phenomena with which most other sciences are concerned; and it seems to me that many ethical theorists pay insufficient attention to the great importance and the real difficulty of this work of discovering moral facts. This work is a necessary preliminary to that of ethical science strictly so-called. The latter is concerned to make explicit the principle or principles on which considered moral judgements proceed, and to formulate a theory by which moral facts can be explained. A pre-condition of its work, therefore, is the possession of considered moral judgements or moral facts. It is the difficulty of getting these that seems to me insufficiently recognised, the difficulty of being sure that we have eliminated all influences due to local, environmental or cultural conditions, and so have an authentic deliverance of the moral consciousness.2

What I want to insist on at present, however, is that though it is natural to begin, and not unusual to end, enquiries into the nature of morality with the study of our own moral judgements and those of our neighbours, they are only part of the data of ethics; and that, therefore, in view of the difficulty of being sure that any given moral judgement is an authentic deliverance of the moral consciousness, it is desirable not only to scrutinise our own moral judgements carefully, but also to make the widest possible survey of the moral judgements of men of different times and cultures, so that we may be able to check the authenticity of the moral judgements of some by those of others. For morality is a phenomenon which has appeared in a great variety of forms, of which the system of moral ideas and beliefs and attitudes of Western Europe or even of Western civilisation is only one. There are also, even at the present time, such moralities as those of India and China and contemporary primitive peoples. Each of these is, or at least contains, not merely certain kinds of conduct, but also certain systems of judgements about conduct and attitudes with regard to conduct, and these differ in many ways from one another and from our own. Moreover, morality is a historical phenomenon which has appeared in a large variety of forms in the past, such, for example, as the morality of the Hebrews and Greeks, the Egyptians and Babylonians and Persians; so that what we find is not morality but moralities.3 And, when we consider the different moralities, we are impressed not only with how much they have in common, but also with how profoundly they differ.

Leaving for the moment the fundamental question to which this multiplicity of moralities gives rise, namely, how are we to discover morality among the moralities, what I want to emphasise is that all these moralities, past and present, and all the moral judgements in which they find expression, or at least all the considered moral judgements among them, are equally data of ethics, and that ethical theorists neglect any of them at their peril. For there are no men whose beliefs are known to history or anthropology who are not moral beings and members of social groups. They all pursue ends according to rules, distinguish some ends as good and some rules as right; and they pass judgements on their own and other people's actions as morally good or bad, right or wrong. This is true both of contemporary primitive peoples and of the early ancestors of people who are now civilised or advanced. I am not suggesting that the moral beliefs of such people are more relevant to ethical enquiry than those of other people, past or present, still less that they alone are relevant. All I contend is that they are a relevant part of the data of ethics. Among my reasons for devoting special attention to the moral beliefs and judgements of primitive peoples are: (1) They have been largely neglected by recent and contemporary ethical theorists. (2) A great deal of information about them has recently become available, and much of it seems to me to be inconsistent with at least some contemporary ethical theories. (3) The ways of life of these people, their moral ideas and ideals, are the most radically different from our own that we can find; and it is a commonplace in science that the severest test to which we can expose any theory is to consider how far it can explain the phenomena which differ most markedly from those which originally suggested it. (4) It has been not uncommon for moral and social philosophers, from Plato onwards, to construct pictures of simple societies to show how people would behave and would feel they ought to behave under the simplest conditions. Now the study of the ways of life of primitive peoples provides us, not with speculative hypotheses as to what might happen, but with what in fact did happen and is happening today under such conditions. If, as these philosophers assume, conditions in such simple societies can throw any light on the nature of man and morality, it is wiser to draw our conclusions from societies which have in fact existed than from imaginary societies which are bound to be influenced by the preconceived ideas of their constructors. For, as Goldenweiser4 says, there is no arguing with history.

There are, however, moral theories which, if we could accept them, would make enquiries into the different moralities of mankind, or indeed into any other than our own, unnecessary and even valueless. A consideration of them is perhaps the simplest way of showing the relevance of other moralities to the solution of our problem; for one way of testing the adequacy of these theories is to consider whether they are consistent with the moral judgements of men of other ages and civilisations. This itself might be regarded as sufficient to show the relevance of other moralities to our ethical problems. If we further find, as I think we shall, that at least some of these ethical theories cannot account for the moral judgements of all men everywhere, that should be conclusive evidence that the moral judgements of other men in other cultures are relevant to our problem. And there are, I think, other ways in which a consideration of these theories will bring to light the relevance of primitive morality, in particular, to our ethical enquiries. Let us, therefore, look briefly at one or two theories which profess to relieve us of the duty of examining moralities other than our own.

Some ethical theorists tell us that we can see or know that certain moral rules are right with the same certainty with which we see that two and two are four, or that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. We do not, they contend, merely believe these propositions. We know that they are true. Similarly, they tell us, we immediately apprehend as self-evident truths the rightness of certain moral rules or the obligatoriness of certain acts or sorts of acts. Other ethical theorists tell us that we immediately apprehend or perceive by inspection that certain sorts of things or states of affairs are intrinsically good, in the same direct way in which we perceive that a rose is red or a primrose yellow; and that those actions are right which produce or promote, or are intended to produce or promote, such things.

According to these views, if a person does not immediately see that the rules in question are right or the ends good, the only advice that can be given to him is to look again and try to remove the obstacles and prejudices which prevent him from seeing; just as the only advice that can be given to the schoolboy who says that he does not see that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles is to look again, to follow the argument more carefully and with more concentrated attention. If he still does not see, there is nothing that can be done for him, except hope that providence will open his eyes. So if, after due attention, a person still fails to see the rightness of so-called self-evident moral rules or the goodness of so-called intrinsic goods, he must be regarded as in some way deficient in moral sense or moral reason.

Now I entirely agree that, if the obligatoriness of certain sorts of acts is genuinely self-evident,5 the proposed method of procedure is the only one open to us. I agree also that the ultimate principle on which the moral agent proceeds in his judgements, that is, the moral criterion, must be of this kind—self-authenticating, unmediated, containing its evidence within itself—so that a person has only to grasp its nature to recognise its self-evidence. If, therefore, we were completely satisfied that the judgements in question had the self-evidence claimed for them by some theorists, we should have no alternative to accepting them as true, even if we were thereby forced to conclude that the moral consciousness of those who think otherwise is constituted in a different way from our own. Such a conclusion would in effect mean that the judgements of those who differ from us on this question are not expressions of the moral consciousness at all. For it is difficult to see any difference between a moral consciousness which operates on a different principle from ours and one which is not moral at all.

But, as I have already pointed out, it is by no means easy to be sure that in any given judgement we have an authentic deliverance of the moral consciousness, i.e. a deliverance uninfluenced by conditions which are peculiar to the agent who makes the judgement or to his people. And there are at least three reasons for doubting the claim that it is an authentic deliverance of the moral consciousness that the rightness of certain rules or the obligatoriness of certain sorts of acts is self-evident, (1) This character is claimed for the acts and rules in question when they are considered by themselves in isolation. But they never do occur in isolation; and it is difficult to be sure that the context in which they normally occur has nothing to do with their obligatoriness appearing to be self-evident. (2) As has often been pointed out, these acts are never described with the precision and freedom from ambiguity which are essential to the terms of a proposition which is to be recognised as self-evident. (3) We find little agreement, even among the most careful thinkers who claim that there are self-evident moral judgements, as to which moral judgements have this character. What seemed self-evident to Sidg-wick is not accepted as such by Moore; and what Moore regards as self-evident is not accepted as even true by Ross. In view of these doubts, it is desirable to consider such judgements in different contexts, and especially in different cultural conditions, to discover whether they retain their apparent self-evidence in all contexts. If we find that they are not regarded as true by all men everywhere—let alone as self-evidently true—we should hesitate to accept their self-evidence as an authentic deliverance of the moral consciousness; for any judgement which is really self-evident should be recognised as such by all who have the capacity to grasp it and have paid sufficient attention to it. Accordingly, those who claim that certain moral rules are self-evident tend to minimise the differences between the moral judgements of different peoples, and attribute the failure of primitive peoples to recognise certain rules as self-evident either to their not having the capacity to grasp the terms involved in them or to their not having sufficiently attended to them.6 If the evidence compels us to reject this explanation, the only alternatives7 open to us are either to reject their claim to self-evidence or to deny that the primitive moral consciousness functions according to the same principle as ours; and the latter alternative amounts, as I have said, to a denial that primitive peoples are moral beings at all, in the sense in which we use the term.

Accordingly, in our attempts to test the adequacy of ethical theories which rely on what I shall call the method of isolation, that is the method which assumes that we can pass final moral judgements on acts or sorts of acts or ends or states of affairs in isolation from their context, the evidence about the moralities of primitive peoples is relevant in at least three ways. (1) It shows that some of the judgements which are regarded as self-evident by contemporary moralists are not even regarded as true by some primitive peoples. (2) It enables us to decide whether we can accept as adequate the explanation offered by contemporary moralists as to why some primitive peoples reject what are claimed to be self-evident moral judgements. As we shall show in detail later, the evidence of the anthropologists is all against the adequacy of this explanation. (3) It shows that some primitive peoples have moral rules of their own, which appear to them obviously right, but some of which are different from, and inconsistent with, those accepted by contemporary moralists.

But the relevance of the anthropological evidence to our ethical enquiries is not confined to providing examples of moral judgements which are difficult to reconcile with some of our ethical theories. It suggests and supports an alternative theory of the principle of moral judgement. It suggests that there are grounds for the judgements, whether about the rightness of acts or the goodness of states of affairs, which are regarded as obvious by a particular people; and that, therefore, they are not unmediated or self-authenticating. For, according to the considered and unanimous view of contemporary social anthropologists, we cannot understand why particular moral judgements are regarded as obvious, or even as true, by a primitive people unless we take account of the context of interrelated institutions which constitute their way of life and subject to the conditions of which their judgements on acts and agents and states of affairs are passed. Now, if this is true of the moral judgements of primitives, may it not be equally true of our own? May it not be that certain things seem good to us and certain rules right, because we consider them in the context of our own way of life? When different rules seem right and different ends seem good to men in different ages and civilisations, are we justified in concluding that in one case, namely in our own, the certainty or apparent self-evidence with which they are accepted is due to their intrinsic reasonableness, while in the case of all whose judgements differ from ours it is due to the mental and moral and social conditioning to which they have been subjected? Part of the value of the work of the social anthropologists and of its relevance to our ethical enquiries is that it forces us to raise such questions. It also supplies us with at least part of the evidence necessary to answer them.

All these considerations suggest that the ethical theories, which rely on the apparent self-evidence of certain moral judgements, whether about right or about good, do not make the study of primitive morality irrelevant to our ethical enquiries.

There is, however, another moral theory which seems, at first sight at any rate, to suggest that a consideration of primitive morality is, if not entirely irrelevant to, at least unnecessary for the solution of our problem. But a more detailed examination of this theory shows that, if it is accepted, the study of the moral judgements of other peoples becomes not only relevant, as providing facts by which the theory itself can be tested, but also important as making a positive contribution to our understanding of morality. This theory may be briefly stated as follows. Morality is a human phenomenon; it arises from the double nature of man as at once a creature of impulses and inclinations which have their origin in his animal instincts, and also a rational or self-conscious being, a being who is aware of himself as one amid the variety of his experiences, and as such capable of formulating, in a more or less coherent fashion, an ideal of a form of life which will satisfy his whole nature by satisfying its different aspects or elements in conformity with one another. Add to this the fact that man is social, a member of a group or society, the other members of which he is capable of recognising as rational or self-conscious and yet creatures of desire like himself, and therefore entitled to the same sort of satisfaction as himself; so that the ideal which he forms for himself and for them is at once personal and social, and so meant to provide for the satisfaction of all of them compatibly with one another. Granted all this it follows that, if we could discover what man, as a being at once self-conscious and social and a creature of desires, requires for the satisfaction of his nature, we would have an adequate account of the nature of morality. May we not, it is asked, discover this by examining the nature of man individual and social?

Now this is a theory with which, as the sequel will show, I have a great deal of sympathy, and the main contentions of which, with suitable reservations, I should be prepared to accept. But even if we accept this theory, it does not relieve us of the task of considering moralities other than our own; for, in our efforts to discover the nature of man and what he needs for his satisfaction, we meet precisely the same difficulties as we do in trying to discover morality among the moralities; and the anthropological evidence is equally relevant to both enquiries.

The reason for this is not far to seek. Human nature is not merely something given, but something which grows or develops, so that we never find pure or bare human nature, but that nature as it develops in interaction with one or another type of environment, an environment consisting largely of ideas and beliefs, customs and institutions. We never find human nature without a cultural environment, and in different environments it develops along different lines and it seems capable of satisfaction in different ways. It is difficult to discover in the resulting joint-product how much or which parts are due to human nature as such and how much to the particular kind of cultural environment. We are all too apt to assume that human nature is what it develops into among ourselves, under the cultural conditions of Western civilisation in the twentieth century, and that it needs for its satisfaction what it seems to need under our own conditions. Part of the importance of the work of the anthropologists is that it acts as a corrective to this assumption. It shows us how human nature expresses itself under different sets of cultural conditions, different from one another and from our own; and so it acts as a warning against predicating of human nature generally, what is true of white man under the cultural conditions of Western Europe.

I shall give one illustration,8 the details of which are easily available, to show how misleading this assumption may be. Margaret Mead9 found social workers and other serious-minded people in America concerned about the strains and stresses of adolescence, and the problems to which they give rise. They attributed these to human nature, and the crises which, as they thought, naturally and necessarily arise during adolescence. But it occurred to Margaret Mead that these difficulties might be peculiar to Western civilisation, or even to the particular form which it takes in America, rather than due to human nature as such. She, therefore, went and studied adolescence under entirely different conditions in Samoa, and found that it showed very few of the difficulties which perplexed her American friends.

But in order to avoid the hasty inference that the Americans could solve their difficulties by taking over one item of Samoan culture while leaving the rest of their way of life unchanged, it is necessary to add that the Samoan way of life fails to develop some of the values which we regard as among the most precious in our culture, and that its failure to do so is not unconnected with the conditions which explain the absence of the strains and stresses of adolescence among its members.10 The realisation of these values seems to require that the energies of some of the primary urges of human nature should be controlled and directed along certain lines or, as the psychologists say, that they should be sublimated, and it is this direction and control which give rise to crises. To give these energies free expression in adolescence, as the Samoans do, prevents strains, but it seems also to be inconsistent with sublimation and the values which are realised through sublimation. Whether the values can be realised without the strains and crises is a question to which neither the Samoan nor our own culture has yet provided the answer. Each of the cultures has its own values and disvalues, and the values and disvalues seem to be so inextricably bound together that we cannot remove the disvalues without endangering the values as well. Be this as it may, the Samoan culture shows that the crises of adolescence are the results not so much of human nature as of certain ways of dealing with it.

The evidence of other anthropologists, with whose views we shall be concerned later, shows that it is equally misleading to regard the development of some of the other primary urges of human nature, such as acquisitiveness or pugnacity, which we find under our own cultural conditions, as necessary expressions of human nature rather than as cultural products of our own civilisation. Such considerations show us the relevance of anthropological evidence to our attempts to discover what human nature is and what it requires for its satisfaction. What human nature needs for its satisfaction can only be discovered by experience, and experience proceeds by experiment. The people of Western Europe are not the only people who have made and are making experiments in trying to satisfy human nature and needs. The results of all these experiments are as relevant to our attempts to discover the good for man as they are to enquiries into the structure of human nature.

All the considerations which I have been urging in support of the view that a study of the moral ideas and ways of life of primitive peoples is relevant to our ethical enquiries, are based on two assumptions: (1) that the nature of primitive man is essentially the same as our own, that he is stirred by the same emotions, moved by the same desires and reasons according to the same principles as ourselves; and (2) that his mind is sufficiently developed to grasp the nature of the acts which we regard as right and of the ends which we regard as good. But these assumptions have been questioned and I shall, therefore, have to defend them in the proper place. It has been held either that the primitive mind is constructed in a different way and acts according to different principles from our own, or that it is so undeveloped and immature as to be inferior to the civilised mind in ways which amount to a difference in kind, a difference which makes it incapable of grasping the rules which we regard as right and the ends which we regard as good. If either of these contentions is well grounded; if, in particular, there are fundamental innate differences of kind either of constitution or of powers between the primitive and the civilised mind, that would prove the simplest and easiest way of explaining the differences between their moral beliefs and judgements and ours. It would also mean that the consideration of their moral ideas can throw no light on the nature of morality as we understand it, and that it is, therefore, entirely irrelevant to our present purpose. But, as I shall try to show in detail later, the overwhelming weight of anthropological evidence is against such a view. According to the available evidence, the primitive and the civilised child enter the world with substantially the same mental constitution and powers, and, therefore, we must regard primitive cultures with their moral and social institutions, their ideals and their rules, as the results of attempts, by people with interests and problems and powers of the same kind as our own, to discover the good for man, a way of life which will satisfy their aspirations for themselves and their fellows. No doubt their co-operative efforts at conceiving and realising the good for man, which I call their experiments in living, are at best only partially successful; but may the same not be said of our own? At any rate, each of these experiments throws some light on the nature of man; the ways in which he seeks and, at least partially, finds expression and satisfaction for his moral aspirations; the kind of life which he regards as good; the ends which seem to him worthy of pursuit; and the rules which he has developed to guide him in the pursuit.

If the evidence compels us to conclude that the fundamental nature and powers of the human mind are the same among all men and that, therefore, the principle on which the moral consciousness proceeds is everywhere the same, that principle must be not only consistent with, but capable of explaining the enormous diversity of moral judgements which we find among different peoples. For whether or not we in the end discover some unity of principle underlying the moral judgements of the different sections of mankind, first appearances suggest not one morality but many, not unanimity but considerable diversity between the moral beliefs entertained and the moral judgements passed by men of different ages and civilisations. We find relative unanimity within a particular civilisation at a particular stage in its development, but great diversity between different civilisations and different stages of development. This diversity exists not only in judgements on particular acts but also in those on sorts of acts, that is on rules. For example, by one people suicide or infanticide is condemned as immoral; by another it is regarded with indifference; by still another it is regarded in certain circumstances as a sacred duty. If, then, the principle of moral judgement is the same everywhere, any account of it which is to be satisfactory must show that it is consistent with this diversity of moral judgements, that indeed the different moral judgements are really expressions of the same principle having regard to the different conditions and beliefs and cultures of those who pass them. This gives us two tests which we can apply to any ethical theory: consistency with the moral judgements of mankind everywhere, and capacity to explain the diverse moral judgements of different peoples and ages as expressions of the principle or principles which it propounds as the moral criterion or criteria. Among my reasons for considering primitive morality is the conviction that, when considered in the light of the moral judgements of primitives, some contemporary ethical theories will not survive these tests.

There is still another and, to my mind, a very important way in which the study of primitive ways of life is relevant to our moral enquiries. The tendency towards abstraction and atomism, which we find in the method of isolation applied by some recent ethical writers to acts and ends, is no less evident in the recent and contemporary treatment of other moral and social facts, such as the relation between moral and social theory or between the different social sciences. And the contention of the anthropologists that none of the judgements or beliefs or customs, none of the institutions or aspects of the life of a primitive people, can be understood without taking account of their whole way of life, provides a necessary corrective to all these tendencies. For if this contention is well grounded, it means that, whether in passing or in trying to understand moral judgements, we have to perform an integrating or syn-thesising activity in which we consider not only different ends and activities, but also the different aspects of life to which they refer, economic, legal, political, religious, and so on, in relation to one another and the way of life of which they form parts. This unifying, interrelating activity seems to me to be involved in all moral deliberation, and to be a condition of considered moral judgements. Our more serious and considered moral judgements seem to me to be passed, not on isolated acts, but on agents in respect of acts and on character as reflected in acts. Moreover, the agents in question are members of a community, and to understand either their actions or their judgements on them, we have to take account of their relations to others. Now on the subjective side, character and personality involve a certain unity and wholeness, a certain consistency of outlook based on formed habits and the building up of relatively permanent feeling attitudes. The self-conscious agent cannot help bringing some measure of such integration into his life. Similarly, on the objective side, we find a corresponding unity in more or less comprehensive plans and policies which manifest themselves in series of interconnected acts. These acts can be understood and judgements of value passed on them only in relation to the policies of which they are partial expressions and to the character of which the policies are the outward manifestations. But if the view of the anthropologists is sound we have to go further. We must not only consider acts and ends in relation to character and policies; we must also consider character and policies themselves in the context of the way of life which is the combination of both the inner and the outer aspects of conduct; we must consider the individual agent in the complexity of his social relationships; we must consider the moral ideal in relation to the social ideal, and the different aspects of life dealt with by the different social sciences in relation to one another and to the whole way of life whose aspects they are.

Now whether we look at moral and social facts from the subjective point of view of character and personality or from the objective point of view of plans and policies or from the point of view of the social sciences which provide the theoretical interpretation of these facts, we find in the modern world an emphasis on distinction, analysis and separation, with the result that unity and interconnection tend to disappear, or at any rate to fade into the background; and we are left with the unrelated elements or aspects on our hands. The structure of the modern civilised world is so loosely knit, the activities, industrial, social, political and religious, in which the modern man lives his life, are so heterogeneous, compartmentalised and apparently unconnected that it is difficult for himself or others to see his life as a whole, if indeed there is any whole to see; and the social sciences which deal with the different aspects of his life, economics and politics, law and social philosophy, ethics and theology, each goes its own separate way, within its own limited field, without paying more attention to its neighbours than an occasional nod of respectful recognition when they meet at the borders which divide their subjects. Even this is not infrequently accompanied by the warning, ‘You had better keep to your own side of the border; only those who speak our language and accept our presuppositions are tolerated on this side’. This isolation of the different aspects of life and of the social sciences which deal with them seems to me one of the chief diseases of the modern world. Iron curtains are as disastrous in the realm of the spirit as they are in that of international Politics. They result in a sense of frustration and moral bewilderment on the part of modern man, who has duties in all the different spheres, but finds it difficult to see how they are connected and on what principle he is to decide between them when their requirements clash. It seems to me that it is the business of the moral philosopher to break down these iron curtains, to provide a corrective to the method of isolation, to bring to light the unity underlying the differences, to try to see life as a whole, and to make explicit the principle on which its broken fragments can be united and the differences reconciled.

This is his business, not only because it is something which needs to be done and there is no one else to do it, nor merely because it is the traditional role of the moral philosopher to try to see life as a whole, but also because what is common to these different departments and to the sciences which deal with them is that they are all concerned with relations between persons; and, whatever else may be said of relations between persons, they always have a moral aspect, and the final judgement on them is a moral judgement. An industrial policy may be economically efficient, but when the economist has told us all that can be said from his point of view, the question still remains: ‘Is the pursuit of that policy morally right in its effect on the welfare of producers and consumers and the community as a whole?’ And that is a moral question, one not for economics but for ethics, or better still for the two together. Similarly, a piece of legislation may be clear and consistent and impartially administered, but the question may still be asked: ‘Is it just?’ And justice is a moral notion to be dealt with by ethics. Similar considerations apply to the other spheres of human activity and the relations between them. Moral questions not only arise in all of them, but also concern the relations between them; and it is the business of the moral philosopher to bring to light the principles on which they can be integrated into a consistent whole and the differences between their claims ultimately settled.

But few contemporary moral philosophers seem willing to undertake this task; and some go so far as to say that the issues involved are not moral; and that, therefore, the questions they raise are not questions for ethics at all. One of the most recent writers on ethical theory, for example, tells us that students embark on the study of moral philosophy because they hope to get from it the answers to such questions as: ‘What fiscal policy ought I to vote for?’ And he gives this as an illustration of a mistaken approach to the subject, based on an inaccurate grasp of its nature. The answer to such a question, he contends, should be provided, not by moral philosophy but by economics. “That science”, he says, “will tell me how I am most likely to bring about prosperity or justice in my country.”11 But, surely, all that economic science can tell us is the economic consequences of different fiscal policies. It is true that without such knowledge we are not in a position to decide which policy we ought to vote for, but given that knowledge the moral question, the question of justice, still remains; and that is a question for the moral philosopher, though in trying to solve it he needs the co-operation of the economist. It is in trying to discover his duties in relation to such questions which involve economic and social and political issues that contemporary modern man is most often baffled and perplexed. No doubt the issues involved in such questions are not merely moral, but the duties and obligations of individuals in regard to them are moral duties and obligations; and if we respect Lord Gifford's wishes we must try to deal with them.

Now the researches of social anthropologists into the morality of primitive peoples seem to me highly relevant to our attempts to solve such problems; for the members of a primitive community are few in number, most of them know one another, and all the relations between them, whether they be economic, political or legal, are recognised by them to be personal relations between individuals. Moreover, the different aspects of their lives are not so sharply separated and depart-mentalised as they are in the modern world. It is, therefore, much easier to see their lives as wholes, to see the interrelation between their different activities, than it is to do so when we are considering the large-scale and complex life of a modern society, where the relations between the different aspects of life and different groups of persons are very loosely integrated, and where relations between individuals are largely depersonalised. A consideration of the ways of life of such small and simple peoples should enable us to see more easily and clearly how morality is concerned with the whole of life, without being the whole of it; how ethics is related to political and social organisation, to economics and law; how all these and the moral duties that arise in connection with them are related to one another, and how in their interrelation they constitute the unity of a way of life. It may also enable us to view such questions with greater objectivity and impartiality than if we were discussing controversial contemporary issues among ourselves, issues which are liable to arouse emotions which might cloud vision.

However relevant and important an understanding of primitive morality may be for our ethical enquiries, the study of it presents peculiar difficulties, for the subject has been largely neglected by recent and contemporary anthropologists. It is true that there is in their work much of the material required for such a study, but few of them have devoted any separate consideration to it. This is all the more remarkable when we consider that, during the present century, trained field workers have made intensive sociological studies of almost every other aspect of the lives of primitive peoples, their social organisation, their economic activities, their legal systems, their educational arrangements, their mentality, their art and their religion. The published results of these enquiries now constitute a considerable and growing body of literature. Many social scientists have recognised the relevance and the importance of this material for their own studies, and there has been a good deal of fruitful co-operation between field workers among primitives and specialists in some of the social sciences. But moral philosophers have been slower to recognise the relevance of such materials to their studies, and the social anthropologists have not helped them to realise it. For, as I have said, few of them have devoted any separate attention to primitive morality, and much of what they have to say about it has to be gathered from occasional remarks scattered throughout their treatment of other subjects. This state of affairs is unsatisfactory, both from the ethical and the anthropological points of view. Co-operation between the two would, I am confident, be fruitful for both. It is as an effort towards such co-operation that this study is undertaken; and I have found the anthropologists with whom it has brought me into contact most anxious to be helpful.

A brief consideration of the reasons for this neglect of primitive morality will bring to light some of the questions we shall have to discuss as well as the material which is available to answer them. No doubt the absence of any recent work on primitive morality is partly due to the intrinsic difficulties of the subject;12 but it is probably much more due to changes which have taken place during the present century in the assumptions which anthropologists make, and in the conclusions at which they have arrived regarding primitive life as a whole. It is significant in this connection that the last serious treatment of primitive morality is to be found in the works of Wester-marck13 and Hobhouse,14 who wrote some forty years ago before these changes took place. They dealt with primitive morality as part of a general treatment of comparative ethics, which in their accounts was concerned not only with the nature of morality but also with its origin and its development from the earliest times to the present day. Their treatment was necessarily based on the assumptions current among social anthropologists at the time when they wrote; but the intensive field work which has been carried out by trained experts in recent years has led to the rejection of some of these assumptions, and this rejection not only calls for a reconsideration of the work based on them, but also makes the treatment of comparative ethics in general and of primitive morality in particular much more difficult.

From our point of view, the most significant of these assumptions of the earlier anthropologists were: first, that not only did man develop progressively from the most primitive to the most advanced stage, but that in the course of this development every people passed through the same stages in the same order, and that these progressive stages can be traced in all the different aspects of their life, art and religion, social and political organisation, economic and industrial arrangements, social customs and institutions, and so on; and second, that particular customs, forms of institutions, rites or other activities, can be understood without much reference to their context in the life of a particular people, and can, whenever found, be regarded as evidence of the same state of mind and stage of development. On these assumptions, once the general framework of the evolutionary development was determined, different customs, institutions, modes of belief or behaviour, gathered from different peoples, could be fitted into their place in the scheme and used to throw light on one another. The gaps in the evidence about a particular people, due to the absence of observation or any other cause, could then be filled from evidence collected from others who were believed to be at the same stage of development. According to this theory, most contemporary primitive peoples are still at stages of development through which our ancestors and those of other civilised peoples passed at or before the dawn of history; and, therefore, the evidence collected from them can be used to throw light on the ways of life of our early ancestors.

Now intensive surveys of particular primitive peoples by trained experts have led to the rejection of both these assumptions. They have conclusively demonstrated that, whatever criterion we apply, the different aspects of the way of life of the same people are seldom at the same stage of development; and that, whatever aspect of their life we consider, different peoples have not all passed through the same stages in the same order. And, what is more important from our point of view, they have also shown that what appears to the casual observer to be the same act or institution or custom may have an entirely different significance or function among different peoples. During the last thirty or forty years, social anthropologists have been demonstrating, in season and out of season with an insistence which is sometimes almost wearisome, that the different aspects of the way of life of a particular people, their ways of thinking and acting, their social and economic arrangements, their religious beliefs and ceremonies, their institutions and social organisation, dovetail, interconnect and interpenetrate in such a way that none of them can be understood in isolation from its context in the way of life of which it forms part. Now this makes the work of comparative ethics very much more difficult, for the units of comparison can no longer be isolated acts or judgements, rules or ends, but ways of life or at least groups of institutions as relatively integrated or unitary wholes. Indeed, some anthropologists have been so impressed with the uniqueness of each culture that they contend that there is no basis of comparison between them.15

But while these considerations may explain the recent neglect of comparative ethics in the sense and on the scale on which it was undertaken by Westermarck and Hobhouse, who worked under the influence, and on the assumptions16 of the classical evolutionary theory, they will not explain the neglect of primitive morality by the large body of trained field workers who have given us so much and such accurate information about other aspects of primitive life. The explanation for this is, I think, to be found in a certain confusion in their views about the nature of morality itself, and especially about its relations to religion on the one hand, and to law and social organisation on the other.17

We may distinguish two main aspects of moral conduct. There is an inner or subjective or purely personal aspect, consisting of the motives, spirit or attitude of mind of the agent. There is also an outer or objective or visible aspect, consisting of activities and rules, ends and ideals. Now if we think only of the former aspect, and it is the specifically moral aspect, that to which moral goodness in the strict sense belongs, we may treat morality as a relatively separate part of life, one among others. In the main, this is how most anthropologists seem to regard morality, but naturally they do not confine their attention to that aspect only: they also think and speak of moral rules and ideals; and, therefore, confusion tends to arise, for what is true of the inner aspect does not always apply to the outer or visible aspect. Besides, the inner aspect of his morality is the most intangible and elusive thing about a man. The understanding of it requires a most intimate knowledge of him; and even if we have such knowledge, it is not easy to formulate the results of it explicitly. It is much easier to describe a man's outward behaviour than his thoughts and judgements about conduct and the spirit which finds expression in them.

Moreover, this inner aspect of conduct does not vary from people to people. It is much the same everywhere and, therefore, there is not much for the anthropologist to say about it. Loyalty to the recognised ideal, doing what is right because it is right—such conduct is regarded as morally good everywhere. It is the ideals, the rules, the duties, the things which are regarded as good or right themselves, which vary from people to people. But looked at from this objective or outer side, morality is not a separate sphere of activities. It is concerned with the whole of life. For our moral duties in this sense, the things that are right or that we ought to do, may also be social or legal, economic or religious duties.18 Accordingly much of what anthropologists describe under the headings of social organisation and law and economics is, in fact, a description of the outer aspect of the morality of the people concerned. The anthropologist who describes one aspect of a primitive community's way of life, whether the educational arrangements, the legal system or the economic organisation, recognises and indeed emphasises that, in order to understand the particular aspect in which he is interested, he has to give an account of the culture as a whole, of the way in which that aspect is related to the others and, in virtue of these relations, functions in the whole. In doing this, he is describing the things which the people in question think right, as well as the ways they think and feel about them, the motives and incentives by which they are moved, the ideals which they seek to realise, and the institutions and customs in which these find expression. Accordingly, there seems little left to be dealt with under the separate heading of morality, but to describe over again the way of life and the interrelated system of habits of thinking and feeling and acting which constitute it and show how the duties and rights of individuals and their conceptions of justice, distributive and corrective, are determined by them. In short, morality in this sense of the term, that is the outer or objective side of morality, is not a separate sphere of activities. Not only do moral issues arise in every sphere of life, in the sense that there are rights to be respected and duties to be fulfilled in relation to them, but these moral rights and duties are not merely moral. They are also social, economic, legal and religious rights and duties; and, therefore, they have to be described in describing these spheres.

Accordingly, the anthropologists tend to deal with most of what concerns the outer aspect of morality, the things which are regarded as right and the ends which are regarded as good, under the headings of social organisation and rules of primitive law, often without recognising that they are dealing with morality. Moreover, anthropologists are more concerned with why people do what they regard as right, especially when it is difficult and burdensome and not to their immediate advantage, than with why they regard it as right. In other words, they are concerned with the question of sanctions, and they are apt to regard sanctions not merely as incentives to follow a course of conduct, but also as its justification, the ground of its rightness. But it is necessary to distinguish between whether an act or course of conduct is right, and, if it is, what is the ground of its rightness, and what a person will get if he performs it or what will happen to him if he does not. This would be so even on the cynical view that men never do anything merely because it is right without an additional incentive for doing so. The anthropologists, however, seem to be more interested in the reasons which explain why people act in particular ways than in the reasons which justify the actions.

This, however, is not all. Not only are anthropologists apt to treat moral rules and principles, ends and ideals, as parts of social organisation, primitive law and economics, but they also tend to regard the inner aspect of morality, the spirit of goodwill, the attitude of mind in which morally good actions are performed, as either an effect or a part of religion; and, as this seems the only aspect of morality which they normally recognise as moral, they tend to regard morality as dependent on, and sanctioned by religion. They seem, therefore, to assume that what is to be said about morality should naturally come under the heading of religion. Yet when we consult works on primitive religion, of which there are many, what we find consists mainly of the views of primitive peoples about the supernatural and about their duties in the way of ritual in regard to it. They tell us little or nothing about the duties and obligations of men to one another.19 We have to gather these as best we can from other sources.

Considering the extent of the field to be covered and how little work has been done recently on primitive morality, all I can hope to do in these lectures will be tentative and exploratory; and any conclusions at which I arrive will be provisional. What I am specially anxious to do is to call attention to what seems to me a rich and largely unexplored field of moral material, which I am satisfied is highly relevant to our ethical enquiries, and to express the hope that others, both moral philosophers and social anthropologists, will devote more attention to it, and either confirm or modify my tentative conclusions.

No doubt, the brief account which I have given of the treatment of morality by anthropologists is unduly simplified. It is an account of general tendencies rather than a precise statement of the views of any particular anthropologist. I gave it merely to explain why I have chosen the line of treatment which I propose to follow, and as an indication of the subjects which it will be necessary to discuss. I propose to begin with a tentative and provisional account of the structure of the moral life and the relation of the moral and social ideals to one another and to life as a whole. This account, which will be sufficiently general to apply to all moralities whatever the detailed differences between them, should enable us to see in their interrelation the different problems which we shall have to discuss. In order to illustrate this account and provide a concrete filling for its general framework, I shall try to describe the ways of life of a few representative primitive peoples in sufficient detail to enable us to see their moral judgements on acts and ends and agents in their cultural context. I shall then consider the nature of primitive mentality and try to justify the assumption on which my argument is based that their minds are much the same as our own; and that, therefore, their moral beliefs and judgements are relevant to our ethical enquiries. Next, I shall discuss the relationship between primitive morality and religion, partly because, as I have indicated, there seems to me to be some confusion among anthropologists on the subject, and partly to justify my treatment of morality as an independent and autonomous sphere of activities—a sphere of activities which, no doubt, has theological and metaphysical implications, but whose main principles can be discerned and their authority justified by considering the nature of man as a person among persons. If this can be established we can claim the right to examine the moral beliefs and judgements of primitive peoples, without taking account of any aspect of their religion except its ethical content and its social consequences. Finally, I shall consider the implications for ethical theory of the facts which our account of primitive moralities will have brought to light. In doing so, I shall discuss, among other questions, the nature and authority of moral rules and their importance for the moral life, the content and structure of the moral ideal, and the nature and conditions of moral progress. This programme will still leave many questions regarding morality to which it will not be possible to make more than a passing reference, among them the theological and metaphysical implications of morality or what we might call the ethical interpretation of reality; but it is perhaps more than sufficient to occupy us during this course.