Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/542

530 6. Laws in the interest of the system of ceremonial designed to promote obedience to the code.

7. Laws in the interest of the enforcement of the code and prescribing penalties and rewards.

8. Laws in the interest of the purity, perpetuity and authority of the code itself.

9. Laws in the interest of a class.

10. Laws of unknown significance.

Excluding 1, 9 and 10, we find that all the other classes of laws aim, directly or indirectly, at securing the above described conditions of social continuance and happiness. While the first class seems to identify group welfare with individual welfare, all the others imply divergence of interest and seek to safeguard the general interest at the expense of private liberty. While groups 2 and 3 aim at this directly, group 4 seeks the same end indirectly, while groups 5, 6, 7 and 8 pertain to the system of control, by which alone obedience is secured and the preceding ordinances made effective. Putting aside the extraneous matter, which often obscures the real purpose of a code, I believe that all bodies of social requirements can be split up into the above groups. If this be true, our theoretical conclusion as to the direction of social control is strikingly confirmed.

Another preliminary task appears, namely, to indicate the relation in which the study of social requirement and social control stand to ethics.

Like theology or astrology, ethics as it stands today is a pseudo-science. It seeks to be at once a science of conduct as it presents itself to the individual and a science of conduct as it presents itself to the group. Attempting to classify and weigh actions from these contradictory points of view, it succeeds in doing neither correctly, and so falls ignominiously from the rank of science. Social ethics, or the study of conduct from the social standpoint, is and will be recognized as a department of sociology. The investigation of social friction, the study of the concessions of each to all to the end that collisions may be avoided, the ascertainment of the acts most conducive to the