Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/149

 But the youth often begins to doubt whether, after all, social convention is the ultimate criterion of good and evil. He sometimes feels a lurking suspicion that our social conventions may be all wrong. And if he reflects at all, and does not simply stifle his doubt and distrust, he will come to the conclusion that social convention is inadequate to supply the standard of moral judgment. And that for two reasons.

(1) Social conventions have only local validity. The conventions of one country differ from those of another. In many respects the conventional standards of Germany and Britain are very different. And we find even greater divergences if we compare the conventional standards of the Western world with those of the Orient. Now ethics demands that what is right in one place must be right under similar circumstances everywhere. The standard of moral judgment must be the same everywhere. Ethics can never rest in the fact that "there ain't no Ten Commandments" east of Suez. Ethics maintains that, if the Ten Commandments are a true expression of the moral standard, they must be true universally.

(2) Social conventions have only temporary validity. The conventions of one time differ from those of another. Moral conventions, it is true, do not usually change so rapidly and capriciously as those which determine fashions and manners. Yet they do change, and sometimes in a swift and arbitrary way. The moral conventions of the Commonwealth were very different from those of the Restoration, and those of mid-Victorian England varied in marked respects from those that hold at the present time.