Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/127

 the ground instead of attending to his duty and having intercourse with the wife of his dead brother, so as to raise up seed for the latter.

The moral rules could only for this reason become customs because they met deep-lying, ever-recurring social needs. Finally, however, a simple custom cannot explain the force of the feeling of duty, which often shows itself more powerful than all the demands of self-preservation. The customary element in morals only has the effect that certain rules are forthwith recognised as moral, but it does not produce the social instincts which compel the performance of demands recognised as moral laws.

Thus, for example, it is a matter of habit that counts it as disreputable when a girl shows herself in her nightgown to a man, even when this garment goes down to the feet, and takes in the neck, while it is no way improper if a girl appears in the evening with a much uncovered bosom at a ball before all the world, or if she, in a watering-place, in a wet bathing-dress exposes herself to the lecherous gaze of men of the world. But only the force of the social instincts can bring it about that a sternly moral girl should at no price submit to that which convention, fashion, custom—in short, society—has once stamped as shamelessness, and that she should occasionally even prefer death itself to that which she regards as shame.

Other moralists have carried the idea of the moral regulations as simple customs still farther, and described them as simple conventional fashions, basing this on the phenomena that every nation, nay each class has its own particular moral conceptions which, often stand in absolute contradiction to others, that, consequently, an absolute moral law has no validity. It has been concluded from that that morality is only a changing fashion, which only the thoughtless philistine crowd respect, but which the superman can and must raise himself above as things that appertain to the ordinary throng.

But not only are the social instincts something absolutely not conventional, but something deeply grounded