Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/137

 by hirelings, whereby they avoid entering personally into the fray.

All these produce in conservative or ruling classes those phenomena which we sum up as immorality.

Materialist moralists, to whom the moral codes are simple conventional fashions, deny the possibility of an immorality of that kind as a social phenomenon. As all morality is relative, is that which is called immorality simply a deviating kind of morality?

On the other hand, idealist moralists conclude from the fact that there are entire immoral classes and societies that there must be a moral code eternal and independent of time and space; a standard independent of the changing social conditions on which we can measure the morals of every society and class.

Unfortunately, however, that element of human morality which, if not independent of time and space, is yet older than the changing social relations, the social instinct, is just that which the human morality has in common with the animal. What, however, is specifically human in morality, the moral codes, is subject to continual change. That does not prove, all the same, that a class or a social group cannot be immoral; it proves simply that so far at least as the moral standards are concerned, there is just as little absolute morality as absolute immorality. Even the immorality is in this respect a relative idea, as absolute immorality is to be regarded only as a lack of those social impulses and virtues which man has inherited from the social animals.

If we look, on the other hand, on immorality as an offence against the laws of morality, then it implies no longer the divergence from a distinct standard holding good for all times and places, but the contradiction of the moral practice to its own moral principles; it implies the transgression against moral laws which people themselves recognise and put forward as necessary. It is thus nonsense to declare particular moral principles of any people or class, which are recognised as such, to be immoral simply because they contradict our moral code. Immorality can never be more than