Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/138

 a deviation from our own moral code, never from a strange one. The same phenomenon, say, of free sexual intercourse or of indifference to property can in one case be the product of moral depravity, in a society where a strict monogamy and the sacredness of property are recognised as necessary; in another case it can be the highly moral product of a healthy social organism which requires for its social needs neither the fixed property in a particular woman, nor that in particular means of conservation and production.

If, however, the growing contradiction between the changing social conditions and the weakening hold of morality in the ruling classes tend to growing immorality, and shows itself in an increase of hypocrisy and cynicism, which often goes hand in hand with a weakening of the social impulses, so does it lead to quite other results in the rising and exploited class. Their interests are in complete antagonism to the social foundation which created the ruling morality. They have not the smallest reason to accept it, they have every ground to oppose it. The more conscious they become of their antagonisms to the ruling social order the more will their moral indignation grow as well, the more will they oppose to the old traditional morality a new morality, which they are about to make the morality of society as a whole. Thus arises in the uprising classes a moral ideal, which grows ever bolder the more they gain in strength. At the same time, as we have already seen, the power of the social instincts in the same classes will be especially developed by means of the class war, so that with the daring of the new moral ideal the enthusiasm for the same also increases. Thus the same evolution which produces in conservative or decaying classes increasing immorality, produces in the rising classes a mass of phenomena which we sum up under the name of ethical idealism, which is not, however, to be confused with philosophical idealism.