Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/514

496 also a very complex problem for analysis. The social heritage of customs and maxims, of institutions and tendencies, that is tied up with every critical ethical situation seems to stand over against the individual with mandatory or prescriptive powers. But this social heritage is itself subject to alteration by the reactions of individuals as well as by change in economic, political, and other conditions of man's existence as a social and historical being. In view of the exceeding great complexity of many critical ethical situations for the individual, we may rightly assert that the possibility of applying an inherited principle of moral judgment to new cases depends on a resemblance between the present situation and a multiplicity of other situations differing in the components of time, place, and history, as well as on an identity of mental character in different individuals. In short, the validity of generic types of moral judgments and the rational authority of social judgments on human conduct involve both a spiritual identity of nature among differing individuals and a continuity of moral and social evolution. It is clear that every specific type and single case of moral judgment, when reflectively considered, presents a complex sociological and historical problem. Hence a critical consideration of the rational foundation of specific ethical values would seem to be impossible without a comparative social and historical analysis of actually existing moral judgments. It is at this point that the treatment of ethics as a department of sociology gives promise of fruitfulness for practice. And there can be no doubt that the treatment of ethical problems from the standpoint of social evolution has thrown much light on the origin, mutation, and present meaning of moral ideas. The great bulk of generally recognized ethical judgments and commonly accepted maxims of conduct has a social reference and their history is intertwined with the history of society. The continuity and the variation in ethical ideas keep step with the continuity and variation of civilized institutions as a whole. We are told that 'the crimes of Clapham are chaste in Martaban' because Clapham and Martaban belong to entirely different types of social evolution. Spartans exposed