Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/47

No. 1.] reason as exalted by the rationalist is not the reason which actually functions in the moral consciousness. The reason which law and common sense have in mind in the demand for reasonable conduct is rather a social attitude than a faculty for eternal truths, and as such depends in its significance upon the group and its standards. To the aristocrat, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, inequality is reasonable; to the democrat equality.

These considerations are already in the sphere of Sumner's declaration: "The mores can make anything right." Sumner's chief emphasis was no doubt psychological rather than metaphysical. He wished to show that the mores give sanction and currency to "things which seem to us contrary to simple and self-evident rules of right; that is they are contrary to views now inculcated in us by our own mores as axiomatic and beyond the need of proof." This as psychological statement would not disquiet a believer in eternal and immutable morality. It is simple enough to make a distinction between what is right and what seems right to a particular period or group. And the absolutist may even admit that his own views are defective, just as he may hold that his color vision is limited, and yet argue on logical or metaphysical grounds that this does not affect the intrinsic character of right, any more than his defective vision affects the laws of light. But Sumner's challenge goes deeper: He not merely foresees as probable a further change in the mores by which democracy and pair marriage, which have been brought about as favored by present economic conditions, will yield to other ideals; he insists that "the standards of good and right are in the mores." "All ethics grow out of the mores and are a part of them. That is why the ethics never can be antecedent to the mores, and cannot be in a causal or productive relation to them." "Shocking as it must be to any group to be told that there is no rational ground for any of them to convert another group to its mores ... yet this must be said for it is true."

Here then is a radical position. It is not just the familiar position of empirical utilitarianism which held that right is what conduces to the greatest happiness of the greatest number and