THE SPIRITUAL ATTITUDE TO BE OBSERVED TOWARDS FELLOW-MEN IN GENERAL, IRRESPECTIVE OF THE SPECIAL RELATIONS WHICH CONNECT US MORE CLOSELY WITH SOME THAN OTHERS  
The Right to Life
 
The thoughts presented above on the subject of sin naturally lead over to the next topic, the obligations we are under regarding the life, the property and the reputation of others. The ancient moral laws unquestionably remain: “Thou shalt not kill”; “Thou shalt not steal”; “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” But their application is extended and their significance intensified by the positive definition which has been given to the term Spiritual.
 
So long as the mere inviolateness of the human personality is emphasized, without any defined conception of what it is that is inviolate (the inviolateness without the infinite preciousness), there is danger that the physical part of man will be invested with the sacred character that belongs to the spiritual, that the two, the spiritual and the physical parts, will be identified.
 
The result will be mischievous in two ways: First, while the act of killing will be reprobated, a kind of tabu being attached to bloodshed, the taking of the life of fellow-beings in more indirect ways, or what may be180 called constructive murder, will be lightly regarded. The following case is mentioned by a recent writer. The directors of a railroad refused to vote the sum of five thousand dollars to provide a certain safety appliance for their cars. Soon after an accident occurred, in which a number of men were killed. The accident might have been prevented had the five thousand dollars required for the installation of the safety appliance been voted. Now the men were undoubtedly killed by the directors of the company. As to the difference in the degree of guilt in the case of direct and indirect murder, there is room for casuistical debate. The consequences it is true were not present to the directors’ minds. But are they not responsible for the very fact that the consequences were excluded from their view? They were intent on their dividends, and ignored the endangered lives. But is not this the substance of their guilt? Does not moral progress lie in the direction of extending the sense of responsibility so as to cover the indirect taking of life? Similarly the use of poisonous substances in industry, bad sanitation, inadequate fire protection, must be stigmatized as indirect murder. The Commandment “Thou shalt not kill” must extend over a far wider area than it has covered in the past.53
 
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Secondly, the positive definition of the spiritual nature enables us to perceive more distinctly that the physical part is the means and the spiritual part the end, and to draw the necessary consequences. That which is means is not to be cherished if to do so would defeat the end itself; hence the physical life is not to be preserved if by preserving it we deny or defeat the very purpose which the physical part is to serve. So long as men have the tabu feeling about bloodshed, the fact that life ought of right to be taken in certain instances will seem a hopeless contradiction of the general rule against killing. Keeping in mind the spiritual end of existence on the other hand, we affirm unhesitatingly that it is better that a man should die than commit a heinous crime. It was better for the young girl mentioned in a well-known tale, threatened with outrage, and seeing no other possible way of escape, to strangle herself with her own hair rather than submit. According to the opinion of certain scholastic writers on ethics, dishonor resides solely in the consent of the soul, and where this is absent the mere physical infringement cannot leave a moral stain. This is a helpful point of view in regard to the victims of the atrocities of war, the inmates of certain Belgian nunneries, and the hapless objects of unspeakable brutality in certain Polish villages. The anguish of a pure-minded woman who becomes a mother under such circumstances is hardly conceivable. And to discriminate between the infamy done to her and her own unpolluted soul is a plain duty, as well as to relieve the innocent offspring of outrage from any participation in the guilt to which it owes its existence. But the case to which I refer is different. It is one in which the choice remains between voluntary death and submission to intended violation. Submission in such a situation argues a kind of consent, or at least the absence of a sufficient revulsion.
 
It is right to kill an intending murderer supposing182 that there is no other way of preventing him from committing his crime, whether the intended victim be oneself or someone else. It is not only the life thus protected from attack that is saved, but the murderer in a sense is saved as well, so far as he can be saved, by the intervention. Also the members of his family are saved, humanity is saved from moral disgrace in his person. The same reasoning applies to the position of the extreme non-resistants. They will not, they tell us, do a wrong to prevent a wrong. In their eyes to take the physical life of another is in every possible instance an absolute wrong. They fail to take account of the instrumental relation between the physical and the spiritual parts. And on the same grounds, a defensive war, a war to ward off aggression, may be theoretically justified. But here the application of the theory is dubious as well as dangerous. Exceptional cases of high-handed aggression that ought to be resisted occur, but aggression is rarely, if ever, one-sided. As a rule, there is more or less wrong on both sides, and the tangle of accusations and mutual recriminations is almost impossible to unravel. Very rarely, indeed, if ever, is right altogether on one side, and wrong on the other, though predominant right may be on one side and predominant wrong on the other. And aside from this, the instruments of destruction in modern warfare have become so monstrous, the efficiency notion applied to war has led to such ruthlessness, the attempt to distinguish between the civilian population and the armed forces has so nearly broken down, that right-thinking persons everywhere are now eagerly intent on how to prevent183 aggression before it can take effect, rather than to resist it after it has occurred.
 
NOTE
 
The casuistical question may be raised whether from this point of view we are not all murderers. The amount I spend on my house, food, recreation, might if divided prolong the life of many a child in the slums. Am I not then actually a parasite, that is, a murderer? It is this shocking scruple that has led fine people to live among the poor, and to try to equalize their mode of living with that prevailing in the environment. The motive is noble, though as a matter of fact they may never succeed in doing what they set out to do because they never actually touch bottom. There are always depths of poverty to which they can not descend. They may spend comparatively little, yet that little is far in excess of the spending of the most indigent. And had they stripped themselves of everything they would have been face to face with the reductio ad absurdum of their method, for they would have abandoned civilization and degraded their human life to the level of the wayside tramp.
 
What is inspiring in their example is just the immense compassion, the willingness to give up so much. But the method itself is not a solution.
 
Are we then murderers, all of us? Perhaps a distinction may be drawn between acts which in themselves are hostile to the life of fellowmen, like overtaxing the worker, and acts which tend positively to maintain the higher values of life,—such as the providing of decent shelter, support and education, for the members of one’s family. It is true that, as Tolstoy warns us, we easily slip into indefensible luxury under the pretence of maintaining the higher values. But this does not affect the validity of the distinction itself.
 
And yet the distinction does not relieve us of what may be called our share of the social or collective guilt. The exploiter184 is chargeable with individual guilt. I who am trying to keep up the standard of civilized living within my little sphere am nevertheless conscious of participating in the social guilt, the guilt of a society that has permitted and still permits such misery to exist. Well, it does exist, and I can do but a very little to change it. Can I then endure the contrast between my own lot and that of the greater number. Is it not true after all that if I give up the comforts, or let me say the helps to the maintenance of the higher values, I should be saving the lives of many children? Those children are dying because I am not dividing my possessions among the poor. Can I stand up and look at that fact, at those deaths?
 
The only answer which it is possible to give at the point we have thus far reached in our exposition is: push on, perfect civilization, a way will eventually be found to uplift the masses and make them partakers of the future civilization. The other alternative, that of Tolstoy, is stagnation. Yet I cannot disguise from myself the fact that in the meanwhile, while we are trying to push on, millions are perishing. This is the true “burden of world pain,” not the sentimental world pain due to the fact that one is not having oneself the best kind of a time in the world, but the pain caused by the fact that while we are reaching forward to help the suffering masses, those masses, though composed of individuals morally as worth while as ourselves, and many of them doubtless better, if we only knew it, are perishing before our very eyes, and that we stand by and cannot save them. I have said that in the meanwhile while we are trying to push on, millions are perishing. The actual moral problem so often overlooked is underlined in the words “in the meanwhile.”
 
There is one pathetic consolation. Envy is not the widespread vice which it is sometimes represented to be. Those who are in trouble take the will very largely for the deed. People in the worst conditions are grateful to anyone who shows a real desire to help, even if his actual performance does not go very far. And there is a still finer trait in ordinary human nature,185 namely, the tendency to find a certain vicarious relief in the joy of the few, provided that their joy be pure.
 
The Right to Property54
 
“Property,” according to Blackstone, “is the sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”
 
Orthodox jurisprudence, like orthodox religion, is characterized by the absoluteness of its formula. It ignores the genesis of its concepts in the long line of antecedent historical development, and it disdains to entertain the demand for modification, though the circumstances of the time loudly call for it.
 
“The sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises,” etc., may be a fact, but it is not a right. Property can only be regarded as a right if shown to be subservient to the ethical end,—the maintenance and development of personality. Orthodox jurisprudence effaces the end, and treats that which is or has been at one time a means as if it possessed a sanctity of its own. On the other hand, the empirical treatment of jurisprudence, in dismissing the supposedly absolute means, tends to leave out of sight the ethical end, and to treat the social institutions as subservient to mere convenience.
 
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The following propositions will indicate the changes in the conception of the right of property required by our ethical theory.
 
1. Property is a relation between a person or persons and things. There can be no property right in persons, but only in things.55
 
2. The right of property faces in two directions: Toward outside nature and toward fellow human beings. We have a right over the external things of nature. We have a right to the services, though not to the personality, of fellow human beings. These two aspects of the right of property must be kept apart and defined.
 
It is sometimes held that the human race as a whole, as over against nature, has the right of dominion. Nature, it is said, is our quarry, we can take out of it the stones we need to construct the edifice of civilization. Nature is our tool. The laws of nature, as science discovers them, become our servants. Nature offers the raw material which we consume. Nature has no rights as against man. But I hold that neither has man rights as against nature, except in so far as he rightly defines the end in the interest of which he makes use of nature—the maintenance and development of personality.
 
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To suppose that the right of property as the extension of personality over things is tenable without regard to its instrumental use, to suppose that bare appropriation of nature as of “treasure trove” is a prerogative of man, is to lend countenance to the false notion of occupation, or first appropriation, which has confused the ethics of the subject in the literature of jurisprudence, and prevented a right understanding of it. If bare appropriation be the foundation, then the first comer has a right against his successors, since the extension of personality over the thing has been actually accomplished by him, and that is all there is to be said about it. Again, on this view, a case may be made out for vested interests, that is to say, for those who have successfully appropriated the earth, yes, and the fullness thereof, and who having thus effectually extended their personality over things without regard to the uses they make of their possessions, are then to be entitled to remain indefinitely in secure ownership of them.
 
Without an ethical standard, without the notion of an end to be subserved, stubborn possession will always be able to resist modification, and on the other hand attempts at modification will be haphazard. Neither the human species collectively nor the individual has a right simply to appropriate the things of the external world. Neither the first occupier nor the last is entitled to his goods unless he can make out a greater good in the interest of which he should be allowed to possess them.
 
But the case of primary occupation is academic. It occurs on Robinson Crusoe’s island and in legal fiction. Even when the white race invades Africa, it does not commonly take possession of unoccupied land, but188 dispossesses the natives. On what ground does it dispossess them? Is there an ethical standard by which the dealings of the civilized nations with the populations of Africa can be measured? Is the introduction of the appliances of modern civilization, the opening up to trade, a sufficient ground for the subjection or the extermination of the inhabitants? In this connection it becomes clear how urgent a more clarified conception of property rights is. False ideas of this so-called right are to no small extent responsible for the massacre of the inferior races, and the mutual slaughter of those who covet their lands. A proclamation of the Queen of England or of the Emperor of Germany, or the signature of an irresponsible chief to a treaty the meaning of which he scarcely understands, transfers millions of subjects and their territory to one or other of the European powers. What right of property have these European powers in the territory and the peoples acquired by them in this fashion?
 
The last example shows that the right of ownership, except in very rare instances, is not in question in respect to the dealings of man with nature, but comes into play chiefly in the relation of man to his fellows. There are competitors to be outstripped, thwarted. There are weaker fellow-beings to be subdued. The use of force and cunning in acquiring property is well nigh the general rule. Are there any ethical ideals which, if they could be realized, might disclose a better way, might bring order into this frightful chaos, and abate the conflicts? From the ethical ideal as outlined in previous chapters this follows:
 
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The extension of personality over things is a right in so far as things are employed to maintain and develop potential personality. The use of the services of a fellowman is a right in so far as his services are used in such a manner as to preserve and develop his personality as well as that of the user.
 
In speaking of the use of the services of others we touch upon the social aspect of the property relation, and here is the crux of the whole matter. It is coming to be affirmed more and more that property is a “social” concept, that it cannot be explained either as implying a relation of the individual to outside nature, save exceptionally, nor as a relation of the individual considered atomistically to other atomic individuals. The social tie, it is held, is intrinsic. The nature of man as such is social, but the word “social” in current discussion is very ill-defined, and is commonly understood to denote merely the fact of the interdependence of men upon one another, without conveying the idea of a rule or standard by which the system of interdependence may be regulated. Vague notions, such as that of social happiness, are believed sufficient to take the place of such a standard.
 
Let me then consider first the bare fact of interdependence, and see what follows from it, and how far it wil............