So close- knit is society today that an indifference to sanitation
in Asia or a religious persecution in Russia may produce disastrous
results to some innocent and utterly indifferent individual in
Massachusetts or California. On the other hand, there is no vice so
solitary and so can widespread social results. [Footnote: Cf. George
Eliot in Adam Bede: "There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man
can bear the punishment alone. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended
as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease."]
Society has a vital interest in the personal life of its members, and
every member, however self- contained he may be, has a vital interest
in the general standards of morality. For purposes of analysis, however,
it is convenient to make the distinction between the two aspects of
morality, the governance of intra-human and of inter-human relations;
the ordering of the single life and the ordering of the community life.
Of the two the latter is even more imperative than the former, the
arbitration of clashes between individuals even more difficult than
the governing of the impulses within a single heart. We turn, therefore,
to consider the problems involved in the general conception of social
morality, which we may define as the direction of the action of each
toward the greatest attainable welfare of all. Why should we be
altruistic? That altruism (action directed toward others' welfare)
is best for the community as a whole is obvious.
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