Chapter 48
MAN'S NATURE
21. THE BACKGROUND OF ACTIONS.--In estimating human actions we take into consideration both the doer and the circumstances under which the deed was done. Actions may be desirable or undesirable, good or bad, according to their setting. How shall we judge of the blow that takes away human life? It may be the involuntary reaction of a man startled by a shock; it may be a motion of justifiable self-defence; it may be one struck at the command of a superior and in the defence of one's country; it may be the horrid outcome of cruel rapacity or base malevolence.
Nor are the emotions, torn out of their context, more significant than actions without a background. They are mental phenomena to be observed and described by the psychologist; to the moralist they are, taken alone, as unmeaning as the letters of the alphabet, but, like them, capable in combination of carrying many meanings. Anger, fear, wonder, and all the rest are, as natural emotions, neither good nor bad; they are colors, which may enter into a picture and in it acquire various values.
In morals, when men have attained to the stage of enlightenment at which moral estimation is a possible process, they always consider emotions, intentions, and actions in the light of their background. We do not demand a moral life of the brutes; we do not look for it in the intellectually defective and the emotionally insane; nor do we expect a savage caught in the bush to harbor the same emotions, or to have the same ethical outlook, as the missionary with whom we may confront him. The concepts of moral responsibility, of desert, of guilt, are emptied of all significance, when we lose sight of the nature, inborn or acquired, of the creature haled before the bar of our judgment, and of the environment, which on the one hand, impels him to action, and, on the other, furnishes the stage upon which the drama of his life must be played out to the end.
Hence, he who would not act as the creature of blind impulse or as the unthinking slave of tradition, but would exercise a conscious and intelligent control over his conduct, seems compelled to look at his life and its setting in a broad way, to scrutinize with care both the nature of man and the environment without which that nature could find no expression. When he does this, he only does more intelligently what men generally do instinctively and somewhat at haphazard. He seeks a rational estimate of the significance of conduct, and a standard by which it may be measured.
22. MAN'S NATURE.--Moralists ancient and modern have had a good deal to say about the nature of man. To some of them it has seemed rather a simple thing to describe it. Its constitution, as they have conceived it, has furnished them with certain principles which should guide human action. Aristotle, who assumed that every man seeks his own good, conceived of his good or "well-being" as largely identical with "well- doing." This "well-doing" meant to him "fulfilling the proper functions of man," or in other words acting as the nature of man prescribes. [Footnote: _Politics_, i, 2. See, further, on _Man's Nature_,