MAN'S MORAL NATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 781, 9 July 1954, Page 5

MAN'S MORAL NATURE

Sir.-Regarding your leading article of June 4, and Professor Oliphant’s statement that there is no evidence of improvement in human morality in five thousands years, I would like to contest that statement. The quoted example of slavery is surely evidence of improvement. If there is anything more immoral than slavery, I would like to hear of it, Yet it was approved by civilised people including the Christian world a little over a hundred years ago; but few would even try to defend it now. Persecution for religious beliefs was general up to the time of the first Elizabeth and even latér, but little of it remains now and that little is disappearing fast. Cruelty to animals aroused no public protest about one hundred years ago. As recently as my own schooldays, stoning fowls to death, flaying frogs in the spokes of a bieycle wheel, and tying together the tails of two cats and throwing them over a clothes-line and letting them tear themselves to pieces were fairly commonplace. Very little of this happens now. Not because of the fear of punishment but because the conscience of both adults and children has been aroused. Maiming as a form of legal punishment, death for a dozen trivial offences and hideous ill-treatment of children and the mentally ill, were accepted as the right thing. How different it is now! If the arousing of the individual and public conscience to the state where people improve in all these ways is not an improvement in human morality, what is it? Admitted, modern war is more frightful than ever before, but this is due to an improvement in weapons rather than to deterioration in morals. And war is accepted generally as an evil and as immoral; but we don’t know how to avoid it. But admitting war to be immoral is a positive improvement. I am convinced that, by the year 2054 humanity will be conducting researches to find out what we thought were bars to world union and to the cessation of wars.

C. V.

GODDARD

(Dunedin).

("Evidence of improvement"’ in this or that has no bearing on the point at issue. If men who lived more than 2000 years ago cquid have ideas which only lately have been carried into practice, they were clearly men whose moral nature was equal to that of the best people now living. The mass inertia which checked their ideas has not disappeared, but has merely changed its front. Persecution for religious beliefs may have disappeared, for instance, but can we say that persecution itself is no longer with us?-Ed.)