Basic Writings

Chapter 2: The Origin of Conscience

chapter 2 The Origin of Conscience Once the distinction had been established between egoistic behavior as bad and non-egoistic behavior as good,people set out to impress it upon children . Today too this distinction is forced into us from childhood. We constantly hear the selfless person praised and the egoist condemned. The books we read and the plays we see present the same opposition; finally we are directly taught that unselfishness, compassion, benevolence, and sacrifice are good, and that hard-heartedness, envy, and malicious pleasure are bad. If anyone were raised in exactly the opposite conditions, if from his childhood he heard hard-heartedness,envy,and malicious pleasure called good and praised, and selflessness in contrast called bad and blamed; if it were directly impressed upon him that it is praiseworthy to kill as many as possible of his fellows (from the same state),or else to hurt,annoy,and torment them,whereas it would be bad and blameworthy to give in to the impulses of the nonegoistic instinct and to care for others; if this distinction were also constantly impressed upon him by books and plays,then it would become natural for him to describe the Iagos, Richards, and Gonerils as praiseworthy and good, and the Posas as evil. The diversity of the customs prevailing in different nations confirms this. For example, anyone raised among a people whose morals allow infanticide will consider that to be as blameless as we consider it to be blameworthy.Again, those like the Indians to whom the murder of strangers has been taught, will feel any such murder to be as praiseworthy as we, to whom the opposite has been taught, consider it to be blameworthy. Everyone regards as good (or bad) just those actions that he has seen described from his childhood as good (or bad). Indeed, he accepts these distinctions made by his social environment just as insensibly and inescapably as he does the dialect of his social environment. Once this distinction has been made, however, once someone has become accustomed to connecting the idea of praiseworthiness with a particular mode of action and the idea of blameworthiness with its contrary, it will easily seem to him as if he had not become accustomed to making these connections but had been making them from birth.So it seems to us as if we had been connecting the idea of praiseworthiness with non-egoism and of blameworthiness with egoism since our birth. We are no longer capable of dissociating non-egoism from the idea of praiseworthiness, since we have always seen and thought of them in connection, and similarly for dissociating egoism from blameworthiness . J. S. Mill says excellently, “When we have often seen and thought of two things together, and have never in any one instance either seen or thought of them separately,there is by the primary law of association an increasing difficulty , which may in the end become insuperable, of conceiving the two things apart.”7 But since the understanding of things united by habit depends on separating them, non-egoism must be separated from the idea of praiseworthiness . One must reflect that the two things arise from different sources: nonegoism is innate, an inherited quality of our animal ancestors. The idea of its praiseworthiness,however,developed only at a certain stage of culture and then became,as it now is,a habit acquired by individuals in the course of their lives. Egoism, the drive to care for oneself, is equally innate. However, the description of this drive as bad and blameworthy when it seeks satisfaction at the cost of others—this description developed alongside praise of non-egoism and then became linked by habit with the egoistic drive. Certainly,the egoistic person,for example,the cruel man,ordinarily appears to us as antipathetic by nature, and the selfless person as sympathetic by nature . If anyone toward whom we are not hostile is treated badly, our compassion is aroused; we feel pain at the fact of his suffering and hence find his assailant unpleasant, disagreeable, and antipathetic. However, this feeling of antipathy must be distinguished from the feeling that makes us call the cruel man bad and blameworthy. This second feeling is the result of a habit and would not occur to an uncivilized person; the first one rests on the innate feeling of compassion and can also be felt by an uncivilized person. Moreover, if we hate the person...