Right and Reason

The good life and how to live it must always have been the subject of human speculation. From the wooden plow to the tractor, from the rude hut to the skyscraper, from the bow and arrow to the latest form of nuclear weapon, man has been devising tools for the accomplishment of purposes, means for the attainment of ends. He knows what these things are for, because he has made them with a definite end in view. No great intellectual leap is required for man to turn his question from his products to himself and ask: What am I for, what goal am I destined to achieve, what is the purpose of human life?

It is not enough to have tools, but they must be used in the right way. There is a right way of hunting and fishing, of farming and building, of fighting and governing, and there is also a wrong way. The right way leads to satisfaction and success, the wrong way to defeat and frustration. If this is true of single acts and particular pursuits, must it not be true of the sum total of one's acts, of life itself? There must be a right way and a wrong way of living, just as there is of hunting, fishing, and the rest; and the right way of living is the good life. We have no record of any such primitive speculations, but in the dawn of history we find that man had already asked these questions and given some sort of answer to them. In fact, we find rather complex codes of conduct already existing and embedded in the customs of the tribe. This was prescientific knowledge, subject to all the errors and whimsies of nonscientific thinking, but out of material suggested by these primitive codes of conduct an awakened intelligence could fashion a science of the good life. ORIGIN OF ETHICS The transition from nonscientific to scientific knowledge began, in our Western culture, with the Greeks. By the sixth century before Christ they had reduced primitive speculations to some sort of order or system, and integrated them into the general body of wisdom called philosophy. After a brilliant period of speculation on the structure of the universe, they began in the days of the Sophists and of Socrates to turn their insatiable curiosity on themselves, on human life and society. Nothing was too sacred for their penetrating scrutiny.