Ethics, Part 1 - Origin, Middle East, India, China

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ethics
philosophy
Also known as: moral philosophy

Written by Peter Singer

Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Oct 21, 2024

What is ethics?

How is ethics different from morality?

Why does ethics matter?

Defined

Ethics is the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles.

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How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? And what of the more particular questions that face us: is it right to be dishonest in a good cause? Can we justify living in opulence while elsewhere in the world people are starving? Is going to war justified in cases where it is likely that innocent people will be killed? Is it wrong to clone a human being or to destroy human embryos in medical research? What are our obligations, if any, to the generations of humans who will come after us and to the nonhuman animals with whom we share the planet?

Ethics deals with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong.

The terms ethics and morality are closely related. It is now common to refer to ethical judgments or to ethical principles where it once would have been more accurate to speak of moral judgments or moral principles. These applications are an extension of the meaning of ethics. In earlier usage, the term referred not to morality itself but to the field of study, or branch of inquiry, that has morality as its subject matter. In this sense, ethics is equivalent to moral philosophy.

Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, economics, history, politics, sociology, and theology. Yet, ethics remains distinct from such disciplines because it is not a matter of factual knowledge in the way that the sciences and other branches of inquiry are. Rather, it has to do with determining the nature of normative theories and applying these sets of principles to practical moral problems.

This article, then, will deal with ethics as a field of philosophy, especially as it has developed in the West. For coverage of religious conceptions of ethics and the ethical systems associated with world religions, see Buddhism; Christianity; Confucianism; Hinduism; Jainism; Judaism; Sikhism.

The Origins of Ethics

Mythical accounts

Introduction of moral codes

When did ethics begin and how did it originate? If one has in mind ethics proper—i.e., the systematic study of what is morally right and wrong—it is clear that ethics could have come into existence only when human beings started to reflect on the best way to live. This reflective stage emerged long after human societies had developed some kind of morality, usually in the form of customary standards of right and wrong conduct. The process of reflection tended to arise from such customs, even if in the end it may have found them wanting. Accordingly, ethics began with the introduction of the first moral codes.

Virtually every human society has some form of myth to explain the origin of morality. In the Louvre in Paris there is a black Babylonian column with a relief showing the sun god Shamash presenting the code of laws to Hammurabi (died c. 1750 bce), known as the Code of Hammurabi. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) account of God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses (flourished 14th–13th century bce) on Mount Sinai might be considered another example. In the dialogue Protagoras by Plato (428/427–348/347 bce), there is an avowedly mythical account of how Zeus took pity on the hapless humans, who were physically no match for the other beasts. To make up for these deficiencies, Zeus gave humans a moral sense and the capacity for law and justice, so that they could live in larger communities and cooperate with one another.

That morality should be invested with all the mystery and power of divine origin is not surprising. Nothing else could provide such strong reasons for accepting the moral law. By attributing a divine origin to morality, the priesthood became its interpreter and guardian and thereby secured for itself a power that it would not readily relinquish. This link between morality and religion has been so firmly forged that it is still sometimes asserted that there can be no morality without religion. According to this view, ethics is not an independent field of study but rather a branch of theology (see moral theology).

There is some difficulty, already known to Plato, with the view that morality was created by a divine power. In his dialogue Euthyphro, Plato considered the suggestion that it is divine approval that makes an action good. Plato pointed out that, if this were the case, one could not say that the gods approve of such actions because they are good. Why then do they approve of them? Is their approval entirely arbitrary? Plato considered this impossible and so held that there must be some standards of right or wrong that are independent of the likes and dislikes of the gods. Modern philosophers have generally accepted Plato’s argument, because the alternative implies that if, for example, the gods had happened to approve of torturing children and to disapprove of helping one’s neighbours, then torture would have been good and neighbourliness bad.

Problems of divine origin

A modern theist (see theism) might say that, since God is good, God could not possibly approve of torturing children nor disapprove of helping neighbours. In saying this, however, the theist would have tacitly admitted that there is a standard of goodness that is independent of God. Without an independent standard, it would be pointless to say that God is good; this could mean only that God is approved of by God. It seems therefore that, even for those who believe in the existence of God, it is impossible to give a satisfactory account of the origin of morality in terms of divine creation. A different account is needed.

There are other possible connections between religion and morality. It has been said that, even if standards of good and evil exist independently of God or the gods, divine revelation is the only reliable means of finding out what these standards are. An obvious problem with this view is that those who receive divine revelations, or who consider themselves qualified to interpret them, do not always agree on what is good and what is evil. Without an accepted criterion for the authenticity of a revelation or an interpretation, people are no better off, so far as reaching moral agreement is concerned, than they would be if they were to decide on good and evil themselves, with no assistance from religion.

Traditionally, a more important link between religion and ethics was that religious teachings were thought to provide a reason for doing what is right. In its crudest form, the reason was that those who obey the moral law will be rewarded by an eternity of bliss while everyone else roasts in hell. In more sophisticated versions, the motivation provided by religion was more inspirational and less blatantly self-interested. Whether in its crude or its sophisticated version, or something in between, religion does provide an answer to one of the great questions of ethics: “Why should I be moral?” (See below Ethics and reasons for action.) As will be seen in the course of this article, however, the answer provided by religion is not the only one available.

Prehuman ethics

Nonhuman behaviour

Because, for obvious reasons, there is no historical record of a human society in the period before it had any standards of right and wrong, history cannot reveal the origins of morality. Nor is anthropology of any help, because all the human societies that have been studied so far had their own forms of morality (except perhaps in the most extreme circumstances). Fortunately, another mode of inquiry is available. Because living in social groups is a characteristic that humans share with many other animal species—including their closest relatives, the apes—presumably the common ancestor of humans and apes also lived in social groups. Here, then, in the social behaviour of nonhuman animals and in the theory of evolution that explains such behaviour may be found the origins of human morality.

Social life, even for nonhuman animals, requires constraints on behaviour. No group can stay together if its members make frequent, unrestrained attacks on each other. With some exceptions, social animals generally either refrain altogether from attacking other members of the social group or, if an attack does take place, do not make the ensuing struggle a fight to the death—it is over when the weaker animal shows submissive behaviour. It is not difficult to see analogies here with human moral codes. The parallels, however, go much further than this. Like humans, social animals may behave in ways that benefit other members of the group at some cost or risk to themselves. Male baboons threaten predators and cover the rear as the troop retreats. Wolves and wild dogs take meat back to members of the pack not present at the kill. Gibbons and chimpanzees with food will, in response to a gesture, share their food with other members of the group. Dolphins support other sick or injured dolphins, swimming under them for hours at a time and pushing them to the surface so they can breathe.

It may be thought that the existence of such apparently altruistic behaviour is odd, for evolutionary theory states that those who do not struggle to survive and reproduce will be eliminated through natural selection. Research in evolutionary theory applied to social behaviour, however, has shown that evolution need not be so ruthless. Some of this altruistic behaviour is explained by kin selection. The most obvious examples are those in which parents make sacrifices for their offspring. If wolves help their cubs to survive, it is more likely that genetic characteristics, including the characteristic of helping their own cubs, will spread through further generations of wolves.

Kinship and reciprocity

Less obviously, the principle also holds for assistance to other close relatives, even if they are not descendants. A child shares 50 percent of the genes of each of its parents, but full siblings too, on the average, have 50 percent of their genes in common. Thus, a tendency to sacrifice one’s life for two or more of one’s siblings could spread from one generation to the next. Between cousins, where only 12.5 percent of the genes are shared, the benefit-to-sacrifice ratio would have to be correspondingly increased.

When apparent altruism is not between kin, it may be based on reciprocity. A monkey will present its back to another monkey, which will pick out parasites; after a time the roles will be reversed. Reciprocity may also be a factor in food sharing among unrelated animals. Such reciprocity will pay off, in evolutionary terms, as long as the costs of helping are less than the benefits of being helped and as long as animals will not gain in the long run by “cheating”—that is to say, by receiving favours without returning them. It would seem that the best way to ensure that those that cheat do not prosper is for animals to be able to recognize cheats and refuse them the benefits of cooperation the next time around. This is possible only among intelligent animals living in small, stable groups over a long period of time. Evidence supports this conclusion: reciprocal behaviour has been observed in birds and mammals, the clearest cases occurring among wolves, wild dogs, dolphins, monkeys, and apes.

In short, kin altruism and reciprocity do exist, at least in some nonhuman animals living in groups. Could these forms of behaviour be the basis of human ethics? There are good reasons for believing that they could. Kinship is a source of obligation in every human society. A mother’s duty to look after her children is recognized in every known society, and the duty of a father to support and protect his family is almost as widely maintained. Duties to close relatives take priority over duties to more distant relatives, but in most societies even distant relatives are still treated better than strangers.

If kinship is the most basic and universal tie between human beings, the bond of reciprocity is not far behind. It would be difficult to find a society that did not recognize, at least under some circumstances, an obligation to return favours. In many cultures this is taken to extraordinary lengths, and there are elaborate rituals of gift giving. Often the repayment must be superior to the original gift, and this escalation can reach extremes that eventually threaten the economic security of the donor. The huge “potlatch” feasts of certain Native American tribes are a well-known example of this type of situation. Many Melanesian societies also place great importance on giving and receiving very substantial amounts of valuable items.

Many features of human morality could have grown out of simple reciprocal practices such as the mutual removal of parasites from awkward places. Suppose a person wanted to have the lice in his hair picked out and was willing in return to remove lice from someone else’s hair. The person must choose his partner carefully. If he helps everyone indiscriminately, he will find himself delousing others without getting his own lice removed. To avoid this, he must learn to distinguish between those who return favours and those who do not. In making this distinction, he would be separating reciprocators from nonreciprocators and, in the process, developing crude notions of fairness and of cheating. He will naturally strengthen his ties to those who reciprocate, and bonds of friendship and loyalty, with a consequent sense of obligation to assist, will result.

This is not all. The reciprocators are likely to react in a hostile and angry way to those who do not reciprocate. Perhaps they will regard reciprocity as good and “right” and cheating as bad and “wrong.” From here it is a small step to concluding that the worst of the nonreciprocators should be driven out of society or else punished in some way so that they will not take advantage of others again. Thus, a system of punishment and a notion of just desert constitute the other side of reciprocal altruism.

Although kinship and reciprocity loom large in human morality, they do not cover the entire field. Typically, there are obligations to other members of the village, tribe, or nation, even when they are strangers. There may also be a loyalty to the group as a whole that is distinct from loyalty to individual members of the group. It may be at this point that human culture intervenes. Each society has a clear interest in promoting devotion to the group and can be expected to develop cultural influences that exalt those who make sacrifices for the sake of the group and revile those who put their own interests too far ahead. More tangible rewards and punishments may supplement the persuasive effect of social opinion. This is the start of a process of cultural development of moral codes.

Research in psychology and the neurosciences has thrown light on the role of specific parts of the brain in moral judgment and behaviour, suggesting that emotions are strongly involved in moral judgments, particularly those that are formed rapidly and intuitively. These emotions could be the result of social and cultural influences, or they could have a biological basis in the evolutionary history of the human species; such a basis would continue to exert some influence even if social and cultural forces pulled in different directions. Some of this research, however, also indicates that people sometimes use reasoning processes to reach moral judgments that contradict their usual intuitive responses.

Anthropology and ethics

Many people believe that there are no moral universals—i.e., that there is so much variation from one culture to another that no single moral principle or judgment is generally accepted. It has already been shown that this is not the case. Of course, there are immense differences in the way in which the broad principles so far discussed are applied. The duty of children to their parents meant one thing in traditional Chinese society and means something quite different in contemporary Western societies. Yet, concern for kin and reciprocity are considered good in virtually all human societies. Also, all societies have, for obvious reasons, some constraints on killing and wounding other members of the group.

Herodotus - Statue of seated man said
to be Herodotus; in the Louvre, Paris.

Beyond this common ground, the variations in moral attitudes soon become more striking than the similarities. Man’s fascination with such variations goes back a long way. The Greek historian Herodotus (died 430–420 bce) relates that the Persian king Darius I (550–486 bce) once summoned some Greeks before him and asked them how much he would have to pay them to eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They refused to do it at any price. Then he summoned some Indians who by custom ate the bodies of their parents and asked them what would make them willing to burn their fathers’ bodies. The Indians cried out that he should not mention so horrid an act. Herodotus drew the obvious moral: each nation thinks its own customs best.

Variations in morals were not systematically studied until the 19th century, when Western knowledge of the more remote parts of the globe began to increase. In The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906–08), the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck (1862–1939) compared differences between societies in matters such as the wrongness of killing (including killing in warfare, euthanasia, suicide, infanticide, abortion, human sacrifice, and duelling); the duty to support children, the aged, or the poor; forms of permissible sexual relationship; the status of women; the right to property and what constitutes theft; the holding of slaves; the duty to tell the truth; dietary restrictions; concern for nonhuman animals; duties to the dead; and duties to the gods. Westermarck had no difficulty in demonstrating tremendous diversity in what different societies considered good conduct in all these areas. More recent, though less comprehensive, studies have confirmed that human societies can and do flourish while holding radically different views about all such matters—though of course various groups within a society may do less well under some sets of beliefs than others.

As noted above, ethics itself is not primarily concerned with the description of the moral systems of different societies. That task, which remains on the level of description, is one for anthropology or sociology. In contrast, ethics deals with the justification of moral principles (or with the impossibility of such a justification). Nevertheless, ethics must take note of the variations in moral systems, because it has often been claimed that this variety shows that morality is simply a matter of what is customary and that it thus is always relative to particular societies. According to this view, no moral principle can be valid except in the societies in which it is held. Words such as good and bad just mean, it is claimed, “approved in my society” or “disapproved in my society,” and so to search for an objective, or rationally justifiable, ethics is to search for what is in fact an illusion.

One way of replying to this position would be to stress the fact that there are some features common to virtually all human moralities. It might be thought that these common features must be the universally valid and objective core of morality. This argument would, however, involve a fallacy. If the explanation for the common features is simply that they are advantageous in terms of evolutionary theory, that does not make them right. Evolution is a blind force incapable of conferring a moral imprimatur on human behaviour. It may be a fact that concern for kin is in accord with evolutionary theory, but to say that concern for kin is therefore right would be to attempt to deduce values from facts (see below The climax of moral sense theory: Hutcheson and Hume). In any case, the fact that something is universally approved does not make it right. If all human societies enslaved any tribe they could conquer, and some freethinking moralists nevertheless insisted that slavery is wrong, they could not be said to be talking nonsense merely because they had few supporters. Similarly, then, universal support for principles of kinship and reciprocity cannot prove that these principles are in some way objectively justified.

This example illustrates the way in which ethics differs from the descriptive sciences. From the standpoint of ethics, whether human moral codes closely parallel one another or are extraordinarily diverse, the question of how an individual should act remains open. People who are uncertain about what they should do will not be helped by being told what their society thinks they should do in the circumstances in which they find themselves. Even if they are told that virtually all other human societies agree and that this agreement stems from evolved human nature, they may still reasonably choose to act otherwise. If they are told that there is great variation between human societies regarding what people should do in such circumstances, they may wonder whether there can be any objective answer, but their dilemma still would not be resolved. In fact, this diversity does not rule out the possibility of an objective answer: conceivably, most societies simply got it wrong. This too is something that will be taken up later in this article, for the possibility of an objective morality is one of the constant themes of ethics.

The ancient Middle East and Asia

The first ethical precepts must have been passed down by word of mouth from parents and elders, but as societies learned to use the written word, they began to set down their ethical beliefs. These records constitute the first historical evidence of the origins of ethics.

The Middle East

The earliest surviving writings that might be taken as ethics textbooks are a series of lists of precepts to be learned by boys of the ruling class of Egypt, prepared some 3,000 years before the Christian Era. In most cases, they consist of shrewd advice on how to live happily, avoid unnecessary troubles, and advance one’s career by cultivating the favour of superiors. There are, however, several passages that recommend more broadly based ideals of conduct, such as the following: rulers should treat their people justly and judge impartially between their subjects; they should aim to make their people prosperous; those who have bread should share it with the hungry; humble and lowly people must be treated with kindness; one should not laugh at the blind or at dwarfs.

Why, then, should one follow these precepts? Did the ancient Egyptians believe that one should do what is good for its own sake? The precepts frequently state that it will profit a man to act justly, as in the maxim “Honesty is the best policy.” They also emphasize the importance of having a good name. These precepts were intended for the instruction of the ruling classes, however, and it is not clear why helping the destitute should have contributed to an individual’s good reputation among this class. To some degree, therefore, the authors of the precepts must have thought that to make people prosperous and happy and to be kind to those who have least is not merely personally advantageous but good in itself.

The precepts are not works of ethics in the philosophical sense. No attempt is made to find any underlying principles of conduct that might provide a more systematic understanding of ethics. Justice, for example, is given a prominent place, but there is no elaboration of the notion of justice or any discussion of how disagreements about what is just and unjust might be resolved. Furthermore, there is no probing of ethical dilemmas that may occur if the precepts should conflict with one another. The precepts are full of sound observations and practical wisdom, but they do not encourage theoretical speculation.

The same practical bent can be found in other early codes or lists of ethical injunctions. The great Code of Hammurabi is often said to have been based on the principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” as if this were some fundamental principle of justice, elaborated and applied to all cases. In fact, the code reflects no such consistent principle. It frequently prescribes the death penalty for offenses that do not themselves cause death—e.g., for robbery and for accepting bribes. Moreover, even the eye-for-an-eye rule applies only if the eye of the original victim is that of a member of the patrician class; if it is the eye of a commoner, the punishment is a fine of a quantity of silver. Apparently such differences in punishment were not thought to require justification. At any rate, there are no surviving attempts to defend the principles of justice on which the code was based.

The Hebrew people were at different times captives of both the Egyptians and the Babylonians. It is therefore not surprising that the law of ancient Israel, which was put into its definitive form during the Babylonian Exile, shows the influence both of the ancient Egyptian precepts and of the Code of Hammurabi. The book of Exodus refers, for example, to the principle of “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Hebraic law does not differentiate, as the Babylonian law does, between patricians and commoners, but it does stipulate that in several respects foreigners may be treated in ways that it is not permissible to treat fellow Hebrews; for instance, Hebrew slaves, but not others, had to be freed without ransom in the seventh year. Yet, in other respects Hebraic law and morality developed the humane concern shown in the Egyptian precepts for the poor and unfortunate: hired servants must be paid promptly, because they rely on their wages to satisfy their pressing needs; slaves must be allowed to rest on the seventh day; widows, orphans, and the blind and deaf must not be wronged; and the poor man should not be refused a loan. There was even a tithe providing for an incipient welfare state. The spirit of this humane concern was summed up by the injunction to “love thy neighbour as thyself,” a sweepingly generous form of the rule of reciprocity.

Moses receiving the Ten CommandmentsMoses receiving the Ten Commandments, with his brother, Aaron, standing to his right and Israelites waiting at the foot of the mountain, miniature illuminated manuscript, c. 1322.(less)

The famed Ten Commandments are thought to be a legacy of Semitic tribal law from a time when important commands were taught one for each finger, so that they could be remembered more easily (sets of five or 10 laws are common among preliterate civilizations). The content of the Hebrew commandments differed from other laws of the region mainly in its emphasis on duties to God. This emphasis persisted in the more detailed laws laid down elsewhere; as much as half of such legislation was concerned with crimes against God and ceremonial and ritualistic matters, though there may be other explanations for some of these ostensibly religious requirements concerning the avoidance of certain foods and the need for ceremonial cleansings.

In addition to lengthy statements of the law, the surviving literature of ancient Israel includes both proverbs and the books of the prophets. The proverbs, like the precepts of the Egyptians, are brief statements that do not demonstrate much concern for systematic presentation or overall coherence. They go farther than the Egyptian precepts, however, in urging conduct that is just and upright and pleasing to God. There are correspondingly fewer references to what is needed for a successful career, though it is frequently stated that God rewards the just. In this connection, the Book of Job is notable as an exploration of the problem raised for those who accept this motive for obeying the moral law: why do the best of people frequently suffer the worst misfortunes? The book offers no solution beyond faith in God, but the sharpened awareness of the problem it offers may have influenced some to adopt the belief in reward and punishment in another realm as the only possible solution.

The literature of the prophets contains a good deal of social and moral criticism, though most of it consists of denunciation rather than discussion about what goodness really is or why there should be so much wrongdoing. The Book of Isaiah is especially notable for its early portrayal of a utopia in which “the desert shall blossom as the rose…the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb.…They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.”

India

Unlike the ethical teachings of ancient Egypt and Babylonia, Indian ethics was philosophical from the start. In the oldest of the Indian writings, the Vedas, ethics is an integral aspect of philosophical and religious speculation about the nature of reality. These writings date from about 1500 to 1200 bce. They have been described as the oldest philosophical literature in the world, and what they say about how people ought to live may therefore be the first philosophical ethics. (See Indian philosophy.)

The Vedas are, in a sense, hymns, but the gods to which they refer are not persons but manifestations of ultimate truth and reality. In the Vedic philosophy, the basic principle of the universe, the ultimate reality on which the cosmos exists, is the principle of rita, which is the word from which the Western notion of right is derived. There is thus a belief in a right moral order somehow built into the universe itself. Hence, truth and right are linked; to penetrate through illusion and understand the ultimate truth of human existence is to understand what is right. To be an enlightened person is to know what is real and to live rightly, for these are not two separate things but one and the same.

The ethics that is thus traced to the very essence of the universe is not without detailed practical applications. These applications were based on four ideals, or proper goals, of life: prosperity, the satisfaction of desires, moral duty, and spiritual perfection—i.e., liberation from a finite existence. From these ends follow certain virtues: honesty, rectitude, charity, nonviolence, modesty, and purity of heart. To be condemned, on the other hand, are falsehood, egoism, cruelty, adultery, theft, and injury to living things. Because the eternal moral law is part of the universe, to do what is praiseworthy is to act in harmony with the universe, and accordingly such action will receive its proper reward; conversely, once the true nature of the self is understood, it becomes apparent that those who do what is wrong are acting self-destructively.

These basic principles underwent considerable modification over the ensuing centuries, especially in the Upanishads, a body of philosophical literature dating from about the middle of the 1st millennium bce. The Indian caste system, with its intricate laws about what members of each caste may or may not do, is accepted by the Upanishads as part of the proper order of the universe. Ethics itself, however, is not regarded as a matter of conformity to laws. Instead, the desire to be ethical is an inner desire. It is part of the quest for spiritual perfection, which in turn is elevated to the highest of the four goals of life.

During the following centuries the moral philosophy of this early period gradually became a rigid and dogmatic system that provoked several reactions. One, which is uncharacteristic of Indian thought in general, was the Charvaka, or materialist school, which mocked religious ceremonies, saying that they were invented by the Brahmans (the priestly caste) to ensure their livelihood. When the Brahmans defended animal sacrifices by claiming that the sacrificed beast goes straight to heaven, the members of the Charvaka asked why the Brahmans did not kill their aged parents to hasten their arrival there. Against the postulation of an eventual spiritual liberation, Charvaka ethics urged each individual to seek his or her pleasure in the here and now.

Jainism, another reaction to the traditional Vedic outlook, reached exactly the opposite conclusions. The Jain philosophy is based on spiritual liberation as the highest of all goals and nonviolence as the means of attaining it. In true philosophical manner, the Jains found in the principle of nonviolence a guide to all morality. First, apart from the obvious application to prohibiting violent acts directed at other humans, nonviolence is extended to all living things. The Jains are vegetarian. They are often ridiculed by Westerners for the care they take to avoid injuring insects or other living things while walking or drinking water that may contain minute organisms; it is less well known that Jains began to care for sick and injured animals thousands of years before animal shelters were thought of in Europe. The Jains do not draw the distinction usually made in Western ethics between their responsibility for what they do and their responsibility for what they omit doing. Omitting to care for an injured animal would also be in their view a form of violence.

Other moral duties are also derived from the notion of nonviolence. To tell someone a lie, for example, is regarded as inflicting a mental injury on that person. Stealing, of course, is another form of injury, but because of the absence of a distinction between acts and omissions, even the possession of wealth is seen as depriving the poor and hungry of the means to satisfy their wants. Thus, nonviolence leads to a principle of nonpossession of property. Jain priests were expected to be strict ascetics and to avoid sexual intercourse. Ordinary Jains, however, followed a slightly less-severe code, which was intended to give effect to the major forms of nonviolence while still being compatible with a normal life.

Buddha

The other great ethical system to develop as a reaction to the ossified form of the old Vedic philosophy was Buddhism. The person who became known as the Buddha (flourished c. 6th–4th century bce), which means the “enlightened one,” was born the son of a king. Until he was 29 years old, he lived the sheltered life of a typical prince, with every luxury he could desire. At that time, legend has it, he was jolted out of his idleness by the “Four Signs”: he saw in succession an old man, a sick person, a corpse being carried to cremation, and a monk in meditation beneath a tree. He began to think about old age, disease, and death, and decided to follow the way of the monk. For six years he led an ascetic life of renunciation, but finally, while meditating under a tree, he concluded that the solution was not withdrawal from the world, but rather a practical life of compassion for all.

Buddhism is conventionally regarded as a religion, and indeed over the centuries it adopted religious trappings in many places. This is an irony of history, however, because the Buddha himself was a strong critic of religion. He rejected the authority of the Vedas and refused to set up an alternative creed. He regarded religious ceremonies as a waste of time and theological beliefs as mere superstition. He refused to discuss abstract metaphysical problems such as the immortality of the soul. The Buddha told his followers to think for themselves and to take responsibility for their own future. In place of religious beliefs and religious ceremonies, the Buddha advocated a life devoted to universal compassion and brotherhood. Through such a life one might reach the ultimate goal, nirvana, a state in which all living things are free from pain and sorrow. There are similarities between this morality of universal compassion and the ethics of the Jains.

In keeping with his own previous experience, the Buddha proposed a “middle path” between self-indulgence and self-renunciation. In fact, it is not so much a path between these two extremes as one that draws together the benefits of both. Through living a life of compassion and love for all, a person achieves the liberation from selfish cravings sought by the ascetic and a serenity and satisfaction that are more fulfilling than anything obtained by indulgence in pleasure.

It is sometimes thought that because the Buddhist goal is nirvana, a state that can be reached by meditation, Buddhism teaches a withdrawal from the real world. Nirvana, however, is not to be sought for oneself alone; it is regarded as a unity of the individual self with the universal self in which all things take part. In the Mahayana school of Buddhism, the aspirant to enlightenment even takes a vow to become a bodhisattva (buddha-to-be) and not to accept final release until everything that exists in the universe has attained nirvana.

The Buddha lived and taught in India, and so Buddhism is properly classified as an Indian moral philosophy. Yet Buddhism did not permanently take hold in the land of its origin. Instead, it spread in different forms south into Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and north through Tibet to China, Korea, and Japan. In the process, Buddhism suffered the same fate as the Vedic philosophy against which it had rebelled: it became a religion, often rigid, with its own sects, ceremonies, and superstitions.

1 of 2 - Laozi

2 of 2 - Confucius, statue in Shanghai, China.

China

The two greatest moral philosophers of ancient China, Laozi (flourished c. 6th century bce) and Confucius (Kongfuzi, or Kongzi; 551–479 bce), thought in very different ways. Laozi is best known for his ideas about the Dao (literally “Way,” the Supreme Principle). The Dao is based on the traditional Chinese virtues of simplicity and sincerity. To follow the Dao is a matter not of observing any set of duties or prohibitions but rather of living in a simple and honest manner, being true to oneself, and avoiding the distractions of ordinary living. Laozi’s classic book on the Dao, Daodejing, consists only of aphorisms and isolated paragraphs, making it difficult to draw an intelligible system of ethics from it. Perhaps this is because Laozi was a type of moral skeptic: he rejected both righteousness and benevolence, apparently because he saw them as imposed on individuals from without rather than coming from their own inner natures. Like the Buddha, Laozi found the things prized by the world—rank, luxury, and glamour—to be empty and worthless when compared with the ultimate value of a peaceful inner life. He also emphasized gentleness, calm, and nonviolence. Nearly 600 years before Jesus, he said: “It is the way of the Dao…to recompense injury with kindness.” By returning good for good and also good for evil, Laozi believed that all would become good; to return evil for evil would lead to chaos.

The lives of Laozi and Confucius overlapped, and there is even an account of a meeting between them, which is said to have left the younger Confucius baffled. Confucius was the more down-to-earth thinker, absorbed in the practical task of social reform. The province in which he served as minister of justice became renowned for the honesty of its people, the respect shown to the aged, and the care taken of the poor. Probably because of their practical nature, the teachings of Confucius had a far greater influence on China than did those of the more withdrawn Laozi.

Confucius did not organize his recommendations into any coherent system. His teachings are offered in the form of sayings, aphorisms, and anecdotes, usually in reply to questions by disciples. They aim at guiding the student toward becoming a junzi, a concept translated as “gentleman” or “superior man.” In opposition to the prevailing feudal ideal of the aristocratic lord, Confucius presented the superior man as one who is humane and thoughtful, motivated by the desire to do what is good rather than by personal profit. Beyond this, however, the concept is not discussed in any detail; it is only shown by diverse examples, some of them trite: “A superior man’s life leads upwards.…The superior man is broad and fair; the inferior man takes sides and is petty.…A superior man shapes the good in man; he does not shape the bad in him.”

One of the recorded sayings of Confucius is an answer to a request from a disciple for a single word that could serve as a guide to conduct for one’s entire life. He replied: “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” This rule is repeated several times in the Confucian literature and might be considered the supreme principle of Confucian ethics. Other duties are not, however, presented as derivative from this supreme principle, nor is the principle used to determine what should be done when two or more specific duties—e.g., the duty to parents and the duty to friends, both of which are prominent in Confucian ethics—conflict with each other.

Mencius

Confucius did not explain why the superior man chooses righteousness rather than personal profit. This question was taken up more than 100 years after his death by his follower Mencius (Mengzi; c. 372–c. 289 bce), who asserted that humans are naturally inclined to do what is humane and right. Evil is not part of human nature but is the result of poor upbringing or lack of education. But Confucius also had another distinguished follower, Xunzi (c. 300–c. 230 bce), who said that humans naturally seek profit for themselves and envy others. The rules of morality are designed to avoid the strife that would otherwise follow from acting according to this nature. The Confucian school was united in its ideal of the junzi but divided over whether such an ideal was to be obtained by controlling people’s natural desires or allowing them to be fulfilled.