Читать книгу Ethics - Джон Дьюи - Страница 17

In a modern family the parents exercise a certain degree of control over the children, but this is limited in several respects. No parent is allowed to put a child to death, or to permit him to grow up in ignorance. On the other hand, the parent is not allowed to protect the child from arrest if a serious injury has been done by him. The State, through its laws and officers, is regarded by us as the highest authority in a certain great sphere of action. It must settle conflicting claims and protect life and property; in the opinion of many it must organize the life of its members where the coöperation of every member is necessary for some common good. In early group life there may or may not be some political body over and above the clan or family, but in any case the kin or family is itself a sort of political State. Not a State in the sense that the political powers are deliberately separated from personal, religious, and family ties; men gained a new conception of authority and rose to a higher level of possibilities when they consciously separated and defined government and laws from the undifferentiated whole of a religious and kindred group. But yet this primitive group was after all a State, not a mob, or a voluntary society, or a mere family; for (1) it was a more or less permanently organized body; (2) it exercised control over its members which they regarded as rightful authority, not as mere force; (3) it was not limited by any higher authority, and acted more or less effectively for the interest of the whole. The representatives of this political aspect of the group may be chiefs or sachems, a council of elders, or, as in Rome, the House Father, whose patria potestas marks the extreme development of the patriarchal family.

The control exercised by the group over individual members assumes various forms among the different peoples. The more important aspects are a right over life and bodily freedom, in some cases extending to power of putting to death, maiming, chastising, deciding whether newly born children shall be preserved or not; the right of betrothal, which includes control over the marriage portion received for its women; and the right to administer property of the kin in behalf of the kin as a whole. It is probable that among all these various forms of control, the control over the marriage relations of women has been most persistent. One reason for this control may have been the fact that the group was bound to resent injuries of a member of the group who had been married to another. Hence this responsibility seemed naturally to involve the right of decision as to her marriage.

It is Membership in the Group Which Gives the Individual Whatever Rights He Has.—According to present conceptions this is still largely true of legal rights. A State may allow a citizen of another country to own land, to sue in its courts, and will usually give him a certain amount of protection, but the first-named rights are apt to be limited, and it is only a few years since Chief Justice Taney's dictum stated the existing legal theory of the United States to be that the negro "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Even where legal theory does not recognize race or other distinctions, it is often hard in practice for an alien to get justice. In primitive clan or family groups this principle is in full force. Justice is a privilege which falls to a man as belonging to some group—not otherwise. The member of the clan or the household or the village community has a claim, but the stranger has no standing. He may be treated kindly, as a guest, but he cannot demand "justice" at the hands of any group but his own. In this conception of rights within the group we have the prototype of modern civil law. The dealing of clan with clan is a matter of war or negotiation, not of law; and the clanless man is an "outlaw" in fact as well as in name.

Joint Responsibility and mutual support, as shown in the blood feud, was a natural consequence of this fusion of political and kindred relations. In modern life States treat each other as wholes in certain respects. If some member of a savage tribe assaults a citizen of one of the civilized nations, the injured party invokes the help of his government. A demand is usually made that the guilty party be delivered up for trial and punishment. If he is not forthcoming a "punitive expedition" is organized against the whole tribe; guilty and innocent suffer alike. Or in lieu of exterminating the offending tribe, in part or completely, the nation of the injured man may accept an indemnity in money or land from the offender's tribe. Recent dealings between British and Africans, Germans and Africans, France and Morocco, the United States and the Filipinos, the Powers and China, illustrate this. The State protects its own members against other States, and avenges them upon other States. Each opposes a united body to the other. The same principle carried out through private citizens as public agents, and applied to towns, is seen in the practice which prevailed in the Middle Ages. "When merchants of one country had been defrauded by those of another, or found it impossible to collect a debt from them, the former country issued letters of marque and reprisal, authorizing the plunder of any citizens of the offending town until satisfaction should be obtained." Transfer the situation to the early clan or tribe, and this solidarity is increased because each member is related to the rest by blood, as well as by national unity. The Arabs do not say "The blood of M. or N. has been spilt," naming the man; they say, "Our blood has been spilt."[11] The whole group, therefore, feels injured and regards every man in the offender's kin as more or less responsible. The next of kin, the "avenger of blood," stands first in duty and privilege, but the rest are all involved in greater or less degree.

Within the Group each member will be treated more or less fully as an individual. If he takes his kinsman's wife or his kinsman's game he will be dealt with by the authorities or by the public opinion of his group. He will not indeed be put to death if he kills his kinsman, but he will be hated, and may be driven out. "Since the living kin is not killed for the sake of the dead kin, everybody will hate to see him."[12]

When now a smaller group, like a family, is at the same time a part of a larger group like a phratry or a tribe, we have the phase of solidarity which is so puzzling to the modern. We hold to solidarity in war or between nations; but with a few exceptions[13] we have replaced it by individual responsibility of adults for debts and crimes so far as the civil law has jurisdiction. In earlier times the higher group or authority treated the smaller as a unit. Achan's family all perished with him. The Chinese sense of justice recognized a series of degrees in responsibility dependent on nearness of kin or of residence, or of occupation. The Welsh system held kinsmen as far as second cousins responsible for insult or injury short of homicide, and as far as fifth cousins (seventh degree of descent) for the payment in case of homicide. "The mutual responsibility of kinsmen for saraal and galanas (the Wergild of the Germans), graduated according to nearness of kin to the murdered man and to the criminal, reveals more clearly than anything else the extent to which the individual was bound by innumerable meshes to his fixed place in the tribal community."[14]