We are evolving now a system of ethics which has three conceptions in regard to right, conscience and duty which are different from much of our former ethical teaching: (1) we do not follow right, we create right, (2) there is no private conscience, (3) my duty is never to “others” but to the whole.

First, we do not follow right merely, we create right. It is often thought vaguely that our ideals are all there, shining and splendid, and we have only to apply them. But the truth is that we have to create our ideals. No ideal is worth while which does not grow from our actual life. Some people seem to keep their ideals all carefully packed away from dust and air, but arranged alphabetically so that they can get at them quickly in need. But we can never take out a past ideal for a present need. The ideal which is to be used for our life must come out from that very life itself. The only way our past ideals can help us is in moulding the life which produces the present ideal; we have no further use for them. But we do not discard them: we have built them into the present⁠—we have used them up as the cocoon is used up in making the silk. It has been sometimes taught that given the same situation, the individual must repeat the same behavior. But the situation is never the same, the individual is never the same; such a conception has nothing to do with life. We cannot do our duty in the old sense, that is of following a crystallized ideal, because our duty is new at every moment.

Moreover, the knowledge of what is due the whole is revealed within the life of the whole. This is above everything else what a progressive ethics must teach⁠—not faithfulness to duty merely, but faithfulness to the life which evolves duty. Indeed “following our duty” often means mental and moral atrophy. Man cannot live by taboos; that means stagnation. But as one taboo after another is disappearing, the call is upon us deliberately to build our own moral life. Our ethical sense will surely starve on predigested food. It is we by our acts who progressively construct the moral universe; to follow some preconceived body of law⁠—that is not for responsible moral beings. In so far as we obey old standards without interpenetrating them with the actual world, we are abdicating our creative power.

Further, the group in its distributive aspect is bringing such new elements into the here and now that life is wholly changed, and the ethical commands therein involved are different, and therefore the task of the group is to discover the new formulation which these new elements demand. The moral law thus gathers to itself all the richness of science, of art, of all the fullness of our daily living.

The group consciousness of right thus developed becomes our daily imperative. No mandate from without has power over us. There are many forms of the fallacy that the governing and the governed can be two different bodies, and this one of conforming to standards which we have not created must be recognized as such before we can have any sound foundation for society. When the ought is not a mandate from without, it is no longer a prohibition but a self-expression. As the social consciousness develops, ought will be swallowed up in will. We are some time truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of restraints and prohibition. Morality is not the refraining from doing certain things⁠—it is a constructive force.

So in the education of our young people it is not enough to teach them their “duty,” somehow there must be created for them to live in a world of high purpose to which their own psychic energies will instinctively respond. The craving for self-expression, self-realization, must see quite naturally for its field of operation the community. This is the secret of education: when the waters of our life are part of the sea of human endeavor, duty will be a difficult word for our young people to understand; it is a glorious consciousness we want, not a painstaking conscience. It is ourselves soaked with the highest, not a Puritanical straining to fulfil an external obligation, which will redeem the world.

Education therefore is not chiefly to teach children a mass of things which have been true up to the present moment; moreover it is not to teach them to learn about life as fast as it is made, not even to interpret life, but above and beyond everything, to create life for themselves. Hence education should be largely the training in making choices. The aim of all proper training is not rigid adherence to a crystallized right (since in ethics, economics or politics there is no crystallized right), but the power to make a new choice at every moment. And the greatest lesson of all is to know that every moment is new. “Man lives in the dawn forever. Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly.”

We must breed through the group process the kind of man who is not fossilized by habit, but whose eye is intent on the present situation, the present moment, present values, and can decide on the forms which will best express them in the actual world.

To sum up this point: morality is never static; it advances as life advances. You cannot hang your ideals up on pegs and take down no. 2 for certain emergencies and no. 4 for others. The true test of our morality is not the rigidity with which we adhere to standard, but the loyalty we show to the life which constructs standards. The test of our morality is whether we are living not to follow but to create ideals, whether we are pouring our life into our visions only to receive it back with its miraculous enhancement for new uses.

Secondly, I have said that the conception of right as a group product, as coming from the ceaseless interplay of men, shows us that there is no such thing as an individual conscience in the sense in which the term is often used. As we are to obey no ideals dictated by others or the past, it is equally important that we obey no ideal set up by our unrelated self. To obey the moral law is to obey the social ideal. The social ideal is born, grows and shapes itself through the associated life. The individual cannot alone decide what is right or wrong. We can have no true moral judgment except as we live our life with others. It is said, “Every man is subject only to his own conscience.” But what is my conscience? Has it not been produced by my time, my country, my associates? To make a conscience by myself would be as difficult as to try to make a language by myself.16

It is sometimes said, on the other hand, “The individual must yield his right to judge for himself; let the majority judge.” But the individual is not for a moment to yield his right to judge for himself; he can judge better for himself if he joins with others in evolving a synthesized judgment. Our individual conscience is not absorbed into a national conscience; our individual conscience must be incorporated in a national conscience as one of its constituent members.17 Those of us who are not wholly in sympathy with the conscientious objectors do not think that they should yield to the majority. When we say that their point of view is too particularistic, we do not mean that they should give up the dictates of their own conscience to a collective conscience. But we mean that they should ask themselves whether their conscience is a freak, a purely personal, conscience, or a properly evolved conscience. That is, have they tried, not to saturate themselves with our collective ideals, but to take their part in evolving collective standards by freely giving and taking. Have they lived the life which makes possible the fullest interplay of their own ideas with all the forces of their time? Before they range themselves against society they must ask themselves if they have taken the opportunities offered them to help form the ideas which they are opposing. I do not say that there is no social value in heresy, I only ask the conscientious objectors to ask themselves whether they are claiming the “individual rights” we have long outgrown.

What we want is a related conscience, a conscience that is intimately related to the consciences of other men and to all the spiritual environment of our time, to all the progressive forces of our age. The particularistic tendency has had its day in law, in politics, in international relations and as a guiding tendency in our daily lives.

We have seen that a clearer conception today of the unity of the social process shows us: first, that we are not merely to follow but to create “right,” secondly, that there is no private conscience, and third, that my duty is never to “others” but to the whole. We no longer make a distinction between selfishness and altruism.18 An act done for our own benefit may be social and one done for another may not be. Some twenty or thirty years ago our “individual” system of ethics began to be widely condemned and we have been hearing a great deal of “social” ethics. But this so-called “social” ethics has meant only my duty to “others.” There is now emerging an idea of ethics entirely different from the altruistic school, based not on the duty of isolated beings to one another, but on integrated individuals acting as a whole, evolving whole-ideas, working for whole-ideals. The new consciousness is of a whole.

As right appears with that interrelating, germinating activity which we call the social process, so purpose also is generated by the same process. The goal of evolution most obviously must evolve itself. How self-contradictory is the idea that evolution is the world-process and yet that some other power has made the goal for it to reach. The truth is that the same process which creates all else creates the very purpose. That purpose is involved in the process, not prior to process, has far wider reaching consequences than can be taken up here. The whole philosophy of cause and effect must be rewritten. If the infinite task is the evolution of the whole, if our finite tasks are wholes of varying degrees of scope and perfection, the notion of causality must have an entirely different place in our system of thought.

The question is often asked, “What is the proposed unity of European nations after the war to be for?” This question implies that the alliance will be a mere method of accomplishing certain purposes, whereas it is the union which is the important thing. With the union the purpose comes into being, and with its every step forward, the purpose changes. No one would say that the aims of the Allies today are the same as in 1914, or even as in April, 1917. As the alliance develops, the purpose steadily shapes itself.

Every teleological view will be given up when we see that purpose is not “preexistent,” but involved in the unifying act which is the life process. It is man’s part to create purpose and to actualize it. From the point of view of man we are just in the dawn of self-consciousness, and his purpose is dimly revealing itself to him. The life-force wells up in us for expression⁠—to direct it is the privilege of self-consciousness.19

As this true purpose evolves itself, loyalty springs into being. Loyalty is awakened through and by the very process which creates the group. The same process which organizes the group energizes it. We cannot “will” to be loyal. Our task is not to “find” causes to awaken our loyalty, but to live our life fully and loyalty issues. A cause has no part in us or we in it if we have fortuitously to “find” it.

Thus we see that we do not love the Beloved Community because it is lovable⁠—the same process which makes it lovable produces our love for it. Moreover it is not enough to love the Beloved Community, we must find out how to create it. It is not there for us to accept or reject⁠—it exists only through us. Loyalty to a collective will which we have not created and of which we are, therefore, not an integral part, is slavery. We belong to our community just in so far as we are helping to make that community; then loyalty follows, then love follows. Loyalty means the consciousness of oneness, the full realization that we succeed or fail, live or die, are saved or damned together. The only unity or community is one we have made of ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves.20

Thus the social process is one all-inclusive, Self-sufficing process. The vital impulse which is produced by all the reciprocally interacting influences of the group is also itself the generating and the vivifying power. Social unity is not a sterile conception but an active force. It is a double process⁠—the activity which goes to make the unity and the activity which flows from the unity. There is no better example of centripetal and centrifugal force. All the forces which are stored up in the unity flow forth eternally in activity. We create the common will and feel the spiritual energy which flows into us from the purpose we have made, for the purpose which we seek.