CHAPTER XXXIII
THE ETHICS OF THE INDIVIDUAL
151. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE TERM?--Men collected into groups and organized
in various ways we call states, and we treat a state as a unit. We look
upon it as having rights and as owing duties both to individuals and to
other states. There are individuals whom we are apt to regard as
representatives of the state; as instruments, rather than as men--
executive officers, legislators, official interpreters of its laws,
whether good or bad. For states and their representatives we often have
especial moral standards, differing more or less from those by which we
judge human beings merely as human beings. It is with the morality of the
latter that I am here concerned.
To be sure, all human beings are to be found in states, or in that
rudimentary social something which foreshadows the state. To talk of the
morality of the isolated individual is nonsense. Morality is the
expression of the social will; and if we think of even Robinson Crusoe as
a good man, it means that we apply to him social standards.
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