The Moral of The Story An Introduction To Ethics 8th Edition

The Moral of the Story: An Introduction
to Ethics 8th Edition

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-moral-of-the-story-an-introduction-to-ethics-8th-e
dition/
CONTENTS vii
primary reading: Plato, Apology 413 primary reading: Søren Kierkegaard,

primary reading: Ronald Dworkin,
Johannes Climacus 513
What Is a Good Life? 417 primary reading: Søren Kierkegaard,
narrative: A Man for All Seasons 421 Either/Or 514

narrative: The Myth of the Cave 424 primary reading: Jean-Paul Sartre,
Existentialism Is a Humanism 514
narrative: The Truman Show 426
primary reading: Dwight Furrow, A Culture
narrative: The Store of the Worlds 429
of Care 517
Chapter 9 narrative: Groundhog Day 521
Aristotle’s Virtue Theory: narrative: No Exit 523
Everything in Moderation 432 narrative: Good Will Hunting 524
narrative: The Searchers 528

Empirical Knowledge and the Realm
of the Senses 432
Chapter 11
Aristotle the Scientist 433 Case Studies in Virtue 533
Aristotle’s Virtue Theory: Teleology Courage of the Physical and Moral
and the Golden Mean 436 Kind 533
Aristotle’s Influence on Aquinas 450 Compassion: From Hume to Huck Finn 540
Some Objections to Greek Virtue Gratitude: Asian Tradition and Western
Theory 452 Modernity 551
primary reading: Aristotle, Nicomachean
Virtue and Conduct: The Option of Soft
Ethics 454
Universalism 566
primary reading: Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics 458 Diversity, Politics, and Common
narrative: The Flight of Icarus 461
Ground? 570
primary reading: John McCain, Why Courage
narrative: Njal’s Saga 462
Matters: The Way to a Braver Life 572
narrative: Lord Jim 465
primary reading: Philip Hallie, Tales
narrative: A Piece of Advice 468
of Good and Evil, Help and Harm 575
Chapter 10 primary reading: Jesse Prinz, Is Empathy
Virtue Ethics and Authenticity: Necessary for Morality? 577

Contemporary Perspectives 470 narrative: Courage: Band of Brothers,
Third Episode, “Carentan” 580
Ethics and the Morality of Virtue narrative: Courage: True Grit 582
as Political Concepts 470
narrative: Courage: Cowardice 585
Have Virtue, and Then Go Ahead: Mayo, narrative: Compassion: The Parable of the
Foot, and Sommers 473 Good Samaritan 589
The Quest for Authenticity: Kierkegaard, narrative: Compassion: Schindler’s
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and List 590

Levinas 483 narrative: Gratitude: Pay It Forward 593
viii CONTENTS
Chapter 12 The Death Penalty 694

Different Gender, Different The Ethics of Self-Improvement: Narrative
Ethics? 597 Identity 703
Feminism and Virtue Theory 597 A Final Word 712
What Is Gender Equality? 598 primary reading: Amber Levanon Seligson
and Laurie Choi, Critical Elements of an
Women’s Historical Role in the Public Organizational Ethical Culture 713
Sphere 602
primary reading: FDA U.S. Food and
The Rise of Modern Feminism 609 Drug Administration, Background on
the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act
Classical, Difference, and Radical (FSMA) 714
Feminism 615
primary reading: Great Ape Project, The
primary reading: Harriet Taylor Mill,
Declaration on Great Apes 718
Enfranchisement of Women 632
primary reading: Marc Bekoff and Jessica
narrative: A Doll’s House 635
Pierce, Wild Justice 719
narrative: Maids of Misfortune 640
primary reading: Rachel Gandy, July 2, 2015,
narrative: A Thousand Splendid Suns 644 Prison Policy Initiative, Justice Breyer
Argues the Death Penalty Isn’t Just Cruel,
Chapter 13 It’s Unusual Too 723
Applied Ethics: A Sampler 648 narrative: Media Ethics: Spotlight 726
The Question of Abortion narrative: Business Ethics: The Insider 728
and Personhood 648 narrative: The Death Penalty: The Jigsaw

Man 731
Euthanasia as a Right to Choose? 651
narrative: The Death Penalty: The Life
Media Ethics and Media Bias 654 of David Gale 733
narrative: Telling One’s Own Story:
Business Ethics: The Rules of the Game 664
True Detective Season 1 736
Just War Theory 673
Bibliography 740
Animal Welfare and Animal Rights 681 Glossary 750
Ethics of the Environment: Think Globally, Index 757
Act Locally 687
Preface
Like the previous editions of The Moral of the Story, the eighth edition is a com-
bination of classical questions in ethical theory and contemporary issues. The gen-
eral concept remains the same: that discussions about moral issues can be facilitated
using stories as examples, as a form of ethics lab where solutions can be tried out
under controlled conditions. The book is written primarily for such college courses
as Introduction to Ethics; Moral Philosophy; and Introduction to Philosophy: Values.
Many textbooks in value theory or ethics choose to focus on problems of social im-
portance, such as abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. This book reflects
my own teaching experience that it is better for students to be introduced to basic
ethical theory before they are plunged into discussions involving moral judgments.
Consequently, The Moral of the Story provides an overview of influential classical
and contemporary approaches to ethical theory. However, without practical applica-
tion of the theories, there can be no complete understanding of the problems raised,
so each chapter includes examples that illustrate and explore the issues. As in previ-
ous editions, each chapter concludes with a section of examples—summaries and
excerpts—taken from the world of fiction, novels and films in particular.
Within the last few decades, narrative theory has carved out a niche in American
and European philosophy as well as in other academic disciplines. It is no longer un-
usual for ethicists and other thinkers to include works of fiction in their courses as well
as in their professional papers, not only as examples of problem solving, but also as
illustrations of an epistemological phenomenon: Humans are, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s
words, storytelling animals, and we humans seem to choose the narrative form as our
favorite way to structure meaning as we attempt to make sense of our reality. The narra-
tive trend is making itself felt in other fields as well: The medical profession is looking
to stories that teach about doctor-patient relationships; psychotherapists recommend
that patients watch films to achieve an understanding of their own situation, and have
patients write stories with themselves as the lead character. The court system is making
use of films and novels to reach young people in trouble with the law. The U.S. military
is partnering up with authors to anticipate possible scenarios for future assaults on
American interests. NASA is teaming up with science fiction writers and Hollywood
in an attempt to once again make space exploration exciting for new generations of
readers, and judging from the success of recent films, that approach is working. And
neuroscientists tell us that we understand the world by superimposing narrative order
on the chaos we experience. It seems that new fields are constantly being added to the
list of professions that are discovering, or rediscovering, the potential of stories.
ix
x P R E FA C E
Organization
Like the previous editions, the eighth edition of The Moral of the Story is divided
into three major sections. Part 1 introduces the topic of ethics and places the
phenomenon of storytelling within the context of moral education and discussion.
Part 2 examines the conduct theories of ethical relativism, psychological and ethical
egoism, altruism, utilitarianism, and Kantian deontology, and explores the concepts
of personhood, rights, and justice. Part 3 focuses on the subject of virtue theory and
contains chapters on Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, contemporary virtue theories in
America, theories of authenticity in the Continental tradition, and gender theory.
The virtues of courage, compassion, and gratitude are examined in detail, and the
book concludes with a more detailed discussion of a broad selection of moral issues,
applying theories introduced in previous chapters. Each chapter concludes with a
set of study questions, a section of Primary Readings with excerpts from classical
and contemporary texts, and a section of Narratives, a collection of stories that il-
lustrate the moral issues raised in the chapter. The Primary Readings are selected for
their value as discussion topics; they don’t necessarily reflect my own views, and I
have made no attempt to select readings that cover all possible angles, because of
space limitations. The Narratives will be described in more detail below.
Major Changes to the Eighth Edition

Throughout the eighth edition all examples and discussions reflecting moral and so-
cial issues in the news have been updated wherever an update seemed reasonable. In
addition, key words and names have been either italicized or changed to bold type for
an easy overview, all depending on the context. Major changes to the eighth edition
include the following: as with every new edition, Chapter One has been thoroughly
revised, with a new introduction, reflecting the turbulent times we live in. Stephen
Pinker’s famous theory of times getting better is juxtaposed with John Gray’s more
pessimistic vision. The section “Good and Evil” has been updated and expanded to
examine current stories of egregiously evil behavior. Finally, the Narratives section
now includes a summary and excerpt of the famous short story “The Lottery.”
Chapter Two has been updated with current examples of films and television
shows illustrating moral problems, including Fargo and True Detective. New boxes
feature the Zombie phenomenon in entertainment, virtual reality and narrative
video games, and the moral complexities of the book/HBO series Game of Thrones.
Chapter Three has an updated discussion of the female genital mutilation issue,
and updates of other current issues.
Chapter Four expands upon the concept of “heroes” to explore the actions of in-
dividuals giving up their lives to save students and co-workers in mass shootings and
acts of terrorism. In addition, the Narratives section now includes the Swedish film
Force Majeure which starts out as a family film and spirals downward into a study of
fundamental selfishness.
Chapter Five has a new box on the concept of “consequences,” and another
on the movie The Purge and its take on the hedonistic calculus. In the Narratives
P R E FA C E xi
section, the film Outbreak has been reinstated from previous editions due to the
relevancy of its subject matter, and the recent film Contagion has been added as a
companion story.
Chapter Six has an expanded section on animal cognition, and the Narratives
section now includes the graphic novel (and film) Watchmen.
Chapter Seven has been thoroughly updated with discussions about cloning and
personhood, a reference to the recent shootings, both by and of police officers, a new
box exploring the moral implications of creating robots, and an update on new views on
restorative justice. The Narratives section has had the classic science fiction film Blade
Runner reinstated, and the new film Ex Machina has been added as a companion piece.
Chapter Eight has a new box on American/Canadian Indian values successfully
promoted by an imposter, Archie Grey Owl.
Chapter Nine has a new section on Intelligent Design, as well as the complete list
of Aristotle’s original virtues and vices.
Chapter Ten has a new box dedicated to a brief discussion of hard determinism,
free will, and compatibilism. In addition, the Levinas section has been expanded with
a discussion of the European refugee crisis seen from the point of view of Levinas’s
theory of the Other.
Chapter Eleven has been updated with new examples of courageous behavior,
related to terror attacks and school shootings. The classic Japanese novel Kokoro has
been added to the Narratives section.
Chapter Twelve has an update on gender-neutral language, as well as an update
on the changes in military policies allowing women in combat. In addition, the story
of Hypatia has been added, and the boxes on conservative feminism, the princess
phenomenon, as well as same-sex marriage have been updated.
Chapter Thirteen has several thoroughly revised sections, including new per-
spectives on euthanasia, and updates on media ethics issues. A new box in the Busi-
ness Ethics section explores the origin of the 2008 financial crisis seen through the
film The Big Short, and another new box discusses the phenomenon of personal
branding. The section on Just War has a new box focusing on the war in Iraq. The
section on Environmental Ethics has been updated and the Death Penalty section
has been revised with new examples and data. In the section on Telling One’s Life
as a Story, a box from the previous edition’s Chapter Ten on personal identity has
found a better home. The Primary Readings now include an excerpt from the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration’s presentation of the FSMA (FDA Food Safety
Modernization Act) from 2011, an excerpt from Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce’s
Wild Justice, and a column by Rachel Gandy on Justice Breyer’s opinion on the
death penalty. New narratives include the Academy Award–winning film Spotlight
and the acclaimed HBO series True Detective, Season 1.
I would like to mention an issue that I myself am not too happy about: the field
of textbook publishing is changing, and some changes have impacted this 8th edition
of The Moral of the Story. Those readers who have used this book through several
editions will notice some changes in the Primary Readings and Narratives sections:
Some texts have disappeared, or have been replaced with public-domain translations,
xii P R E FA C E
paraphrased summaries and short excerpts. This decision was necessary, due to the
fact that permissions to include lengthy text excerpts in textbooks have become much
harder or downright impossible to obtain, and I had no choice but to exclude some
texts despite them being a staple in the book for many editions. In addition, I’ve had
to abandon the inclusion of several new, planned primary readings, such as an excerpt
from Mary Midgley’s “Mythology of Selfishness.” As a compromise I have chosen to
maintain the presence of such texts in the book by placing detailed descriptions and
short excerpts into the chapter text itself, or in the case of narratives (particularly the
novels), paraphrasing the stories and keeping brief excerpts of an essential paragraph
or two allowed under the public domain notion. I hope I have done those texts justice.
Using the Narratives

The Narratives have been chosen from a wide variety of sources ranging from epic
prose, poems, and novels to films, and one graphic novel. I wish to emphasize that
from a literary and artistic point of view, summaries and excerpts do not do the origi-
nals justice; a story worth experiencing, be it a novel, short story, or film, can’t be
reduced to a mere plot outline or fragment and still retain all of its essence. As Martha
Nussbaum says, the form is an inherent part of the story content. Usually, there is
more to the story than the bare bones of a moral problem, and in writing these sum-
maries I have had to disregard much of the richness of story and character develop-
ment. Nevertheless, I have chosen the summary or excerpt format in order to discuss
a number of different stories and genres as they relate to specific issues in ethics.
Because I believe it is important to show that there is a cross-cultural, historic tradition
of exploring moral problems through telling a story, I have opted for a broad selection
of Narratives. Each chapter has several Narratives, and some additional narratives—
or narratives from previous editions—now appear in boxes within the chapter text,
but it is not my intention that the instructor should feel obligated to cover all of them
in one course; rather, they should be regarded as options that can be alternated from
semester to semester—a method I like to use myself for the sake of variety. There
are, of course, other ways than summaries in which stories and ethical theory can
be brought together; one might, for instance, select one or two short stories or films
in their original format for class discussion, or make them available to the students
for extra credit. I hope that instructors will indeed select a few stories—novels, short
stories, or films—for their classes to experience firsthand. However, the Narratives
are written so that firsthand experience should not be necessary to a discussion of the
problem presented by the story. The summaries and excerpts give readers just enough
information to enable them to discuss the moral problem presented. I hope that some
readers will become inspired to seek out the originals on their own. In most cases the
ending is important to the moral significance of a story, and whenever that is the case,
I include that ending. In cases where the ending is not significant to the moral drama,
I have done my best to avoid giving it away because I don’t want to be a spoiler.
Because space is limited, I have not been able to include more than a sampling
of stories, and I readily admit that my choices are subjective ones; I personally find
P R E FA C E xiii
them interesting as illustrations and effective in a classroom context where students

come from many different cultural backgrounds. Because I am a naturalized U.S. citi-
zen, originally a native of Denmark, I have chosen to include a few references to the
Scandinavian literary and film tradition. I am fully aware that others might choose other
stories or even choose different ethical problems to illustrate, and I am grateful to the
many users of the previous seven editions, instructors as well as students, who have let
me know about their favorite stories and how they thought this selection of stories might
be expanded and improved. The new Narratives reflect some of those suggestions.
Some students (and instructors) may be disappointed that this edition has no nar-
ratives from video games. I hear from students and colleagues that video games are in-
creasingly focused on elaborate narratives rather than merely accumulating points and
killing enemy entities, and I know from colleagues that some narrative video games
now offer interesting ways of experiencing moral problems and decision-making,
even involving scenarios of emotional and ethical complexity. However, since I have
no experience with actually playing such games (my video gaming experience ended
some time in the 1990s), I have not included any games in the Narratives sections.
As was the case with previous revisions, I have had to make some difficult
choices: To keep the cost of the book down, I have had to cut materials from previ-
ous editions to make room for new readings, updates, and narratives. This is never
easy, because many of the older readings and stories are favorites of mine, and I am
well aware that they may also be the favorites of instructors using this book, and
important elements in well-functioning syllabi. Fortunately, in this electronic age we
can include new materials without losing all of the older elements. The Connect site
(see description below) will include a number of narratives from previous editions,
such as The Invention of Lying, Eat Drink Man Woman, Return to Paradise, Match
Point, Dead Man Walking, Do the Right Thing, and Thelma and Louise for easy
access and downloading by instructors. As in previous editions, I emphasize that I
wholeheartedly welcome e-mails from students as well as instructors who use this
book, with relevant comments and suggestions for new stories as well as additional
philosophical perspectives: nrosenst@sdccd.edu.
The Eighth edition of The Moral of the Story, is now available online with Con-
nect, McGraw-Hill Education’s integrated assignment and assessment platform.
Connect also offers SmartBook for the new edition, which is the first adap-
tive reading experience proven to improve grades and help students study more
effectively. All of the title’s website and ancillary content is also available through
Connect, including:
• A
full Test Bank of multiple-choice questions that test students on central concepts
and ideas in each chapter.
• An Instructor’s Manual for each chapter with full chapter outlines, sample test
questions, and discussion topics.
Required=Results ©Getty Images/iStockphoto
McGraw-Hill Connect®
Learn Without Limits
Connect is a teaching and learning platform that
is proven to deliver better results for students and
instructors.
Connect empowers students by continually adapting

to deliver precisely what they need, when they need
it, and how they need it, so your class time is more
engaging and effective.
73% of instructors who use Using Connect improves retention

Connect require it; instructor rates by 19.8%, passing rates by 12.7%,
satisfaction increases by 28% and exam scores by 9.1%.
when Connect is required.
Analytics
Connect Insight®
Connect Insight is Connect’s new one-of-a-kind visual
analytics dashboard—now available for both instructors
and students—that provides at-a-glance information
regarding student performance, which is immediately
actionable. By presenting assignment, assessment, and topical
performance results together with a time metric that is easily
visible for aggregate or individual results, Connect Insight
gives the user the ability to take a just-in-time approach
to teaching and learning, which was never before available.
Connect Insight presents data that empowers students and Students can view
helps instructors improve class performance in a way that is their results for any
efficient and effective.
Connect course.
Mobile
Connect’s new, intuitive mobile interface gives students and
instructors flexible and convenient, anytime–anywhere access
to all components of the Connect platform.
Adaptive
THE ADAPTIVE
READING EXPERIENCE
DESIGNED TO TRANSFORM
THE WAY STUDENTS READ
More students earn A’s and

B’s when they use McGraw-Hill
Education Adaptive products.
SmartBook®
Proven to help students improve grades and study
more efficiently, SmartBook contains the same content
within the print book, but actively tailors that content
to the needs of the individual. SmartBook’s adaptive
technology provides precise, personalized instruction on
what the student should do next, guiding the student to
master and remember key concepts, targeting gaps in
knowledge and offering customized feedback, and driving
the student toward comprehension and retention of the
subject matter. Available on tablets, SmartBook puts
learning at the student’s fingertips—anywhere, anytime.
Over 8 billion questions have been

answered, making McGraw-Hill
Education products more intelligent,
reliable, and precise.
www.mheducation.com
Acknowledgments
As always, I first want to thank my students in the classes Introduction to

Philosophy: Values, Philosophy of Women, Issues in Social Philosophy, Reflec-
tions on Human Nature, Human Nature and Society, and Philosophy and Literature
for their enthusiastic cooperation in suggesting good stories and discussing drafts
of the stories and study questions with me—an invaluable help in fine-tuning the
summaries and questions.
Next, I would like to thank the Project Team at McGraw-Hill Higher Education
for good communication and support, in particular Development Editor Erin Gu-
endelsberger for her prompt e-mails and great suggestions. Thanks also to: Brand
Managers Jamie Laferrera and Penina Braffman, Content Project Manager Melissa
Leick, Marketing Manager Meredith Leo, Content Licensing Specialist Shannon
Manderschied, Photo Researcher Stacey Dong Miskell, and Project Manager for
MPS Ldt. Touseen Qadri. The cover painting is by artist Karen Barbour, and I
am delighted that her evocative visions have represented The Moral of the Story
through eight editions. I also wish to thank the following reviewers, and one anony-
mous reviewer, for their suggestions:
Joy Branch, Southern Union State Mary Ann Sellars, Ivy Tech Community
Community College College, Southwest
Lynn G Bartholome, Monroe Community Irene Byrnes, SUNY Broome Community
College College
My colleagues at the Social Sciences and Behavioral and Multicultural Studies

epartment at San Diego Mesa College, which includes professors, adjuncts, and
D
professors emeritus/emerita of philosophy, history, political science, and geography,
are a wonderful support group—many of us come from different professional fields
and have different outlooks on many things, but we all cherish the ambience of
professional integrity in our workplace and find time to discuss ethics-related issues
on a regular basis: Thank you to my colleagues from the Social Sciences Department
as well as other departments: In particular I wish to thank Department Chair John
Crocitti, Jonathan McLeod, Donald Abbott, Dwight Furrow, and Dean Charles
Zappia. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to J. Craig Bradley,
Stephen Pacheco, and Josef Binter for sharing their research with me, and to Tony
Pettina for being an advance reader on the section on Asian moral philosophy.
xvi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii
I would like to thank Ian Duckles for his invaluable help in steering me through the
maze of narrative open-ended video games with a moral aspect, and I am looking
forward to future conversations with him as well as Mary Gwin with whom I share
a fascination for the potential of stories as moral laboratories, and an interest in the
life quality of companion animals.
At Mesa College we have a biannual Meeting of the Minds tradition where phi-
losophy faculty, contract as well as adjuncts, meet and share our thoughts about
teaching and engage in debates about classical and current philosophical topics. I
want to express my appreciation for the professional enthusiasm of all the philosophy
faculty who participate regularly in these meetings. My colleague John Berteaux,
philosophy professor at Monterey State University, deserves my heartfelt thanks for
being an old friend and colleague from the adjunct days who shares my concerns for
issues in social ethics and who has generously shared his work, including his archive
of newspaper columns with me. A special word of appreciation goes to my friend
and colleague Harold Weiss, professor of philosophy at Northhampton Community
College who has been enormously helpful in suggesting new material for the eighth
edition, including several films I would otherwise not have thought of including. A
profound note of appreciation goes to my colleague and friend Melinda Campbell,
professor of philosophy at National University, San Diego, for her helpful comments
to the seventh edition and support for the updates in the eighth edition, as well as
sharing her insight into using The Moral of the Story for her online courses. And I
would like to say a special thank you to my friend and former colleague, Professor
Emerita of history Mary Lou Locke. I am grateful for her permission, as author M.
Louisa Locke, to include an excerpt from her first novel in Chapter 12. I would also
like to thank Reiko Abe Auestad, Oslo University, Norway, for her interest in this
book, and her suggestion to bring the novel Koroko into the new edition, my good
friend Steve Fischer for sharing his insight into the phenomenon of personal brand-
ing, and my good friend Randi McKenzie for her support and wise suggestions.
Because this edition builds upon the previous seven editions, I would like to
acknowledge the generous support and suggestions I have received in the past from
a very large number of people—friends, colleagues, and professionals from a wide
variety of fields—who have graciously given me their time and assistance. Your
input has been invaluable to me, and I am profoundly grateful to you all.
My father, Finn Rosenstand, raconteur par excellence, passed away the day after
Christmas 2014, four weeks shy of his 100th birthday. He was alert and lucid until
his final day and lived his life according to his motto, maeden agan, ancient Greek
for “everything in moderation.” He frequently mentioned that if given the choice, he
would like to live every single day all over again—something that Nietzsche would
have appreciated as a sign that one truly loves life and is not a nay-sayer. Throughout
my career as a philosophy instructor, and writer of textbooks and other works, he
tirelessly looked for material I might be able to use; all seven previous editions have
benefited from his research and suggestions. Throughout my childhood and young
adulthood my father used to read aloud to my mother and me from the treasures of
xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Danish and world literature in the long, dark, Scandinavian fall and winter evenings.
As I have mentioned in previous editions, he was instrumental in opening my mind
to intellectual curiosity, human compassion, and a passion for history, literature, and
film. My appreciation for what he has meant to me has no boundaries.
But most of all, I want to thank my husband, Craig R. Covner, for his strength
and loving support, for always being ready to share his insight into American history
as well as Hollywood film h istory, for his understanding and patience with me in my
writer’s work-mode, and for his wonderful sense of humor.
Chapter One
Thinking About Values

Living in Interesting Times
Sometimes we hear about an old Chinese saying, May you live in interesting
times, and, according to tradition, it is meant as a curse, not a benign wish. As a
matter of fact, there doesn’t seem to actually be such an ancient Chinese expres-
sion; the one that comes closest seems to be 1600 century Chinese writer Feng
Menlong’s opinion that it is “Better to be a dog in a peaceful time than a human in
a chaotic world,” and the “interesting times” expression seems to have been intro-
duced by Western writers in the 1930s. But whether or not it really is an ancient
Chinese curse, or an idea concocted by sarcastic Westerners and attributed to
Chinese wisdom, it strikes a chord in many hearts these days. As much as we in
the Western modern world have been used to thinking that an exciting life is a
good life, there is an ancient cross-cultural wisdom present in the saying, echoed
in famous French seventeenth century philosopher René Descartes’s personal
motto, Bene vixit qui bene latuit, “One lives well who hides well”: a quiet life, safe
from turmoil and violent death, has been the dream of many a human being who
has fled destruction and persecution, or kept a low profile hoping that the tide of
violence might pass them by. And here we are, in our various cities and regions
of the West and around the world, living two kinds of lives these days, our normal
lives with their normal hopes for our families, our health and our jobs, and a New
Normal life where we are constantly reminded that we are vulnerable, to a degree
that few of us had imagined only a few decades ago. At the global level we are
experiencing climate turmoil that questions our previous models of predictability
(in Chapter 13 you can read more about the debate over climate change); in addi-
tion, people from some parts of the world are on the move, changing demograph-
ics and economies in the places they migrate to, on a scale not seen since before
World War II. Some flee their war- and terror-ridden countries. Others seek a
better life, financially, for themselves and their families, and yet others, it would
seem, are set on bringing their brand of terror with them to new venues. And lo-
cally, terror massacres and school shootings are reminders that “hiding well” is
no guarantee that sudden disaster will pass you by. All this unpredictability takes
its toll; even people from cultures that have previously registered high on the
“happiness” scale are registering lower than before. We are worried about tomor-
row, overall. Some people predict that we in the next half-century may be facing
challenges, environmental as well as financial and political, never seen before in
recorded human history.
1
2 C H A P T E R 1 T H I N K I N G A B O U T VA L U E S
And yet: Human beings are amazingly resilient. Humans have been through
plagues, famine, natural disasters, and wholesale abuse by fellow human beings. In
other words, we have always lived in “interesting times.” And perhaps our current
era is actually even less “interesting” than earlier centuries. As American-Canadian
cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker stresses, statistically we live in far less
violent times now than for instance the Middle Ages. In The Better Angles of Our
Nature (2011) Pinker says,
“We now know that native peoples, whose lives are so romanticized in today’s chil-
dren’s books, had rates of death from warfare that were greater than those of our
world wars. The romantic visions of medieval Europe omit the exquisitely crafted
instruments of torture and are innocent of the thirtyfold greater risk of murder in
those times. The centuries for which people are nostalgic were times in which the
wife of an adulterer could have her nose cut off, children as young as eight could
be hanged for property crimes, a prisoner’s family could be charged for easement
of irons, a witch could be sawn in half, and a sailor could be flogged to a pulp. The
moral commonplaces of our age, such as that slavery, war, and torture are wrong,
would have been seen as saccharine sentimentality, and our notion of universal human
rights almost incoherent. . . . The forces of modernity—reason, science, humanism,
individual rights—have not, of course, pushed steadily in one direction; nor will they
ever bring about a utopia or end the frictions and hurts that come with being human.
But on top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and
knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence.”
So are we moving toward a kinder, gentler, more peaceful world, because
we, as Pinker thinks, are paying more attention to the voice of reason and com-
mon sense? An opposing view has been voiced by British political philosopher
John Gray who finds Pinker’s optimism naive. For Gray, civilization is a fragile
entity. In “Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war” Gray says, “Improve-
ments in civilization are real enough, but they come and go. While knowledge
and invention may grow cumulatively and at an accelerating rate, advances in
ethics and politics are erratic, discontinuous and easily lost. Amid the general
drift, cycles can be discerned: peace and freedom alternate with war and tyranny,
eras of increasing wealth with periods of economic collapse. Instead of becoming
ever stronger and more widely spread, civilization remains inherently fragile and
regularly succumbs to barbarism.” So who is right? Are we teetering on the brink
of some kind of cultural collapse, or are we just in medias res (in the middle of
things), looking at chaotic life from the inside, unable to see the bigger and fairly
reassuring picture?
As I frequently mention to my students, and I will pass it on to you, the reader,
the future envisioned in overall positive terms by Pinker and in negative terms by
Gray is, in many ways, in your hands. You may not have the actual power to mold
the future, but you will have the power to help inspire and even mold reactions of
fellow human beings to whatever challenges are waiting for us, up ahead in the
stream of time, through social media, and whatever other kind of media we may
have in the future. Being forearmed with knowledge, not only of the past, but with
L iving in I nteresting T imes 3
the values of both past and present, will help you in your decision-making. And
so we embark on this journey into The Moral of the Story, examining moral value
systems of primarily the Western culture in contemporary and modern times as well
as past centuries—because each new idea is generally a reaction to older ideas that
have somehow become inadequate. The book, however, is not a chronological jour-
ney. It moves through modern moral problems, to equivalents in the past, and back
to contemporary scenarios.
The fact is that we all encounter issues involving moral values on an everyday
basis; sometimes they involve small decisions, sometimes large ones. Some every-
day issues that are in the news are questions about Internet file sharing /copying/
downloading of copyrighted material. Some find it is rightfully illegal, while others
find it to be completely acceptable and even a morally decent thing—sharing new
ideas with others. Another issue that you may have been engaged in discussing is
the ethics of texting and Facebook communication, and what exactly is an ap-
propriate level of intimacy and sharing of information if it risks getting into the
wrong hands? And what is the kind of information we can, in all decency, text to
each other—Is it acceptable to break up through a text message? Sext—send sexy
pictures taken with or without the portrayed person’s permission? Share gossip? All
these questions involve an underlying code of ethics. So, too, do the major moral
issues we as a society are struggling with: Some of the big questions and even con-
flicts we have dealt with during the first decade of this century have involved the
right to marry whomever you choose, including a person of your own gender; the
question of the appropriate response to terrorism (through the civil courts, or mili-
tary actions and tribunals); the use of torture in interrogations of presumed terror-
ists; the right to have access to euthanasia; the continued question about the moral
status of abortion (both of these topics are featured in Chapter 13); the periodically
resurfacing discussion about the right to gun ownership; the moral status of pets
as property or family members; and other such issues that involve both moral and
legal perspectives. This book will deal with some of those issues, but perhaps more
important, it will deal with the values underlying those issues—the moral theories
explaining those values. Later in this chapter we look at the terms of values, mor-
als, and ethics. Some questions involving values focus on how we ought to behave
vis-à-vis other human beings; any moral theory that involves a focus on action, on
what to do, is known as an ethic of conduct, and we will look at various theories of
ethics of conduct from Chapter 3 through Chapter 7. However, there is a different
kind of moral philosophy that focuses on developing a good character, on how to
be, generally referred to as virtue ethics, and that is our topic for Chapters 8 through
11. Of the remaining chapters, this chapter and Chapter 2 explore the current spec-
trum of moral discussions and the influence of storytelling as a tool for both teach-
ing and learning about moral values. Chapter 12 looks at various models of ethics
as seen by feminists, and Chapter 13 represents what is known as “applied ethics,”
moral philosophies applied to specific cases or scenarios, such as the abortion issue,
euthanasia, media ethics, just-war theory, animal rights, and environmental ethics.
For each of the issues mentioned above there is generally a side promoting it
and a side arguing against it. We’re used to that kind of debate in a free society,
and you’ll see some of those questions discussed in this book, in particular in
Chapters 7 and 13. What we have also become used to during the past decades is
that our nation seems more divided than in previous decades—what some politi-
cal commentators have labeled a “50-50 nation.” In election years, particularly in
the first decade of the twenty-first century, political opinions divided the country
almost in half—at least if there were only two options to choose from, Democratic
or Republican. The presidential elections of 2000 and 2016 were particularly close.
In 2016 the Republican candidate Donald Trump the clear winner of the electoral
votes, while the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Even
if we have “blue states” and “red states” showing up on the electoral map, there
are blue and red areas within each state. This is of course politics, and our main
topic is going to be ethics and values, but there is a relevant connection: There is a
set of moral values commonly associated with Democratic policies, such as being
pro-choice/pro-abortion, increased gun control, pro-gay rights, and scaling back
military operations, and another associated with Republican politics generally
advocating pro-life/anti-abortion, pro-gun ownership, anti-gay rights, and strong
support for the military. A theory has been voiced by several commentators that
there seems, at present there seems, to be a drift toward the “left” in the American
public, with the gradual acceptance of same-sex marriage, women in combat roles,
and concern for intersex equity, but interestingly enough the trend does not include
an added support for gun control. These stereotypes don’t always hold up, and in
addition there is a growing movement of Independents, voters who decline to state
a party affiliation on their voter registration form. So it may be misleading to say
that the nation is divided down the middle—but it is a clear indication that across
this nation we just don’t all agree on the details of how one should be a good citizen,
other than it is a good thing to have a form of government where the people have
the opportunity to vote. So if we’re looking for a code of ethics to live by, and even
to promote, we should expect that not everyone is going to agree. But what is also
commonplace is that we tend to think that those who disagree with us are either
stupid, ignorant, or perhaps even evil. The blogosphere is full of such assumptions.
And that lends itself to thinking that we, perhaps in fact, are citizens of two cultures
within the United States, the culture of liberal values and the culture of conserva-
tive values (a pattern known in many other countries with a Western tradition of
democracy and right to free speech). Some call it a culture war. So here I have a
little recommendation—an introduction of a moral value, if you will: For the sake
of a good discussion, whether in the classroom, online, or perhaps just as an internal
dialogue with yourself, it may be useful not to jump to the immediate conclusion
that people who disagree with you are stupid, ignorant, or evil. As we strive to
become a nation of successful diversity, we sometimes forget that moral and po-
litical diversity also deserves a place alongside diversity of gender, race, religion,
economic background, sexual orientation, and so forth. In other words, people have
a right to have a wide variety of opinions, and some of these opinions are arrived at
through honest and conscientious deliberation. We have little chance of being able
to talk with one another and even learn from one another if we keep thinking that
everybody who doesn’t agree with us is automatically wrong or wrongheaded.
Values , M orals , and E thics 5
On the other hand, an acceptance of the fact that people disagree on moral
issues doesn’t have to lead to a moral relativism, or an assumption that there is al-
ways another side to everything. Despite our moral differences in this culture, most
reasonable people are going to agree on some basic values: In my experience, the
majority of Americans are in favor of justice and equality, and against murder, child
abuse, racism, sexism, slavery, animal torture, and so forth. In Chapter 3 you’ll find
a discussion of ethical relativism, and in Chapter 11 you’ll find a further discussion
of the search for common values in a politically diverse culture.
Values, Morals, and Ethics

In its most basic sense, what we value is something we believe is set apart from things
that we don’t value or that we value less. When do we first begin to value something?
As babies, we live in a world that is divided into what we like and what we don’t
like—a binary world of plus and minus, of yes and no. Some psychoanalysts believe
we never really get over this early stage, so that some people simply divide the world
into what they like or approve of and what they dislike or disapprove of. However,
most of us add to that a justification for our preferences or aversions. And this is where
the concept of moral values comes in. Having values implies that we have a moral
code that we live by, or at least that we tell ourselves we try to live by, a set of beliefs
about what constitutes good conduct and a good character. Perhaps equally impor-
tant, having values implies that we have a conception of what society should be, such
as a promoter of values we consider good, a safety net for when things go wrong, an
overseer that punishes bad behavior and rewards good behavior, a caregiver for all our
basic needs, or a minimalist organization that protects the people against internal and
external enemies but otherwise leaves them alone to pursue their own happiness. In
Chapter 7 we examine several of these conceptions of social values.
In the late twentieth century the number of college classes in introductory ethics
and value theory swelled. When they hear I teach ethics, people who are unfamiliar
with how college classes in the subject are taught say, “Good! Our college students
really need that!” That response always makes me pause: What do they think I teach?
Right from wrong? Of course, we do have discussions about right and wrong, and
we can, from time to time, even reach agreement about some moral responses being
preferable to other moral responses. If students haven’t acquired a sense of values by
the time they’re in college, I fear it’s too late: Psychologists say a child must develop a
sense of values by the age of seven to become an adult with a conscience. If the child
hasn’t learned by the second grade that other people can feel pain and pleasure, and
that one should try not to harm others, that lesson will probably never be truly learned.
Fortunately, that doesn’t mean everyone must be taught the same moral lessons by the
age of seven—as long as we have some moral background to draw on later, as a sound-
ing board for further ethical reflections, we can come from morally widely diverse
homes and still become morally dependable people. A child growing up in a mobster
type of family will certainly have acquired a set of morals by the age of seven—but
it isn’t necessarily the same set of morals as those acquired by a child in a liberal,
secular, humanist family or in a Seventh-Day Adventist family. The point is that all
these children will have their moral center activated and can expand their moral uni-
verse. A child who has never been taught any moral lessons may be a sociopath of the
future, a person who has no comprehension of how other people feel, no empathy. A
case that garnered attention recently, and introduced a new concept, “affluenza,” was
the 2013 case of Ethan Couch, then 16 years old, whose drunk driving resulted in the
deaths of four people. At his trial, a psychologist testified for the defense that growing
up in a very affluent, permissive family had not taught him right from wrong. Whether
or not this argument was just a lawyer’s clever trick, it highlighted the p ossibility that
we indeed have to be exposed to ideas of right and wrong as children in order to rec-
ognize them as significant later in life. And with the attempted flight of Couch and his
mother to Mexico in 2015, it seemed clear that Couch’s lack of understanding that one
must take responsibility for one’s actions was something that his mother may not have
sufficiently understood, either. In 2016 a Texas judge ordered him to serve 2 years in
prison, 180 days for each of the four victims.
If having moral values has to do with brain chemistry, and with simple likes and
dislikes, why don’t we turn to the disciplines of neuroscience and psychology for an
understanding of values? Why is philosophy the discipline that examines the values
issue? That question goes to the core of what philosophy is: Neuroscience can tell us
about the physical underpinnings of our mental life and possibly whether our mental
reactions have a correlation to the world we live in, but as you will see below, it can’t
tell us whether our mental processes are socially appropriate or inappropriate, mor-
ally justified or unjustified, and so forth. Neuroscience has recently identified areas
in the brain where moral decisions involving empathy take place, but that doesn’t
mean that neuroscientists can tell us which moral decisions are more correct than
others. Psychology can tell us only what people believe and possibly why they be-
lieve it; it can’t make a statement about whether people are justified in believing it.
Philosophy’s job, at least in this context, is to question our values; it forces us to pro-
vide reasons, and preferably good reasons, for giving our moral approval to one type
of behavior and disapproving of another. Philosophy asks the fundamental question
Why?, in all its fields, including the field of value theory/ethics. (Box 1.1 gives an
overview of the classic branches within philosophy.) Why do we have the values we
have? Why do values make some people give up their comfort, even their lives, for
a cause, or for other people’s welfare? Why do some people disregard the values of
their society for a chosen cause or for personal gain? Is it ever morally appropriate
to think of yourself and not of others? Are there ultimate absolute moral values, or
are they a matter of personal or cultural choices? Such fundamental questions can
be probed by philosophy in a deeper and more fundamental way than by neurosci-
ence or psychology, and we will explore such questions in the upcoming chapters.
If having values is such an important feature of our life, should elementary
schools teach values, then? It may be just a little too late, if indeed a child’s moral
sense is developed by the age of seven, but at least there is a chance it might help;
and for children whose parents have done a minimal job of teaching them respect
for others, school will probably be the only place they’ll learn it. Some elemen-
tary schools are developing such programs. Problems occur, however, when schools
begin to teach values with which not all parents agree. We live in a multicultural
Values , M orals , and E thics 7
Box 1.1 THE FOUR CLASSIC BRANCHES OF PHILOSOPHY
In the chapter text, you read that philosophy about the subnuclear reality of quantum me-
traditionally asks the question Why? This is chanics. But a classical question of metaphys-
one of the features that has characterized West- ics remains unanswered by science to this day:
ern philosophy from its earliest years in Greek What is the nature of the human mind? Do we
antiquity. We generally date Western philoso- have a soul that outlives our bodies, or will our
phy from approximately seven hundred years self be extinguished with the demise of our
b.c.e./b.c. (“before the common era”/“before brain?
Christ”), when some Greek thinkers, such as Until the mid–twentieth century, philosophy
Thales, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, began to was usually taught in the West with the underly-
ask questions about what reality truly consists ing assumption that philosophy as such was, by
of: Is it the way we perceive it through the and large, a Western phenomenon. That rather
senses, or is there an underlying true reality that ethnocentric attitude has changed considerably
our intellect can understand? Thales believed over the last decades. It is now recognized un-
the underlying reality was water; Heraclitus be- equivocally among Western scholars that Asian
lieved that it was a form of ever-changing en- philosophy has its own rich traditions of explo-
ergy; and Parmenides saw true reality as being ration of metaphysics and ethics in particular;
an underlying realm of permanence, elements and some philosophers point out that in a sense,
that don’t change. We call this form of philoso- all cultures have metaphysics and ethics, even
phy metaphysics; in Chapter 8 you will read a if they have no body of philosophical literature,
brief introduction to Plato’s famous theory of because their legends, songs, and religious sto-
metaphysics, but otherwise the topic of meta- ries will constitute the culture’s view of reality
physics has only indirect bearing on the topic as well as the moral rules and their justifica-
of this book. A few centuries after Thales, the tions. As for logic and epistemology, they are
next area of philosophy that manifested itself not as frequently encountered in non-Western
was ethics, with Socrates’ questioning of what cultures: Indian philosophy has established its
is the right way to live (see chapter text). Two own tradition of logic, but epistemology re-
generations later the third area of philosophy mains a Western philosophical specialty, ac-
was introduced, primarily through the writings cording to most Western scholars.
of Aristotle: logic, the establishing of rules for To the four classic branches, philosophy has
proper thinking as opposed to fallacious think- added a number of specialized fields over the
ing. But the fourth area of Western philosophy centuries, such as philosophy of art (aesthetics),
didn’t really take hold in the minds of thinkers social philosophy, philosophy of religion, polit-
until some two thousand years later, in the sev- ical philosophy, philosophy of sports, philoso-
enteenth century, when René Descartes began phy of human nature, philosophy of gender, and
to seriously explore what the mind can know: philosophy of science. What makes these fields
epistemology, or theory of knowledge. All four philosophical inquiries is their special approach
branches of philosophy are represented today to their subjects; they investigate not only the
in school curricula and enjoy vibrant debates nature of art, social issues, religion, politics,
within the philosophical community. The only and so on, but also the theoretical underpin-
branch to have languished somewhat is meta- nings of each field, its hidden assumptions and
physics, since modern science has answered agendas, and its future moral and social pitfalls
some of its ancient questions: We now know and promises.
society, and although some parents might like certain topics to be on the school
agenda, others certainly would not. Some parents want their children to have early
access to sex education, whereas others consider it unthinkable as a school subject.
There is nothing in the concept of values that implies we all have to subscribe to ex-
actly the same ones, no matter how strongly we may feel about our own. So, beyond
teaching basic values such as common courtesy, perhaps the best schools can do is
make students aware of values and value differences and let students learn to argue
effectively for their own values, as well as to question them. Schools, in other words,
should focus on ethics in addition to morality.
So what is the difference between ethics and morality? Ethics comes from
Greek (ethos, character) and morality from Latin (mores, character, custom, or
habit). Today, in English as well as in many other Western languages, both words
refer to some form of proper conduct. Although we, in our everyday lives, don’t dis-
tinguish clearly between morals and ethics, there is a subtle difference: Some people
think the word morality has negative connotations, and in fact it does carry two dif-
ferent sets of associations for most of us. The positive ones are guidance, goodness,
humanitarianism, and so forth. Among the negative associations are repression, big-
otry, persecution—in a word, moralizing. Suppose the introductory ethics course on
your campus was labeled “Introduction to Morals.” You would, in all likelihood,
expect something different from what you would expect from a course called “Intro-
duction to Ethics” or “Introduction to Values.” The word morality has a slightly dif-
ferent connotation from that of the terms ethics and values. That is because morality
usually refers to the moral rules we follow, the values that we have. Ethics is gener-
ally defined as theories about those rules; ethics questions and justifies the rules we
live by, and, if ethics can find no rational justification for those rules, it may ask us
to abandon them. Morality is the stuff our social life is made of—even our personal
life—and ethics is the ordering, the questioning, the awareness, the investigation of
what we believe: Are we justified in believing it? Is it consistent? Should we remain
open to other beliefs or not? If we live by a system of moral rules, we may or may
not have understood them or even approved of them, but if we have a code of ethics,
we signal to the world that we stand by our values, understand them, and are ready
to not only act on them but also defend them with words and deeds.
In other words, it is not enough just to have moral rules; we should, as moral,
mature persons, be able to justify our viewpoints with ethical arguments or, at the
very least, ask ourselves why we feel this way or that about a certain issue. Ethics,
therefore, is much more than a topic in a curriculum. As moral adults, we are re-
quired to think about ethics all the time.
Most people, in fact, do just that, even in their teens, because it is also considered a
sign of maturity to question authority, at least to a certain extent. If a very young adult
is told to be home at 11 p.m., she or he will usually ask, “Why can’t I stay out till mid-
night?” When we have to make up our minds about whether to study over the weekend
or go hiking, we usually try to come up with as many pros and cons as we can. When
someone we have put our trust in betrays that trust, we want to know why. All those
questions are practical applications of ethics: They question the rules of morality and
the breaking of those rules. Although formal training in ethical questions can make us
G ood and E vil 9
better at judging moral issues, we are, as adult human beings, already quite experienced
just because we already have asked “Why?” a number of times in our lives.
Good and Evil

You have probably heard the “E-word” (evil) recently, in conversation or in the
media. And good is surely one of the most frequently used words in the English
language. But interestingly, for most of the previous century ethicists preferred to
use terms such as “morally acceptable and unacceptable,” or “right versus wrong,”
rather than good versus evil. That pattern seems to be changing, and we’ll talk about
why in this section.
When terrible things happen to ordinary people, including natural disasters as
well as calamities of human origin, we frequently hear stories of people who are
not only victims of the disaster, but also subsequent victims of human schemes of
violence or fraud. But we also hear about people who go out of their way to help
others. During the nuclear crisis in Japan following the earthquake and tsunami,
what became known as the Fukushima 50 (actually around 300 volunteers) chose to
go in and work in the damaged nuclear reactors, in peril of their lives and certainly
exposed to high levels of radiation, for the sake of the community. It was clear that
they knew the risk, but also that they volunteered because they felt it was the right
thing to do for their community. In 2015, three young American males—two service
members and a college student—thwarted a terrorist attack on a high-speed passen-
ger train headed for Paris by tackling and subduing the terrorist, risking their lives
in the process; during the December 2015 massacre at the Regional Center building
in San Bernardino, carried out by a radicalized Islamist husband-and-wife team,
fourteen people died. One of those fourteen, Shannon Johnson, died saving one
of his co-workers by covering her body with his own, saying “I’ve got you.” In the
Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 in Blacksburg, Virginia, thirty-two students and
professors were murdered by a student, Seung-Hui Cho, but many more might have
died had it not been for Dr. Liviu Livrescu, a 76-year-old semi-retired professor who
blocked the door for Cho until all his students could make their escape through the
window. In the end Dr. Livrescu couldn’t hold the door any longer, and Cho burst in
and killed him, and subsequently killed himself. Such stories (of which you will hear
more in Chapter 4 where we will discuss the phenomena of selfishness and altruism)
remind us that dreadful things can happen in the blink of an eye, but also that there are
extraordinary people who will rise to the occasion and make decisions that may cost
them their lives, for the sake of others. That, to most of us, may be the ultimate form
of goodness, but the everyday kindness of a helping hand or a considerate remark
shouldn’t be discounted, even if the kind person isn’t endangering his or her life.
There is hardly a word with a broader meaning in the English language than
good—we can talk about food tasting good, test results being good, a feeling being
good, but also, of course, of actions being good and persons being good, and we
mean something different in all these examples. In Box 1.2 you’ll find a discus-
sion of moral and nonmoral values, and “good” fits right into that discussion: It is
a value term because it expresses approval, but it can be an approval that has to do
In The Lord of the Rings (2001–3) the concept of evil is symbolized by the Ring. Here the hobbit
Smeagol (Andy Serkis) finds the Ring on his birthday (top). Many years later the effects of evil are
clearly visible: Smeagol has become Gollum (bottom), a solitary creature whose mind is focused
exclusively on the Ring.
G ood and E vil 11
Box 1.2 M O R A L A N D N O N M O R A L VA L U E S
What is a value? Most often the word refers to a value theory, asking questions such as, Are there
moral value, a judgment of somebody’s behav- objective rules for when art is good? and Is it
ior according to whether or not it corresponds bad, or is it a matter of personal taste or of ac-
to certain moral rules (for example, “Tiffany is culturation? If you dislike hip-hop music, or like
a wonderful person; she always stays after the Craftsman-style architecture, are there valid ob-
party to help with the dishes”). However, some jective justifications for your likes and dislikes,
value judgments have nothing to do with moral or are they relative to your time and place? Art
issues, and so they are called nonmoral, which is theory even has an additional values concept: the
not the same as immoral (breaking moral rules) relationship between light and dark colors in a
or amoral (not having any moral standards). painting. But the most prevalent nonmoral value
Such nonmoral value judgments can include concept in our everyday world surely has to do
statements about taste (such as “The new gal- with getting good value—with buying something
lery downtown has a collection of exquisite wa- for less than it is worth. That prompted a political
tercolors”; “I really dislike Bob’s new haircut”; commentator, Michael Kinsley, who was fed up
and “Finn makes a great jambalaya”), as well as with the political talk about moral values a few
statements about being correct or incorrect about years ago, to quip, “When I want values, I go to
facts (such as “Lois did really well on her last Wal-Mart.” And McDonald’s has been running
math test” and “You’re wrong; last Saturday we a commercial suggesting that parents who want
didn’t go to the movies; that was last Sunday”). family values should take their kids to McDon-
Like moral value judgments, nonmoral value ald’s for the Value Meal, appealing to the peren-
judgments generally refer to something being nial parental guilt. In other words, satirists and
right or wrong, good or bad; but, unlike moral copywriters can have a field day doing a switch-
value judgments, they don’t refer to morally right eroo on our conception of values, from nonmoral
or wrong behavior. Nonmoral value concepts to moral and back again, and what we readers
abound in our present-day society: What we and consumers can do is stay on our toes so we
call aesthetics, art theory, is a form of nonmoral aren’t manipulated.
with moral issues (such as actions and a person’s character) or it can be unrelated
to moral issues, such as judging the result of a quiz, or a medical test, or something
we approve of because of its aesthetic qualities (it looks good, tastes good, sounds
good). If we assume that we’re interested mostly in the moral value of “good,” we
have only narrowed it down somewhat, because now we have to define what, in
our context and in our culture, is considered a morally good act. It could be acting
according to the rules of one’s culture’s religion; it could be acting with compas-
sion or with foresight as to the overall consequences of one’s actions; or it could be
simply doing one’s duty. A “good person” could be someone who is simply nice by
nature, but it could also be someone who struggles to do the right thing, perhaps
even against his or her nature. Or it could be simply someone we approve of, based
on our cultural rules. That particular moral attitude will be discussed in Chapter 3,
Ethical Relativism.
In our everyday life, we encounter the term evil frequently in the media and
entertainment, and most of us use it regularly. We even have a character in a popular
series of comic movies about retro hero Austin Powers, Dr. Evil, who really is quite
evil, and enjoying it. Entire film franchises and book series are centered around the
fight against evil, such as the Harry Potter series, The X-Men, Lord of the Rings,
and perhaps more than any other story franchise, Star Wars. But entertainment is
one thing that we can leave behind. Real life is another thing: The surviving students
at Virginia Tech will have those memories for the rest of their lives, and many a
young life was cut short that day, bringing grief to their families. The first decades
of the twentieth century have been marred and punctuated by deliberate acts of
harm toward what most of us would call “innocents”—people, including children,
who have never in their lives committed any acts that would warrant any aggressive
action toward them. There have been acts of terror against entire communities, from
the terror attacks of 9/11, 2001, to the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 and the
mass murders in San Bernardino in 2015. There have also been numerous school
shootings over the years, such as at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, CT,
that have prompted school administrations around the country to take measures and
train school personnel in “Active Shooter” scenarios. And then we have the media
favorites: the serial-killer stories where killers manage to evade the law for months,
sometimes even decades, preying on young or otherwise vulnerable members of
society—children, prostitutes, and drug addicts. From the Green River Killer Gary
Ridgway to the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) killer Dennis Rader, to Joseph Duncan
who killed an entire family in Idaho so he could abduct and abuse the two youngest
children (of whom only the little girl survived, to become an excellent and clear-
minded witness against him). In Austria Josef Fritzl was arrested for having kept
his own daughter captive in a hidden room in the basement for twenty-four years,
raping her and fathering seven children with her.
The question we need to ask here is this: Are such people who victimize
others—humans or animals—evil? Or should we just say that their actions are evil?
Or should we use another term entirely, such as being morally wrong?
What do the professionals—the ethicists who make a living teaching theories
of moral values and writing papers, monographs, and textbooks—say? Interestingly,
most contemporary ethicists tend to talk about issues such as selfishness and unself-
ishness, informed consent, weighing moral principles against overall consequences of
one’s actions, group rights versus individual rights, and so forth. We hear discussions
about the concepts of moral right and wrong and the principles by which we deter-
mine such concepts. Up until recently we rarely heard contemporary, professional
ethicists mention the concepts that most people associate with moral issues: good and
evil. Exceptions would be American philosophers such as Philip Hallie and Richard
Taylor and the British philosopher Mary Midgley. However, times are changing, and
even in the philosophical debate today the term evil is seeing a resurgence. So why
were so few philosophers up until very recently interested in talking about good and
evil, when it was one of the key topics in centuries past? For one thing, there has been
an underlying assumption that good and evil are religious concepts, and as we shall
see, the philosophical discussions about ethics and values have generally tended to
G ood and E vil 13
steer clear of the religious connection to ethics. For another, talking about good and
evil generally implies that we pass judgment on what is good and what is evil—which
means that we take sides. We no longer analyze concepts in some lofty realm of ob-
jectivity, we engage ourselves in seeking good and shunning evil. It also means that
we condemn those who are labeled evil and praise those we call good. In other words,
we engage in what some would call moralizing, and most ethicists have for decades
tried to avoid just that, with some exceptions. However, since September 11, 2001,
the concept of evil has been part of our political vocabulary, spearheaded by President
Bush, who labeled nations supporting terrorism as an axis of evil and referred to the
terrorists of 9/11 and others as evildoers. A precedent was created when President
Reagan labeled the Soviet Union “The Evil Empire” in the 1980s. Although that ter-
minology, to some critics, is far too close to a religious vocabulary for comfort, for
other Americans there is great relief and, indeed, comfort in being able to use a word
with the weight of tradition behind it to describe something most of us consider dread-
ful acts committed by people with no consideration for human decency, and the more
of such acts we see perpetrated on what we might call innocent people, the more we’re
likely to use the “E-word.” But what exactly do we call evil? Is evil a force that exists
outside human beings—is there a source of evil such as the devil, some satanic eternal
power that tempts and preys on human souls? Or is it, rather, a force within the human
mind, disregarding the needs and interests of other human beings just to accomplish
a goal? Or might it perhaps be a lack of something in the human mind—a blind spot
where the rest of us have a sense of community, belonging, empathy for others? In that
case, might we explain the acts of evildoers as those of sick individuals? But wouldn’t
that entail that they can’t be blamed for what they do, because we don’t usually blame
people for their illnesses? Those are questions that involve religion, psychology, and
ethics, and there is to this day no consensus among scholars as to how “evil” should
be interpreted. Some see terrorists, serial killers, and child molesters as evil, but we
may not agree on what makes them evil—a childhood deprived of love, a genetic
predisposition, a selfish choice that involves disregard for other people’s humanity,
a brainwashing by an ideology that distinguishes between “real” people and throw-
away people, an outside superhuman evil force that chooses a human vehicle? For the
German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whom you’ll meet in Chapter 6, there was no
doubt what evil is: the self-serving choice that individuals make freely, even when
they know full well the moral law they ought to be following.
Kant’s view comes out of the eighteenth century, however, and as you have seen
above, philosophers of the twentieth century generally steered away from calling
people or actions evil, with one notable exception, and that exception started a trend
that continues to this day: the introduction of the concept “the Banality of Evil,”
a term coined by German philosopher Hannah Arendt in 1963 in her book Adolf
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Arendt was living in Germany when Hitler came to power, but she managed
to flee to Paris before the Holocaust: She was a German Jew, and would undoubt-
edly have been swept up in the extermination process. Years after the war she was
tormented not only by the thought of the atrocities perpetrated in the death camps
but also by the knowledge that so many human beings either stood by and let the
© Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a Jewish-German philoso-

pher who narrowly escaped the Holocaust of World War II.
She left Germany in 1933, the year Hitler came into power,
and spent some time in Switzerland and France, but with
the Nazi occupation of Northern France in 1941, and the
subsequent collaboration by the French government, she was
interned in a labor camp with French Jews. She was released
and able to emigrate to the United States, where she became a
naturalized citizen in 1950. Her major works are The Origins
of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(1963). Her life was chronicled in the 2012 film, Hannah
Arendt.
Holocaust happen or actively participated in the torture and death of other human
beings. (And, for the record, the Holocaust did happen—13 million people perished
in the Nazi death camps on the orders of Hitler and his henchmen Himmler and
Eichmann, and those who deny that fact are playing political games. Enough said.)
The conclusion reached by Arendt and published in her book Adolf Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is that the German public who had
an inkling of what was going on and the Nazis who were actively engaged in the
Endlösung, or the “Final Solution,” were not evil in the sense that they (or most of
them) deliberately sought to gain personal advantage by causing pain and suffering
to others. Rather, it was more insidious: Little by little, they came to view the atroci-
ties they were asked to perform, or disregard, as a duty to their country and their
leader, as something their victims deserved, or simply as a normal state of affairs
and not something hideous or depraved. They became banal, everyday acts, corrupt-
ing the minds of the victimizers. In Arendt’s words about Eichmann’s execution for
his participation in the Holocaust:
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course
in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-
defying banality of evil. . . . The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were
like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still
are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and
of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all
the atrocities put together, for it implied—as had been said at Nuremberg over and over
again by the defendants and their counsels—that this new type of criminal . . . commits
his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to
feel that he is doing wrong. . . .
With Arendt’s introduction of the banality—or normalcy—of evil, the philosoph-
ical discussion of moral wrongdoing took a new turn. Could it be that horrendous
acts of harm done by ordinary people should be seen as “not really their fault”? As
something they were brainwashed into doing? Arendt herself seems to lean in that
direction by viewing Eichmann himself merely a bureaucrat who was somehow swept
G ood and E vil 15
up by an ideology, but as German philosopher Bettina Stangneth mentions in her

book Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass-Murderer (2014),
Eichmann was anything but a victim, he was truly the mastermind behind much of
the Holocaust, knowing full well what he did, and how it affected the lives of fellow
Germans. According to Stangneth, in her desire to show that ordinary people can be
manipulated into doing horrible things, Arendt ended up casting her net too wide, and
making apologies for the truly malicious individuals, the manipulators themselves.
But regardless of whether Arendt was right or wrong about Eichmann himself, her
notion of Banality of Evil allowed philosophers to once again engage in discussions
about evil, without having to deal with any religious context, and the term “evil” once
again found a home in moral debates, in a limited way. In addition, coming out of
the concept of evil becoming everyday-like, banal, there is an implication: that it is
possible to fight the group-pressures or pressures from authorities that may result in
a Banality-of-evil scenario. Many of you have heard of the Stanley Milgram obedi-
ence experiments at Yale University in the 1960s, wherein Professor Milgram showed
that if you are under the influence of an authority who takes responsibility for your
actions, you are likely to be willing to commit acts of atrocity toward other human
beings; he demonstrated that test subjects, believing themselves to be assisting with
an experiment, would overcome their unwillingness to give electric shocks to test
subjects in another room (in reality actors who weren’t being harmed at all) to the
point of killing them, as long as they were told they had to do it, and it was not their
responsibility. A recent film, Experimenter (2015), explores Milgram’s obedience ex-
periments and their impact on our self-image. The other infamous experiment that you
may have heard of is the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, conducted by psycholo-
gist professor Philip Zimbardo, wherein a group of experimental subjects—ordinary
male college students—were divided into “prisoners” and “prison guards,” in order to
examine why conditions would deteriorate so quickly in a real prison setting. Before
long the “prison guards” began treating the “prisoners” with abusive cruelty, believ-
ing that such behavior was somehow warranted to maintain authority, and Zimbardo
had to terminate the experiment within less than a week. Both an American film and a
German version, both titled The Experiment, are chilling reenactments of the experi-
ment. Some see such an event as proof that human nature is fundamentally bad—it
doesn’t take much for the veneer of civilization to wear thin, and our true, evil nature
surfaces. For others, all this means is that there are all kinds of reasons why people do
what they do; some of what we call evil is based on a moral choice, and some of it is
an outcome of environmental pressures or brain anomalies.
In 2007 Zimbardo published a book, The Lucifer Effect, in which he drew
parallels between the experiment and the Abu Ghraib incident of 2004 in which
American military personnel guarding suspected terrorists in Iraq subjected them
to psychological torture, focusing specifically on the power of humans to resist
the pressure from authorities, find enough moral fortitude, and say no to allowing
acts of harm to escalate into some kind of permitted, normal, banal behavior. In
his own words, “Three decades earlier, I had witnessed eerily similar scenes as
they unfolded in a project I directed, of my own design: naked, shackled prison-
ers with bags over their heads, guards stepping on prisoners’ backs as they did
push-ups, guards sexually humiliating prisoners, and prisoners suffering from extreme
stress. . . . As the project’s principal investigator, I designed the experiment that
randomly assigned normal, healthy, intelligent college students to enact the roles
of either guards or prisoners in a realistically simulated prison setting.” Zimbardo
sees a similar group mentality being responsible for both the Stanford Prison ex-
periment and the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2004.
But before we begin to assume that all evil acts are of the kind that may lurk in
ordinary people’s hearts, let us just remind ourselves that not all evil acts are banal.
Surely, the deliberate torturing and killing of children by a Joseph Duncan is not the
kind of evil that ordinary people are periodically persuaded to perform under extraor-
dinary circumstances, and neither are deliberate mass murders. For such acts involving
deliberate choices directly intending and resulting in harm to innocent people we may
want to reserve the terms egregious or extreme evil. If we want to adopt the vocabulary
of “evil,” in addition to “morally wrong” and “misguided,” we must also recognize
that there are degrees of evil, ranging from reluctantly causing pain (such as in the
Milgram experiments) to humiliating other human beings, to abusing, torturing, and
killing them with deliberation and gusto. And perhaps it is a disservice to our sense of
evil to assume that “we’re all capable of doing evil.” Some forms of evil are the result
not of ordinary people being seduced into insensitivity but of some people’s deliber-
ate choices to cause harm—such as Adolf Eichmann. A study by Allan Feinigstein
in Theory and Psychology (2015) points out that most Nazi perpetrators actually didn’t
show any remorse, and some even seemed to relish the torture and suffering they
inflicted—so they actually didn’t fall under the “banality of evil” category at all. And on
the other hand, even in the Stanley Milgram experiment some test subjects refused to
push the shock lever. In Chapter 11, in the section about the philosopher Philip Hallie,
you’ll read a story that goes into detail about rising up against evil: the story of a French
village that rebelled against the Nazis. Hallie presents this story as an “antidote to cru-
elty,” and you will find an additional reference to Philip Zimbardo and his coining of
a new term, “the banality of heroism,” a theory that claims that if evil is a possibility
in our hearts, so, too, are heroism and altruism—in other words, inherent goodness.
Even if we have now taken a look at some different meanings of the term evil,
we have of course by no means exhausted the topic, but a further discussion would
be outside the scope of an introductory chapter. We might continue talking about
where we think evil originates—as a failing to see others as equal human beings,
maybe even a brain deficiency that excludes empathy? Or is it willful selfishness?
In Chapter 4 we look at the concepts of selfishness and unselfishness. Or is it just a
matter of perspective—one culture’s evil is another culture’s goodness? And does it
matter whether a deliberate, harmful act is committed in the name of a political or
religious cause? Would that make the act less or maybe more evil? We look at the
question of different cultural values in Chapter 3. Or we might also ask the ques-
tion that has troubled many cultures for thousands of years, generally known as the
Problem of Evil: If there is a god, and he, she, or it is a well-intended, all-powerful
being, then why do terrible things happen to good people? That question, profound
as it may be, belongs within Philosophy of Religion and lies beyond the scope of
this textbook. That doesn’t mean you’re not welcome to think about its implications.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI
Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

the Newala of to-day does; there was once another Newala in a lovely
valley at the foot of the plateau. I visited it and found scarcely a trace
of houses, only a Christian cemetery, with the graves of several
missionaries and their converts, remaining as a monument of its
former glories. But the surroundings are wonderfully beautiful. A
thick grove of splendid mango-trees closes in the weather-worn
crosses and headstones; behind them, combining the useful and the
agreeable, is a whole plantation of lemon-trees covered with ripe
fruit; not the small African kind, but a much larger and also juicier
imported variety, which drops into the hands of the passing traveller,
without calling for any exertion on his part. Old Newala is now under
the jurisdiction of the native pastor, Daudi, at Chingulungulu, who,
as I am on very friendly terms with him, allows me, as a matter of
course, the use of this lemon-grove during my stay at Newala.
FEET MUTILATED BY THE RAVAGES OF THE “JIGGER”
(Sarcopsylla penetrans)
The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

some 1,600 feet lower down. The way is not only long and fatiguing,
but the water, when we get it, is thoroughly bad. We are suffering not
only from this, but from the fact that the arrangements at Newala are
nothing short of luxurious. We have a separate kitchen—a hut built
against the boma palisade on the right of the baraza, the interior of
which is not visible from our usual position. Our two cooks were not
long in finding this out, and they consequently do—or rather neglect
to do—what they please. In any case they do not seem to be very
particular about the boiling of our drinking-water—at least I can
attribute to no other cause certain attacks of a dysenteric nature,
from which both Knudsen and I have suffered for some time. If a
man like Omari has to be left unwatched for a moment, he is capable
of anything. Besides this complaint, we are inconvenienced by the
state of our nails, which have become as hard as glass, and crack on
the slightest provocation, and I have the additional infliction of
pimples all over me. As if all this were not enough, we have also, for
the last week been waging war against the jigger, who has found his
Eldorado in the hot sand of the Makonde plateau. Our men are seen
all day long—whenever their chronic colds and the dysentery likewise
raging among them permit—occupied in removing this scourge of
Africa from their feet and trying to prevent the disastrous
consequences of its presence. It is quite common to see natives of
this place with one or two toes missing; many have lost all their toes,
or even the whole front part of the foot, so that a well-formed leg
ends in a shapeless stump. These ravages are caused by the female of
Sarcopsylla penetrans, which bores its way under the skin and there
develops an egg-sac the size of a pea. In all books on the subject, it is
stated that one’s attention is called to the presence of this parasite by
an intolerable itching. This agrees very well with my experience, so
far as the softer parts of the sole, the spaces between and under the
toes, and the side of the foot are concerned, but if the creature
penetrates through the harder parts of the heel or ball of the foot, it
may escape even the most careful search till it has reached maturity.
Then there is no time to be lost, if the horrible ulceration, of which
we see cases by the dozen every day, is to be prevented. It is much
easier, by the way, to discover the insect on the white skin of a
European than on that of a native, on which the dark speck scarcely
shows. The four or five jiggers which, in spite of the fact that I
constantly wore high laced boots, chose my feet to settle in, were
taken out for me by the all-accomplished Knudsen, after which I
thought it advisable to wash out the cavities with corrosive
sublimate. The natives have a different sort of disinfectant—they fill
the hole with scraped roots. In a tiny Makua village on the slope of
the plateau south of Newala, we saw an old woman who had filled all
the spaces under her toe-nails with powdered roots by way of
prophylactic treatment. What will be the result, if any, who can say?
The rest of the many trifling ills which trouble our existence are
really more comic than serious. In the absence of anything else to
smoke, Knudsen and I at last opened a box of cigars procured from
the Indian store-keeper at Lindi, and tried them, with the most
distressing results. Whether they contain opium or some other
narcotic, neither of us can say, but after the tenth puff we were both
“off,” three-quarters stupefied and unspeakably wretched. Slowly we
recovered—and what happened next? Half-an-hour later we were
once more smoking these poisonous concoctions—so insatiable is the
craving for tobacco in the tropics.
Even my present attacks of fever scarcely deserve to be taken
seriously. I have had no less than three here at Newala, all of which
have run their course in an incredibly short time. In the early
afternoon, I am busy with my old natives, asking questions and
making notes. The strong midday coffee has stimulated my spirits to
an extraordinary degree, the brain is active and vigorous, and work
progresses rapidly, while a pleasant warmth pervades the whole
body. Suddenly this gives place to a violent chill, forcing me to put on
my overcoat, though it is only half-past three and the afternoon sun
is at its hottest. Now the brain no longer works with such acuteness
and logical precision; more especially does it fail me in trying to
establish the syntax of the difficult Makua language on which I have
ventured, as if I had not enough to do without it. Under the
circumstances it seems advisable to take my temperature, and I do
so, to save trouble, without leaving my seat, and while going on with
my work. On examination, I find it to be 101·48°. My tutors are
abruptly dismissed and my bed set up in the baraza; a few minutes
later I am in it and treating myself internally with hot water and
lemon-juice.
Three hours later, the thermometer marks nearly 104°, and I make
them carry me back into the tent, bed and all, as I am now perspiring
heavily, and exposure to the cold wind just beginning to blow might
mean a fatal chill. I lie still for a little while, and then find, to my
great relief, that the temperature is not rising, but rather falling. This
is about 7.30 p.m. At 8 p.m. I find, to my unbounded astonishment,
that it has fallen below 98·6°, and I feel perfectly well. I read for an
hour or two, and could very well enjoy a smoke, if I had the
wherewithal—Indian cigars being out of the question.
Having no medical training, I am at a loss to account for this state
of things. It is impossible that these transitory attacks of high fever
should be malarial; it seems more probable that they are due to a
kind of sunstroke. On consulting my note-book, I become more and
more inclined to think this is the case, for these attacks regularly
follow extreme fatigue and long exposure to strong sunshine. They at
least have the advantage of being only short interruptions to my
work, as on the following morning I am always quite fresh and fit.
My treasure of a cook is suffering from an enormous hydrocele which
makes it difficult for him to get up, and Moritz is obliged to keep in
the dark on account of his inflamed eyes. Knudsen’s cook, a raw boy
from somewhere in the bush, knows still less of cooking than Omari;
consequently Nils Knudsen himself has been promoted to the vacant
post. Finding that we had come to the end of our supplies, he began
by sending to Chingulungulu for the four sucking-pigs which we had
bought from Matola and temporarily left in his charge; and when
they came up, neatly packed in a large crate, he callously slaughtered
the biggest of them. The first joint we were thoughtless enough to
entrust for roasting to Knudsen’s mshenzi cook, and it was
consequently uneatable; but we made the rest of the animal into a
jelly which we ate with great relish after weeks of underfeeding,
consuming incredible helpings of it at both midday and evening
meals. The only drawback is a certain want of variety in the tinned
vegetables. Dr. Jäger, to whom the Geographical Commission
entrusted the provisioning of the expeditions—mine as well as his
own—because he had more time on his hands than the rest of us,
seems to have laid in a huge stock of Teltow turnips,[46] an article of
food which is all very well for occasional use, but which quickly palls
when set before one every day; and we seem to have no other tins
left. There is no help for it—we must put up with the turnips; but I
am certain that, once I am home again, I shall not touch them for ten
years to come.
Amid all these minor evils, which, after all, go to make up the
genuine flavour of Africa, there is at least one cheering touch:
Knudsen has, with the dexterity of a skilled mechanic, repaired my 9
× 12 cm. camera, at least so far that I can use it with a little care.
How, in the absence of finger-nails, he was able to accomplish such a
ticklish piece of work, having no tool but a clumsy screw-driver for
taking to pieces and putting together again the complicated
mechanism of the instantaneous shutter, is still a mystery to me; but
he did it successfully. The loss of his finger-nails shows him in a light
contrasting curiously enough with the intelligence evinced by the
above operation; though, after all, it is scarcely surprising after his
ten years’ residence in the bush. One day, at Lindi, he had occasion
to wash a dog, which must have been in need of very thorough
cleansing, for the bottle handed to our friend for the purpose had an
extremely strong smell. Having performed his task in the most
conscientious manner, he perceived with some surprise that the dog
did not appear much the better for it, and was further surprised by
finding his own nails ulcerating away in the course of the next few
days. “How was I to know that carbolic acid has to be diluted?” he
mutters indignantly, from time to time, with a troubled gaze at his
mutilated finger-tips.
Since we came to Newala we have been making excursions in all
directions through the surrounding country, in accordance with old
habit, and also because the akida Sefu did not get together the tribal
elders from whom I wanted information so speedily as he had
promised. There is, however, no harm done, as, even if seen only
from the outside, the country and people are interesting enough.
The Makonde plateau is like a large rectangular table rounded off
at the corners. Measured from the Indian Ocean to Newala, it is
about seventy-five miles long, and between the Rovuma and the
Lukuledi it averages fifty miles in breadth, so that its superficial area
is about two-thirds of that of the kingdom of Saxony. The surface,
however, is not level, but uniformly inclined from its south-western
edge to the ocean. From the upper edge, on which Newala lies, the
eye ranges for many miles east and north-east, without encountering
any obstacle, over the Makonde bush. It is a green sea, from which
here and there thick clouds of smoke rise, to show that it, too, is
inhabited by men who carry on their tillage like so many other
primitive peoples, by cutting down and burning the bush, and
manuring with the ashes. Even in the radiant light of a tropical day
such a fire is a grand sight.
Much less effective is the impression produced just now by the
great western plain as seen from the edge of the plateau. As often as
time permits, I stroll along this edge, sometimes in one direction,
sometimes in another, in the hope of finding the air clear enough to
let me enjoy the view; but I have always been disappointed.
Wherever one looks, clouds of smoke rise from the burning bush,
and the air is full of smoke and vapour. It is a pity, for under more
favourable circumstances the panorama of the whole country up to
the distant Majeje hills must be truly magnificent. It is of little use
taking photographs now, and an outline sketch gives a very poor idea
of the scenery. In one of these excursions I went out of my way to
make a personal attempt on the Makonde bush. The present edge of
the plateau is the result of a far-reaching process of destruction
through erosion and denudation. The Makonde strata are
everywhere cut into by ravines, which, though short, are hundreds of
yards in depth. In consequence of the loose stratification of these
beds, not only are the walls of these ravines nearly vertical, but their
upper end is closed by an equally steep escarpment, so that the
western edge of the Makonde plateau is hemmed in by a series of
deep, basin-like valleys. In order to get from one side of such a ravine
to the other, I cut my way through the bush with a dozen of my men.
It was a very open part, with more grass than scrub, but even so the
short stretch of less than two hundred yards was very hard work; at
the end of it the men’s calicoes were in rags and they themselves
bleeding from hundreds of scratches, while even our strong khaki
suits had not escaped scatheless.
NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAHUTA
I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.
MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

This is the general way of closing a house. The Makonde at Jumbe
Chauro, however, have a much more complicated, solid and original
one. Here, too, the door is as already described, except that there is
only one post on the inside, standing by itself about six inches from
one side of the doorway. Opposite this post is a hole in the wall just
large enough to admit a man’s arm. The door is closed inside by a
large wooden bolt passing through a hole in this post and pressing
with its free end against the door. The other end has three holes into
which fit three pegs running in vertical grooves inside the post. The
door is opened with a wooden key about a foot long, somewhat
curved and sloped off at the butt; the other end has three pegs
corresponding to the holes, in the bolt, so that, when it is thrust
through the hole in the wall and inserted into the rectangular
opening in the post, the pegs can be lifted and the bolt drawn out.[50]
MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY
With no small pride first one householder and then a second

showed me on the spot the action of this greatest invention of the
Makonde Highlands. To both with an admiring exclamation of
“Vizuri sana!” (“Very fine!”). I expressed the wish to take back these
marvels with me to Ulaya, to show the Wazungu what clever fellows
the Makonde are. Scarcely five minutes after my return to camp at
Newala, the two men came up sweating under the weight of two
heavy logs which they laid down at my feet, handing over at the same
time the keys of the fallen fortress. Arguing, logically enough, that if
the key was wanted, the lock would be wanted with it, they had taken
their axes and chopped down the posts—as it never occurred to them
to dig them out of the ground and so bring them intact. Thus I have
two badly damaged specimens, and the owners, instead of praise,
come in for a blowing-up.
The Makua huts in the environs of Newala are especially
miserable; their more than slovenly construction reminds one of the
temporary erections of the Makua at Hatia’s, though the people here
have not been concerned in a war. It must therefore be due to
congenital idleness, or else to the absence of a powerful chief. Even
the baraza at Mlipa’s, a short hour’s walk south-east of Newala,
shares in this general neglect. While public buildings in this country
are usually looked after more or less carefully, this is in evident
danger of being blown over by the first strong easterly gale. The only
attractive object in this whole district is the grave of the late chief
Mlipa. I visited it in the morning, while the sun was still trying with
partial success to break through the rolling mists, and the circular
grove of tall euphorbias, which, with a broken pot, is all that marks
the old king’s resting-place, impressed one with a touch of pathos.
Even my very materially-minded carriers seemed to feel something
of the sort, for instead of their usual ribald songs, they chanted
solemnly, as we marched on through the dense green of the Makonde
bush:—
“We shall arrive with the great master; we stand in a row and have
no fear about getting our food and our money from the Serkali (the
Government). We are not afraid; we are going along with the great
master, the lion; we are going down to the coast and back.”
With regard to the characteristic features of the various tribes here
on the western edge of the plateau, I can arrive at no other
conclusion than the one already come to in the plain, viz., that it is
impossible for anyone but a trained anthropologist to assign any
given individual at once to his proper tribe. In fact, I think that even
an anthropological specialist, after the most careful examination,
might find it a difficult task to decide. The whole congeries of peoples
collected in the region bounded on the west by the great Central
African rift, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and on the east by the Indian
Ocean, are closely related to each other—some of their languages are
only distinguished from one another as dialects of the same speech,
and no doubt all the tribes present the same shape of skull and
structure of skeleton. Thus, surely, there can be no very striking
differences in outward appearance.
Even did such exist, I should have no time
to concern myself with them, for day after day,
I have to see or hear, as the case may be—in
any case to grasp and record—an
extraordinary number of ethnographic
phenomena. I am almost disposed to think it
fortunate that some departments of inquiry, at
least, are barred by external circumstances.
Chief among these is the subject of iron-
working. We are apt to think of Africa as a
country where iron ore is everywhere, so to
speak, to be picked up by the roadside, and
where it would be quite surprising if the
inhabitants had not learnt to smelt the
material ready to their hand. In fact, the
knowledge of this art ranges all over the
continent, from the Kabyles in the north to the
Kafirs in the south. Here between the Rovuma
and the Lukuledi the conditions are not so
favourable. According to the statements of the
Makonde, neither ironstone nor any other
form of iron ore is known to them. They have
not therefore advanced to the art of smelting
the metal, but have hitherto bought all their
THE ANCESTRESS OF
THE MAKONDE
iron implements from neighbouring tribes.
Even in the plain the inhabitants are not much
better off. Only one man now living is said to
understand the art of smelting iron. This old fundi lives close to
Huwe, that isolated, steep-sided block of granite which rises out of
the green solitude between Masasi and Chingulungulu, and whose
jagged and splintered top meets the traveller’s eye everywhere. While
still at Masasi I wished to see this man at work, but was told that,
frightened by the rising, he had retired across the Rovuma, though
he would soon return. All subsequent inquiries as to whether the
fundi had come back met with the genuine African answer, “Bado”
(“Not yet”).
BRAZIER
Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

came across in the bush near Akundonde’s. This man is the favourite
of women, and therefore no doubt of the gods; he welds the glittering
brass rods purchased at the coast into those massive, heavy rings
which, on the wrists and ankles of the local fair ones, continually give
me fresh food for admiration. Like every decent master-craftsman he
had all his tools with him, consisting of a pair of bellows, three
crucibles and a hammer—nothing more, apparently. He was quite
willing to show his skill, and in a twinkling had fixed his bellows on
the ground. They are simply two goat-skins, taken off whole, the four
legs being closed by knots, while the upper opening, intended to
admit the air, is kept stretched by two pieces of wood. At the lower
end of the skin a smaller opening is left into which a wooden tube is
stuck. The fundi has quickly borrowed a heap of wood-embers from
the nearest hut; he then fixes the free ends of the two tubes into an
earthen pipe, and clamps them to the ground by means of a bent
piece of wood. Now he fills one of his small clay crucibles, the dross
on which shows that they have been long in use, with the yellow
material, places it in the midst of the embers, which, at present are
only faintly glimmering, and begins his work. In quick alternation
the smith’s two hands move up and down with the open ends of the
bellows; as he raises his hand he holds the slit wide open, so as to let
the air enter the skin bag unhindered. In pressing it down he closes
the bag, and the air puffs through the bamboo tube and clay pipe into
the fire, which quickly burns up. The smith, however, does not keep
on with this work, but beckons to another man, who relieves him at
the bellows, while he takes some more tools out of a large skin pouch
carried on his back. I look on in wonder as, with a smooth round
stick about the thickness of a finger, he bores a few vertical holes into
the clean sand of the soil. This should not be difficult, yet the man
seems to be taking great pains over it. Then he fastens down to the
ground, with a couple of wooden clamps, a neat little trough made by
splitting a joint of bamboo in half, so that the ends are closed by the
two knots. At last the yellow metal has attained the right consistency,
and the fundi lifts the crucible from the fire by means of two sticks
split at the end to serve as tongs. A short swift turn to the left—a
tilting of the crucible—and the molten brass, hissing and giving forth
clouds of smoke, flows first into the bamboo mould and then into the
holes in the ground.
The technique of this backwoods craftsman may not be very far
advanced, but it cannot be denied that he knows how to obtain an
adequate result by the simplest means. The ladies of highest rank in
this country—that is to say, those who can afford it, wear two kinds
of these massive brass rings, one cylindrical, the other semicircular
in section. The latter are cast in the most ingenious way in the
bamboo mould, the former in the circular hole in the sand. It is quite
a simple matter for the fundi to fit these bars to the limbs of his fair
customers; with a few light strokes of his hammer he bends the
pliable brass round arm or ankle without further inconvenience to
the wearer.
SHAPING THE POT
SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB
CUTTING THE EDGE

FINISHING THE BOTTOM
LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

BURNING
FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

LIGHTING THE FARTHER SIDE OF
THE PILE
TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL
NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

Pottery is an art which must always and everywhere excite the
interest of the student, just because it is so intimately connected with
the development of human culture, and because its relics are one of
the principal factors in the reconstruction of our own condition in
prehistoric times. I shall always remember with pleasure the two or
three afternoons at Masasi when Salim Matola’s mother, a slightly-
built, graceful, pleasant-looking woman, explained to me with
touching patience, by means of concrete illustrations, the ceramic art
of her people. The only implements for this primitive process were a
lump of clay in her left hand, and in the right a calabash containing
the following valuables: the fragment of a maize-cob stripped of all
its grains, a smooth, oval pebble, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, a
few chips of gourd-shell, a bamboo splinter about the length of one’s
hand, a small shell, and a bunch of some herb resembling spinach.
Nothing more. The woman scraped with the
shell a round, shallow hole in the soft, fine
sand of the soil, and, when an active young
girl had filled the calabash with water for her,
she began to knead the clay. As if by magic it
gradually assumed the shape of a rough but
already well-shaped vessel, which only wanted
a little touching up with the instruments
before mentioned. I looked out with the
MAKUA WOMAN closest attention for any indication of the use
MAKING A POT. of the potter’s wheel, in however rudimentary
SHOWS THE a form, but no—hapana (there is none). The
BEGINNINGS OF THE embryo pot stood firmly in its little
POTTER’S WHEEL
depression, and the woman walked round it in
a stooping posture, whether she was removing
small stones or similar foreign bodies with the maize-cob, smoothing
the inner or outer surface with the splinter of bamboo, or later, after
letting it dry for a day, pricking in the ornamentation with a pointed
bit of gourd-shell, or working out the bottom, or cutting the edge
with a sharp bamboo knife, or giving the last touches to the finished
vessel. This occupation of the women is infinitely toilsome, but it is
without doubt an accurate reproduction of the process in use among
our ancestors of the Neolithic and Bronze ages.
There is no doubt that the invention of pottery, an item in human
progress whose importance cannot be over-estimated, is due to
women. Rough, coarse and unfeeling, the men of the horde range
over the countryside. When the united cunning of the hunters has
succeeded in killing the game; not one of them thinks of carrying
home the spoil. A bright fire, kindled by a vigorous wielding of the
drill, is crackling beside them; the animal has been cleaned and cut
up secundum artem, and, after a slight singeing, will soon disappear
under their sharp teeth; no one all this time giving a single thought
to wife or child.
To what shifts, on the other hand, the primitive wife, and still more
the primitive mother, was put! Not even prehistoric stomachs could
endure an unvarying diet of raw food. Something or other suggested
the beneficial effect of hot water on the majority of approved but
indigestible dishes. Perhaps a neighbour had tried holding the hard
roots or tubers over the fire in a calabash filled with water—or maybe
an ostrich-egg-shell, or a hastily improvised vessel of bark. They
became much softer and more palatable than they had previously
been; but, unfortunately, the vessel could not stand the fire and got
charred on the outside. That can be remedied, thought our
ancestress, and plastered a layer of wet clay round a similar vessel.
This is an improvement; the cooking utensil remains uninjured, but
the heat of the fire has shrunk it, so that it is loose in its shell. The
next step is to detach it, so, with a firm grip and a jerk, shell and
kernel are separated, and pottery is invented. Perhaps, however, the
discovery which led to an intelligent use of the burnt-clay shell, was
made in a slightly different way. Ostrich-eggs and calabashes are not
to be found in every part of the world, but everywhere mankind has
arrived at the art of making baskets out of pliant materials, such as
bark, bast, strips of palm-leaf, supple twigs, etc. Our inventor has no
water-tight vessel provided by nature. “Never mind, let us line the
basket with clay.” This answers the purpose, but alas! the basket gets
burnt over the blazing fire, the woman watches the process of
cooking with increasing uneasiness, fearing a leak, but no leak
appears. The food, done to a turn, is eaten with peculiar relish; and
the cooking-vessel is examined, half in curiosity, half in satisfaction
at the result. The plastic clay is now hard as stone, and at the same
time looks exceedingly well, for the neat plaiting of the burnt basket
is traced all over it in a pretty pattern. Thus, simultaneously with
pottery, its ornamentation was invented.
Primitive woman has another claim to respect. It was the man,
roving abroad, who invented the art of producing fire at will, but the
woman, unable to imitate him in this, has been a Vestal from the
earliest times. Nothing gives so much trouble as the keeping alight of
the smouldering brand, and, above all, when all the men are absent
from the camp. Heavy rain-clouds gather, already the first large
drops are falling, the first gusts of the storm rage over the plain. The
little flame, a greater anxiety to the woman than her own children,
flickers unsteadily in the blast. What is to be done? A sudden thought
occurs to her, and in an instant she has constructed a primitive hut
out of strips of bark, to protect the flame against rain and wind.
This, or something very like it, was the way in which the principle
of the house was discovered; and even the most hardened misogynist
cannot fairly refuse a woman the credit of it. The protection of the
hearth-fire from the weather is the germ from which the human
dwelling was evolved. Men had little, if any share, in this forward
step, and that only at a late stage. Even at the present day, the
plastering of the housewall with clay and the manufacture of pottery
are exclusively the women’s business. These are two very significant
survivals. Our European kitchen-garden, too, is originally a woman’s
invention, and the hoe, the primitive instrument of agriculture, is,
characteristically enough, still used in this department. But the
noblest achievement which we owe to the other sex is unquestionably
the art of cookery. Roasting alone—the oldest process—is one for
which men took the hint (a very obvious one) from nature. It must
have been suggested by the scorched carcase of some animal
overtaken by the destructive forest-fires. But boiling—the process of
improving organic substances by the help of water heated to boiling-
point—is a much later discovery. It is so recent that it has not even
yet penetrated to all parts of the world. The Polynesians understand
how to steam food, that is, to cook it, neatly wrapped in leaves, in a
hole in the earth between hot stones, the air being excluded, and
(sometimes) a few drops of water sprinkled on the stones; but they
do not understand boiling.
To come back from this digression, we find that the slender Nyasa
woman has, after once more carefully examining the finished pot,
put it aside in the shade to dry. On the following day she sends me
word by her son, Salim Matola, who is always on hand, that she is
going to do the burning, and, on coming out of my house, I find her
already hard at work. She has spread on the ground a layer of very
dry sticks, about as thick as one’s thumb, has laid the pot (now of a
yellowish-grey colour) on them, and is piling brushwood round it.
My faithful Pesa mbili, the mnyampara, who has been standing by,
most obligingly, with a lighted stick, now hands it to her. Both of
them, blowing steadily, light the pile on the lee side, and, when the
flame begins to catch, on the weather side also. Soon the whole is in a
blaze, but the dry fuel is quickly consumed and the fire dies down, so
that we see the red-hot vessel rising from the ashes. The woman
turns it continually with a long stick, sometimes one way and
sometimes another, so that it may be evenly heated all over. In
twenty minutes she rolls it out of the ash-heap, takes up the bundle
of spinach, which has been lying for two days in a jar of water, and
sprinkles the red-hot clay with it. The places where the drops fall are
marked by black spots on the uniform reddish-brown surface. With a
sigh of relief, and with visible satisfaction, the woman rises to an
erect position; she is standing just in a line between me and the fire,
from which a cloud of smoke is just rising: I press the ball of my
camera, the shutter clicks—the apotheosis is achieved! Like a
priestess, representative of her inventive sex, the graceful woman
stands: at her feet the hearth-fire she has given us beside her the
invention she has devised for us, in the background the home she has
built for us.
At Newala, also, I have had the manufacture of pottery carried on
in my presence. Technically the process is better than that already
described, for here we find the beginnings of the potter’s wheel,
which does not seem to exist in the plains; at least I have seen
nothing of the sort. The artist, a frightfully stupid Makua woman, did
not make a depression in the ground to receive the pot she was about
to shape, but used instead a large potsherd. Otherwise, she went to
work in much the same way as Salim’s mother, except that she saved
herself the trouble of walking round and round her work by squatting
at her ease and letting the pot and potsherd rotate round her; this is
surely the first step towards a machine. But it does not follow that
the pot was improved by the process. It is true that it was beautifully
rounded and presented a very creditable appearance when finished,
but the numerous large and small vessels which I have seen, and, in
part, collected, in the “less advanced” districts, are no less so. We
moderns imagine that instruments of precision are necessary to
produce excellent results. Go to the prehistoric collections of our
museums and look at the pots, urns and bowls of our ancestors in the
dim ages of the past, and you will at once perceive your error.
MAKING LONGITUDINAL CUT IN
BARK
DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG
REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

BEATING THE BARK
WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

SOFT
MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

To-day, nearly the whole population of German East Africa is
clothed in imported calico. This was not always the case; even now in
some parts of the north dressed skins are still the prevailing wear,
and in the north-western districts—east and north of Lake
Tanganyika—lies a zone where bark-cloth has not yet been
superseded. Probably not many generations have passed since such
bark fabrics and kilts of skins were the only clothing even in the
south. Even to-day, large quantities of this bright-red or drab
material are still to be found; but if we wish to see it, we must look in
the granaries and on the drying stages inside the native huts, where
it serves less ambitious uses as wrappings for those seeds and fruits
which require to be packed with special care. The salt produced at
Masasi, too, is packed for transport to a distance in large sheets of
bark-cloth. Wherever I found it in any degree possible, I studied the
process of making this cloth. The native requisitioned for the
purpose arrived, carrying a log between two and three yards long and
as thick as his thigh, and nothing else except a curiously-shaped
mallet and the usual long, sharp and pointed knife which all men and
boys wear in a belt at their backs without a sheath—horribile dictu!
[51]
Silently he squats down before me, and with two rapid cuts has
drawn a couple of circles round the log some two yards apart, and
slits the bark lengthwise between them with the point of his knife.
With evident care, he then scrapes off the outer rind all round the
log, so that in a quarter of an hour the inner red layer of the bark
shows up brightly-coloured between the two untouched ends. With
some trouble and much caution, he now loosens the bark at one end,
and opens the cylinder. He then stands up, takes hold of the free
edge with both hands, and turning it inside out, slowly but steadily
pulls it off in one piece. Now comes the troublesome work of
scraping all superfluous particles of outer bark from the outside of
the long, narrow piece of material, while the inner side is carefully
scrutinised for defective spots. At last it is ready for beating. Having
signalled to a friend, who immediately places a bowl of water beside
him, the artificer damps his sheet of bark all over, seizes his mallet,
lays one end of the stuff on the smoothest spot of the log, and
hammers away slowly but continuously. “Very simple!” I think to
myself. “Why, I could do that, too!”—but I am forced to change my
opinions a little later on; for the beating is quite an art, if the fabric is
not to be beaten to pieces. To prevent the breaking of the fibres, the
stuff is several times folded across, so as to interpose several
thicknesses between the mallet and the block. At last the required
state is reached, and the fundi seizes the sheet, still folded, by both
ends, and wrings it out, or calls an assistant to take one end while he
holds the other. The cloth produced in this way is not nearly so fine
and uniform in texture as the famous Uganda bark-cloth, but it is
quite soft, and, above all, cheap.
Now, too, I examine the mallet. My craftsman has been using the
simpler but better form of this implement, a conical block of some
hard wood, its base—the striking surface—being scored across and
across with more or less deeply-cut grooves, and the handle stuck
into a hole in the middle. The other and earlier form of mallet is
shaped in the same way, but the head is fastened by an ingenious
network of bark strips into the split bamboo serving as a handle. The
observation so often made, that ancient customs persist longest in
connection with religious ceremonies and in the life of children, here
finds confirmation. As we shall soon see, bark-cloth is still worn
during the unyago,[52] having been prepared with special solemn
ceremonies; and many a mother, if she has no other garment handy,
will still put her little one into a kilt of bark-cloth, which, after all,
looks better, besides being more in keeping with its African
surroundings, than the ridiculous bit of print from Ulaya.
MAKUA WOMEN

The Moral of The Story An Introduction To Ethics 8th Edition

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

The Moral of The Story An Introduction To Ethics 8th Edition

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Moral of The Story An Introduction To Ethics 8th Edition

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Moral of the Story: An Introduction

to Ethics 8th Edition

primary reading: Plato, Apology 413 primary reading: Søren Kierkegaard,

narrative: A Man for All Seasons 421 Either/Or 514

Aristotle’s Virtue Theory: narrative: No Exit 523

Everything in Moderation 432 narrative: Good Will Hunting 524

narrative: The Searchers 528

Virtue Ethics and Authenticity: Necessary for Morality? 577

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and List 590

Chapter 12 The Death Penalty 694

The Question of Abortion narrative: Business Ethics: The Insider 728

and Personhood 648 narrative: The Death Penalty: The Jigsaw

Major Changes to the Eighth Edition

Using the Narratives

them interesting as illustrations and effective in a classroom context where students

Connect empowers students by continually adapting

73% of instructors who use Using Connect improves retention

More students earn A’s and

Over 8 billion questions have been

As always, I first want to thank my students in the classes Introduction to

My colleagues at the Social Sciences and Behavioral and Multicultural Studies

Thinking About Values

Values, Morals, and Ethics

Box 1.1 THE FOUR CLASSIC BRANCHES OF PHILOSOPHY

Good and Evil

© Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a Jewish-German philoso-

up by an ideology, but as German philosopher Bettina Stangneth mentions in her

Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY

With no small pride first one householder and then a second

Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB

CUTTING THE EDGE

LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL

NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG

REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

You might also like