Professional Ethics and Civic Morals by Durkheim Emile;

Author:Durkheim, Emile;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

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Duties in General, Independent of any Social Grouping—Homicide

We now come to a new sphere of morality. In the earlier lectures we studied the duties that men have towards one another because they belong to a certain definite social group, or because they are part of the same family or guild or State. But there are other duties independent of any particular grouping. I have to respect the life, the property, the honour of my fellow-creatures, even when they are not of my own family or my own country. This is the most general sphere in the whole of ethics, for it is independent of any local or ethnic conditions. It is also the noblest in concept. The duties we are going to review are considered by all civilized peoples as the primary and most compelling of all. The supremely immoral acts are murder and theft, and the immorality of these acts is in no way diminished if they are committed against those of another country. The field of domestic morals, professional ethics and civic morals is certainly not so grave a matter. Whoever fails in one of these duties seems to us as a rule less of an offender than the man who commits one of the other offences. This idea is so general and so deeply engraved in men’s minds that crime, to the ordinary consciousness, consists in essence or almost solely in killing, wounding or stealing. When we form an image of a criminal, it always takes the shape of a man who makes an assault on the property or the person of another. All the work of the Italian school of criminology rests precisely on the postulate, seen as an axiom, that this is the whole of crime. Establishing the type of an offender consists, for instance, in establishing the type of the homicide or thief, with their respective variants.

In this connexion, morals of the present day are in complete contrast with those of ancient times. A real transposition or reversal in the hierarchic order of duties has come about, especially since the coming of Christianity. In the altogether primitive societies and even under the regime of the City State, the duties we are going to consider, instead of being at the highest point of all morals, were only on the threshold of ethics. Instead of being set above all others, these duties, or some of them, had a kind of optional character. The proof of the slight moral dignity attached to them is seen in the lack of any severe penalties for their infringement. Very often, in fact, no penalty followed. In Greece, even the murderer was punished only on the demand of the family, who might be satisfied with a monetary indemnity. In Rome and in Judea, any coming to terms or compromise on homicide was prohibited, since it was considered a public felony, but it was not the same in the case of wounding or theft. It was for the injured individuals to pursue

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