Is man a moral being, or not?

Check out this 1939 WSJ editorial by Thomas Woodlock. There are consequences -- from individual families right up through international affairs -- of your understanding of the nature of man.

"Now leaving open for the moment the question whether man is a moral being or not, we are confronted by the obvious fact that the Western civilization is founded on the assumption that he is, and by the equally obvious fact that our American social structure is in a very special sense formally created on the same base. On this base have rested all the traditions, the mores, and the conventions of both. That base is now attacked in principle and in practice. If it goes the traditions and the mores go with it. What kind of social order can we expect to arise upon its ruins?

One thing we can safely predict of any social order that is erected upon a theory of human amoralism. It must, if it is to be "order," take the ant heap or the hive as its model. It cannot stop short of that; the dichotomy is absolute. There can be no "liberty" for anyone in an amoral social order, any more than there is liberty for an ant or a bee. It would have to be an order much as that of Egypt under the Pyramid-builders but almost infinitely tighter, because more complex, and it would not have at its command the one thing that cemented the Egyptian structure and gave it such unique stability--religion. There is nothing in the history of man to support the possibility of such an order; all history gives it the lie.

To those who believe that man is a moral creature, Mrs. McCormick's conclusion is convincing. We shall see the world's crisis beginning to resolve, when we see the law of right and wrong entering into the dispute--not before. To those who do not so believe, the crisis should be no crisis at all, but rather a step toward the order which their philosophy foresees and demands. That is, of course, supposing them to be logical--which, equally of course, they are not. For it is characteristic of all pragmatists, from William James down, that in building their Utopias they surreptitiously slip in through the back door the "absolutes" that they have ostentatiously kicked down the front stoop!"