ETHIOPIA 



2991 



ETHIOPIA 



but no less must ethics make al- 

 lowance for those variations in the 

 ultimate standard of life for which 

 men are prepared to struggle. The 

 attempt to explain history by 

 assuming that men's aims are al 

 ways the same will not fit the facts 



This distinction between tech- 

 nical activity and conduct was 

 first elaborated in Greek moral 

 philosophy. The ethics of Plato 

 deal with the good of the in- 

 dividual, the good of society, and 

 the relations existing between 

 them. Thus, in The Republic, he 

 sought chiefly to determine the 

 nature of justice as such, and the 

 means of attaining justice in the 

 relations of men, i.e. in society. 

 He showed that life could be re- 

 garded as divided between a num- 

 ber of skilled processes or arts. 

 Plato and Ethics 



Conduct, however, was not one 

 of these, but was concerned rather 

 with the relations between the 

 ends of all these human processes 

 and the relation of these ends to 

 life itself. All the arts and activi- 

 ties of life he regarded as sub- 

 ordinate to the one purpose of life 

 as a whole, which he called the 

 good. This idea of the good is 

 at once the eternal object of all 

 human speculation, and a prac- 

 tical ideal capable of human at- 

 tainment, such as justice or tem- 

 perance. Ethics, then, was an in- 

 quiry into the good which all men 

 sought, but the nature of which 

 none properly understood. Greek 

 thought sometimes regarded the 

 good as attainable by the har- 

 monious adjustment of human 

 desires to one another, making 

 pleasure, or the satisfaction of the 

 greatest possible number of desires, 

 the summum bonum, or highest 

 good. But Plato showed that such 

 a harmony was impossible without 

 the recognition that certain activi- 

 ties or wants of the soul were 

 higher than others. Thus, though 

 Plato still regarded ethics as a 

 matter of knowledge, he made 

 clear that knowledge of the good 

 was different from skill and in- 

 volved certain emotional elements, 

 was not in fact purely a matter of 

 reason. 



Aristotle elaborated the distinc- 

 tion between knowledge and moral 

 insight, dwelling especially on the 

 nature of the deliberate choice or 

 will of man in his search after the 

 good life. Here he insisted that 

 both emotional and intellectual 

 elements must be recognized, and 

 pointed out that in an art the end 

 existed outside the means, calling 

 therefore for knowledge, while in 

 conduct the end lay within the act 

 itself, a recognition of moral 

 insight. 



Greek moral philosophy, how- 

 ever, preoccupied with the notion 

 of the supreme good, remained 

 intellectualistic, as may be seen in 

 its difficulty in explaining that 

 outstanding fact in human con- 

 duct, moral conflict and the weak- 

 ness of the will. Characteristic 

 also was the Greek identification 

 of ethics with politics. The rela- 

 tions of men with each other were 

 conceived as analogous to those of 

 the different desires within the in- 

 dividual, a manifold to be recon- 

 ciled within the harmony or unity 

 of the good life, that is, according 

 to Aristotle, the complete exercise 

 of man's rational functions which 

 differentiate him from the rest of 

 creation. Other important schools 

 of Greek ethical thought were those 

 of the Cyrenaics and Epicureans, 

 who interpreted morality in hedon- 

 istic terms, and those of the Cynics 

 and Stoics, who held rational 

 virtue to be an end in itself. 



In modern times the greatest 

 influence has been the growth 

 of the natural sciences with their 

 view of nature as one deterministic 

 system. This assumption made a 

 sharp contrast with the Christian, 

 and especially the Protestant, in- 

 sistence on the absolute worth of 

 the individual, and so has focussed 

 ethical inquiry on the problem of 

 the freedom of the will. 

 Immunucl Kant 



The modern point of view is 

 represented better by Immanuel 

 Kant than by anyone else. He re- 

 garded the outstanding fact of 

 conduct as the contrast between 

 what w and what ought to be, and 

 emphasised the impossibility of 

 deriving the latter from the 

 former. However much we may 

 learn of the influence of heredity 

 and environment upon human 

 action, the statement that an action 

 is wrong implies that it ought not 

 to have been done, and therefore 

 need not have been done. Here 

 is the contrast with the deter- 

 ministic conceptions of modern 

 science. The possibility of alter- 

 natives of action is as fundamental 

 for human conduct as determinism 

 for the natural sciences. 



How the two are to be reconciled 

 is a matter for metaphysics. 

 Ethics is content to show that con- 

 duct implies a definite principle of 

 action, not inconsistent with man's 

 heredity or environment, but dif- 

 ferent and underivable from such 

 influences. The judgement of value, 

 then, so closely bound up with 

 conduct, is seen to tell us some- 

 thing about the nature of man. 



How its underivable and immedi- 

 ate character is consistent with the 

 change and development of ethical 

 judgements in history ; how ethical 



progress takes place in the deve- 

 loped moral insight of individuals ; 

 how ethical progress finds expres- 

 sion in a system of social rights and 

 obligations ; how moral judge- 

 ments imply something more than 

 the mere results of human reason- 

 ing, and yet may have an objec- 

 tivity different from, but as real as, 

 that of scientific judgements 

 these are the questions with which 

 ethics is concerned. 



Bibliography. Prolegomena to 

 Ethics, T. H. Green, ed. A. C. Brad- 

 ley, 1883 ; The Theory of Good and 

 Evil, H. Rashdall, 1907 ; A Study of 

 Ethical Principles, James Seth, 10th 

 ed. 1908; The Classical Moralists, 

 B. Rand, 1909 ; Ethics, John Dewey 

 and J. H. Tufts, 1909; Manual of 

 Ethics, J. S. Mackenzie, 5th ed. 1915 ; 

 The Method of Ethics, H. Sidgwick, 

 6th ed. 1901. 



Ethiopia OB AETHIOPIA (Gr. 

 Aithiopia). In ancient geography, 

 name given by the Greeks to the 

 whole of Africa from the Red Sea 

 to the Atlantic, in a narrower sense 

 to the territory comprised hi the 

 modern Nubia, Sennar, Kordofan, 

 and part of Abyssinia. The name, 

 derived according to Greek popular 

 etymology from aithein, to burn, 

 and dps, face, was originally ap- 

 plied to all countries inhabited by 

 persons of dark- brown or black 

 colour, the result of the heat of the 

 sun. In the Homeric poems the 

 Ethiopians are described as dwell- 

 ing on the uttermost confines of 

 the earth, a pious and blameless 

 people, often visited by the gods. 

 According to Herodotus, they were 

 divided into the straight-haired 

 Ethiopians of the E. and the curly- 

 haired Ethiopians of the W. 



From the earliest times the 

 history of the country was intim- 

 ately connected with that of Egypt, 

 which was more than once under 

 the rule of Ethiopian kings. The 

 first Ethiopian kingdom was that 

 of Napata (mod. Merawi), founded 

 about the llth century B.C. After 

 the invasion of the country by 

 Cambyses in 624 B.C. the capital 

 was removed to Meroo (Assur, near 

 Shendi) hi the S., and a new king- 

 dom arose which lasted until about 

 the beginning of the Christian era, 

 chiefly ruled by princesses called 

 Candace, probably not a name but 

 a title like Abgar and Pharaoh. 

 The Romans made expeditions 

 into the country, in one of which 

 (24 B.C.) the Ethiopians suffered a 

 severe defeat ; but the conquered 

 territory was abandoned by order 

 of Augustus. The name Ethiopia 

 is also given to a Christian king- 

 dom established in the Abyssinian 

 highlands, with capital Axumis 

 (mod. Axum). This was the origin 

 of the empire of Abyssinia, the 

 official title of which is still Ethiopia. 



