DISCUSSION 
including some very conservative groups of business men who a 
few years ago would have been hostile to the views I have 
expressed about world government under law, disarmament 
and arms control and the curtailment of national sovereignties, 
including our own. There is much more receptivity for such 
views today. 
Price: The point surely, is not that individuals in charge of 
the group have ethics opposed to those of normal individuals, 
but that the group as a whole has some sort of homoeostasis that 
is opposite in sign to that of the individual. Perhaps it is worth 
pointing out that scientists are very peculiar in their organiza- 
tion. They are the one group in which the ethics of the whole 
appear to be the same as those of the individual. I gather that 
quite a lot of discussion has been directed towards this type of 
scientific understanding, which might give one a group ethic 
similar to that of the individual, a point that is not shared by the 
unscientific political control of the group. 
Chisholm: I want to return for a moment to Szent-Gy6rgyi’s 
list. We have a system of ethics for individuals to which, 
generally speaking, we all subscribe, within our own culture 
at least; but we don’t expect our governments, that is to say 
our group, to subscribe to the same set of ethics at all. The 
group inherits its own definition of its own ethics in relation to 
its national purpose, which has been inherited all the way back 
from the old man who made the law by his own whim or will. 
The nation inherits that same freedom from external control, 
so that we still do not expect our governments to be civilized, 
that is to say, we have not set up a law to which our govern- 
ments are expected to conform. I think the mark of civilization 
is essentially a law that is mutually agreed and demands con- 
formity. We have left our nations out of it because this was the 
limit of our feeling of integration, the limit of our area of 
responsibility up till now. But the next step in social evolution 
and indeed moral evolution, it seems to me, is to require 
governments also to become civilized. This is what I think 
Szent-Gy6rgyi is saying; we are civilized up to our national 
boundaries but beyond that we are not. 
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