ABSTRACT
Neither 'social' nor 'individual' has any fixed meaning. All morality is both individual and social:—individual in its immediate inception and execution, in the desires, choices, dispositions from which the conduct proceeds; social in its occasions, material, and consequences. We have then two contrasting property-patterns, one of socially mandated distribution, the other of individual ownership plus hospitality. They both work fairly well in the underlying social task of ensuring survival. The sense in which the one pattern is social, the other individual, has nothing to do with the contrast of group-mandated and individual reflective morality, for both are group mandated and whatever we could say about the social pattern in consciousness or lack of consciousness we could also say about the individualistic pattern. The new anthropology, from 1911 on, dislodged the linear view of moral development as culminating in individualism, and made possible the reconsideration of the individual-social relation.
