ABSTRACT
Innumerable forms of intense misery are caused at the present day by the standards of righteousness or morality which have been adopted in the tradition of Western civilization. Some of the morality adopted from the Jews by Western civilization is plainly justifiable on rational grounds. Hygiene and expediency do not belong to the province of morals. There is no reason why they should not be commended on the score of hygiene or expediency; when they are enforced on quite other grounds, they become oppressive abuses. Traditional morality owes a great deal to savage superstition, but that merely proves that a great deal of traditional morality is superstitious, not diat savage superstition is moral. The view that morality is not a matter of rational provision for social welfare, but a categorical imperative founded on supernatural authority, is the ordinary view of the savage concerning tabu rules.
