Nevertheless these non-moral taboos or restraints may have played a part in building up in us that faculty of preferring the larger good to the impulse of the moment which is the note of real civilization.
Hobbes had said " the natural state of man is non-moral, unregulated; moral rules are means to the end of peace, which is a means to the end of self-preservation."
Thus, the miser first sought money as a means to comfort, but ends by sacrificing comfort to money; and similarly though the first promptings to justice (or any other virtue) spring from the non-moral pleasures gained or pains avoided by it, through the link formed by repeated virtuous acts the performance of them ultimately comes to have that immediate satisfaction attached to it which we distinguished as moral.
The discovery of the so-called evolution of morality out of non-moral conditions is very frequently an unconscious subterfuge by which the evolutionist hides the fact that he is making a priori judgments upon the value of the moral concepts held to be evolved.
The finer mind of the nation, represented mainly by the prophets from Amos onward, had denounced unsparingly the superficial non-moral popular cult.
