The obligations and duties recognized in moral rules of this
most fundamental kind may vary from society to society or
within a single society at different times. Some of them may
reflect quite erroneous or even superstitious beliefs as to what
is required for the health or safety of the group; in one society
it may be a wife's duty to throw herself on her husband's
funeral pyre, and in another, suicide may be an offence against
common morality. There is a diversity among moral codes
which may spring either from the peculiar but real needs of
a given society, or from superstition or ignorance. Yet the social
morality of societies which have reached the stage where this can be distinguished from its law, always includes certain
obligations and duties, requiring the sacrifice of private inclination
or interest which is essential to the survival of any
society, so long as men and the world in which they live retain
some of their most familiar and obvious characteristics.
Among such rules obviously required for social life are those
forbidding, or at least restricting, the free use of violence,
rules requiring certain forms of honesty and truthfulness in
dealings with others, and rules forbidding the destruction of
tangible things or their seizure from others. If conformity
with these most elementary rules were not thought a matter
of course among any group of individuals, living in close
proximity to each other, we should be doubtful of the description
of the group as a society, and certain that it could not
endure for long.