Making my way through Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, I was interested to discover that he contemplated starting an ethical society in the 1730s. From an early age he was given to reflection on personal behavior and social relationships, and, as revealed in his Poor Richard’s Almanac, in the virtues that promoted self-improvement and self-advancement.
Dissatisfied with the religion he met with in churches, Franklin conceived the idea of setting out on a personally conducted project of moral perfection. To do this he created a short list of the virtues and set up a weekly grid of those virtues (in the left hand column) and the days of the week (across the top). By self-reflection at night, he noted whether he had failed in the performance of a particular virtue that day, and, if he had, he made a demerit mark in the square for that virtue and that day.
He took on the project gradually, feeling that he had to get some practice on a few of the virtues before tackling them all.
Franklin’s list of virtues was as follows: (1) Temperance (2) Silence (3) Order (4) Resolution (5) Frugality (6) Industry (7) Sincerity (8) Justice (9) Moderation (10) Cleanliness (11) Tranquillity (12) Chastity (13) Humility. His glosses on each of these are in his inimitable style. For example: Temperance - Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation. Order - Let all your things have their places, let each part of your business have its time. Moderation - Avoid extremes, forbear resenting injuries, so much as you think they deserve. Tranquillity - Be not disturbed at trifles or at accidents common or unavoidable. Humility - Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
This exercise was for Franklin’s own private development, but socially he had for years met with a small group of friends in a helpful discussion group, and this group idea led to a little paper in 1731, in which he proposed forming a “united party for virtue.” The concept was urged on him by observation of public life, where party members seldom operated from what he called a “principle of benevolence,” and “fewer still in public affairs act with a view to the good of mankind.”
So Franklin conceived a moral reform society, which he thought should begin and spread at first among young and single men only (the beginners in public life at that period). Initiation into the “sect” (as he called it) would require two things: First, assent to a general creed, and, second, thirteen weeks of examination and practice in the aforementioned model.
For his creed, Franklin reduced everything down to what he thought was common to the essentials of every known religion and free of everything that might shock the professors of any religion. It is basically a deist creed: One god, who governs the world through providence, and to be worshipped, the soul immortal, and virtue to be rewarded and vice punished here or hereafter. In the middle of this creed, he enunciates what is obviously for him the key factor, namely, “that the most acceptable service to God is doing good for man.”
The scheme would be communicated prudently to likely candidates and members would promote one another’s interests. A couple of young men adopted it with enthusiasm, but the pressure of private and public life occasioned his postponing the venture, until, as he confessed, “I have no longer strength or activity left sufficient for such an enterprise.”
The magnitude of the task did not discourage him. “I have always thought,” he wrote, “that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes and accomplish great affairs among mankind if he first forms a good plan, and cutting off all amusements or other employments, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.” For such a task, he also thought of writing a treatise, The Art of Virtue, to show how to live by virtue rather than to just verbally espouse it.
Franklin’s virtues do not include what we would call the ethics of public affairs. For him, public life was individual life writ large, and the virtues prescribed for the individual would make a real difference if practiced at the public affairs level. Justice, for example, was described as “wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.” That principle underlies our modern Declaration of Human Rights, but Franklin did not spell it out in its national and international application. Franklin shares with the modern humanist the notion, as he put it, that “vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone considered.” In the conduct of his newspaper, he carefully excluded all libeling and personal abuse, and when a solicitor argued the “liberty of the press” against this policy, he was willing to print the person’s statement separately for him to distribute as he pleased, but Franklin would not put it in the paper. That’s how he saw personal virtue extending to public virtue.
Franklin’s own moral standing has been examined, for example, by William Cabell Bruce, in his two volume “Benjamin Franklin Revealed” (1917). Bruce recognizes that Franklin was often a flawed person, but argues that the Autobiography overplayed his own faults for the “homiletical” purpose of encouraging younger persons to learn from what he called his “errata.” Bruce also argues that the penny-pinching Franklin of Poor Richard’s almanac was not truly representative of the real life Franklin, who made himself self-sufficient financially by his early 40s and was generous to a fault thereafter. What worries Bruce most, and upset the high social circles of Philadelphia, was Franklin’s problems with the virtue of chastity. His son was evidently born out of wedlock, but to Bruce’s amazement, Franklin treated him with full regard and without any embarrassment in society. (Father and son were later to cause each other much grief by taking opposite sides in the Revolutionary War, the son being a Loyalist.)
The personal issues aside, here we have an early conception of an ethical society, aimed at promoting groups of person devoted to the cultivation of virtue, who would then take their virtue out into society for its improvement.
Our Ethical Culture Societies have, of course, eliminated subscription to any creed or even to any philosophy, although we generally subscribe to the creed that “every person has an inalienable worth.” But there are lessons we could learn from Franklin, such as:
(1) Write down your goals. (A commonplace of modern motivational advice).
(2) Examine yourself for compliance with your own ethical beliefs. (The self test.)
(3) Believe in the power of individuals to bring about change. (The faith factor.)
(4) Get small groups together to make such a life of virtue a social reality. (Cooperation.)
(5) Make initiation into the group a definite exercise in having newcomers address ethical values in their lives. (Setting standards.)
(6) Set out the program in a publication, with the principles enunciated and expanded on. (Promotion by advertising. Many groups have spread widely through their use of publications.)
(7) Be on the lookout for candidates to draw them into the program. (Recruitment.)
(8) Concentrate on achieving the one goal of promoting virtue. (The energy of focus.)
Ben Franklin was as much the founder of modern America as was Washington and Jefferson and the others of our Founding Fathers. Franklin was principled but tolerant, secular but reverential, a pioneer scientist, a practical entrepreneur, a political activist, with a firm commitment to self-improvement and social betterment. A person of virtue, a promoter of values. And the visionary of an ethical society as an important contributor to the moral health of a nation.
John Hoad, Ph.D.
Posted by John Hoad on May 19, 2003