IV.

History

For as long as people have been living together in groups, the moral regulation of behavior has been necessary to the group's well-being. Although the morals were formalized and made into arbitrary standards of conduct, they developed, sometimes irrationally, after religious taboos were violated, or out of chance behavior that became habit and then custom, or from laws imposed by chiefs to prevent disharmony in their tribes. Even the great ancient Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations developed no systematized ethics; maxims and precepts set down by secular leaders, such as Ptahhotep, mingled with a strict religion that affected the behavior of every Egyptian. In ancient China the maxims of Confucius were accepted as a moral code. The Greek philosophers, beginning about the 6th century bc, theorized intensively about moral behavior, which led to the further development of philosophical ethics.