You still see the same sentiment expressed today—perhaps because Pearson’s The Grammar of Science (1900) was so influential.
The idea above that “at one time or another ‘anything’ has been considered moral” is the same refrain you hear from atheists today—or from secular materialists.
It goes together with the notion “cultural relativity”; however, if you stop to think for a moment it is an obvious falsity.
Murder—there has never been a society on earth where murder has been considered moral; if there were, such a society could not exist—because people prepared to use murder to dominate it would predominate, so it would collapse.
Perhaps the punishments for murder have varied—from fines to execution to imprisonment—but the idea that murder in and of itself is immoral has never changed.
But that’s not what’s claimed—what is claimed is that “very few acts have not been immoral at one time or another”. And, indeed, it would be helpful to know how many acts it takes to constitute “very few”—a “scientific” quantitative breakdown would help, since it is vague, and perhaps it does include murder after all.
Per Pearson’s Darwinism, what is or isn’t moral is decided by what confers “survival value” on the community—so the idea is that people are completely flexible, will do anything to survive.
Of course, people might claim that the moral law was delivered to them on stone tablets from God or direct from Thoth.
But for the scientist the actual reason behind the stated reason is “survival”—and, in principle, people might do anything to survive.
A problem with Pearson’s reasoning here is that he is prepared to grant imagination an important role in science—in life itself.
And he concedes that imagination is opposed to science, is not scientific.
Now, where do all these moral laws come from?
If we exclude a transcendental realm, as Pearson does, then we must answer “the imagination”—these not being scientific enterprises, the only other realm Pearson allows.
Yes, the rules may be rational—but to have any force they need what Pearson would call “imaginative” elements attached to them (stone tablets, Thoth).
And, even if worked out in purely rational terms connected to survival, reason will always lead you to exclude certain acts—such as murder.
And hence there is an absolute moral structure to reality, even if it has play within it, and even if it is looked upon in rational survival terms (though, as Pearson would concede, most moral laws have not been worked out in a conscious rational way like that).
In fact, groups will often die, as Indians used to in the Caribbean, rather than be enslaved—so that a moral law does not always “aid survival” (Pearson could say that moral law was an evolutionary dead-end, but since he must concede that moral laws come from the imagination and that the imagination is “unreal”, not being scientific, he is forced to concede that an important facet of reality, morality, is detached from reality and so have dubious survival value).
The view Pearson puts forward here is normative in Western societies—it takes everything as relative, there is no absolute moral criteria we can appeal to.
And yet I find that this idea is often just stated and assumed “there have been all sorts of moral codes” while it elides the fact that while there are differences between moral codes, and small differences are often decisive, that there tends to be a general agreement (other things that are generally considered immoral apart from murder—false testimony, theft; and there is usually some marriage law as well, marriage being a particular property form).
So we see here what is now a common assumption, that moral codes should be viewed in terms of what is culturally relative and that there is no “absolute morality” other than what helps the group survive at this particular moment.
Yet the view is false—at the minimum, we could say that it claims too much, since it claims there is no regularity in morality at all; and yet there is.
What Pearson creates is a false dichotomy, where all moral laws are fickle human products—and, therefore, malleable, whereas the laws of science, albeit only existing in man’s mind, are absolute; and that constitutes an inversion, since what is material becomes absolute whereas what is spiritual becomes relative—and no discipline is more unstable and considers things more in relative terms than material science.
In fact, it is only from the start of the 19th century, in Pearson’s “time of our grandfathers”, that moral change began—before that morality was very stable; and, further, since the Christian seven virtues are really the four Platonic virtues plus three (faith, hope, and charity) then the Western moral law is more stable than just the static Christian era. It goes back millennia.
When did it start to change all the time? At the start of the 19th century—i.e. when the mode of life became primarily scientific. Hence Pearson’s “absolute science” and “relative morality” break down—it is the scientific view that destroys morality through relativisation.