He kept up a close connexion with his more powerful kinsmen; nor did they like him the less because he was a robber; for he never robbed them; and that robbery, merely as robbery, was a wicked and disgraceful act, had never entered into the mind of any Celtic chief.' Various answers have been given by the advocates of innate morality to these serious discrepancies.
(1) It is maintained that savage or uncultivated nations are not a fair criterion of mankind generally: that as men become more civilized, they approximate to unity of moral sentiment; and what civilized men agree in, is alone to be taken as the judgment of the race.
Now, this argument would have great weight, in any discussion as to what is good, useful, expedient, or what is in accordance with the cultivated reason or intelligence of mankind; because civilization consists in the exercise of men's intellectual faculties to improve their condition.

But in a controversy as to what is given us by nature,--what we possess independently of intelligent search and experience,--the appeal to civilization does not apply.

What civilized men agree upon among themselves, as opposed to savages, is likely to be the reverse of a natural instinct; in other words, something suggested by reason and experience.
In the next place, counting only civilized races, that is, including the chief European, American, and Asiatic peoples of the present day, and the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world, we still find disparities on what are deemed by us fundamental points of moral right and wrong.

Polygamy is regarded as right in Turkey, India, and China, and as wrong in England.

Marriages that we pronounce incestuous were legitimate in ancient times.