Ethical Culture Roots

Anti-Democratic Tendencies in American Life

A 1904 article from The Ethical Record with Adler's views on true versus false democracy.
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Ethical Culture vs. Imperialism

Jim Zwick writes about the "influential role" in the anti-imperialist movement played by leaders of the Ethical Culture movement in the late 19th and early 20th century. Articles by Felix Adler, William M. Salter, Jane Addams and others present an ethical perspective on war and imperialism.
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Founding Address by Felix Adler

In 1876, the 25-year-old Felix Adler delivered this address in New York City to an audience gathered by a group of men who had organized around Adler's ideas for founding a new religious and philosophical movement.
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On the Occasion of the Fifty-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Ethical Movement

An Address by Dr. Felix Adler - May 10, 1931 - In this address, delivered when Dr. Adler was 80 years old and at the end of his career as the founding Leader of Ethical Culture, Adler looks back at the founding of the movement and the 55 years after. At the end, he reflects on possibilities for the movement's future.
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The Departed

From 1926: As this is the Jubilee year of the Society for Ethical Culture, a stately, grave, and noble address...
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The Ethical Manifold

Felix Adler, in this chapter from An Ethical Philosophy of Life, describes the "ideal of the whole" as well as the concept of the "ethical manifold."
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The Philippine War: Two Ethical Questions

Adler attempts to answer two questions on the ethics of war: "Is it treason to condemn a war waged by our country while the war is still in progress?" and "Are civilized nations justified in adopting uncivilized methods of warfare?"
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The Supreme Ethical Rule: Act So As To Elicit the Best In Others ...

This chapter from An Ethical Philosophy of Life is Felix Adler's attempt to describe what he means by "elicit the best in others." In doing so, he defends this as the "supreme ethical principle" -- that is, the fundamental principle of ethics. He describes an ethical conception of virtue in the context of realism: that people don't always act out of their most ethical, most virtuous selves.
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The White Man's Burden Is Sentimentalism

I am in favor of implanting civilization in the East, and I believe in the necessity of emancipating the Filipinos from the bonds of ignorance. But civilization that is forced down from above on a people seldom lasts. It is not wise, it is not right, that Western ideas, unadapted, should be carried to the East. Probably no man has done more to arouse public sentiment in this respect than Rudyard Kipling. With his grip on words whose roots smell of the earth from which he has dug them, he believes the whole white race to be the chosen instrument of God to carry Western ideas to enlighten the East.
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