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William G. Sumner on Morals from Tradition, Custom, Habit

Folkways (Ginn & Co., 1906), 76.

We learn the morals as unconsciously as we learn to walk and hear and breathe, and [we] never know any reason why the [morals] are what they are. The justification of them is that when we wake to consciousness of life we find them facts which already hold us in the bonds of tradition, custom, and habit.