The Moral Economy

by Ralph Barton Perry

V

Justice is the mutual respect through which rational purposes enter into a relation of fraternal equality. It is the courteous paying of honor where honor is due. In modern times justice has very properly been identified with tolerance, which is the acknowledgment that one is one's self equally liable to error with another, and that another is equally liable to truth with one's self. Justice attaches a certain finality to the judgment of every individual instrument of reason. Under the form of justice veracity realizes its highest meaning. The truth is not to be administered with paternal indulgence or caution; it is to be yielded as a right to every free and self-determining mind.

The practice and the spirit of justice pervade every highly developed social grouping, such as marriage, friendship, or fellow-citizenship in a democracy. For Aristotle a friendship is "one {106} soul dwelling in two bodies";[20] that is, the same high capacity uniting two individuals in the acknowledgment of its common principles, and in the contemplation of its common objects. Aristotle's other saying, that "man is a political animal," is inspired with the same meaning. To participate in the life of a state, in which one's fellow-citizens were one's equals, in which men with equal endowments carried on one united activity while acknowledging one another's independence, was to an Athenian the very fulness of life. To be banished from it was, even in the eyes of the law, equivalent to death.

In a chapter of his Physics and Politics, entitled "The Age of Discussion," Bagehot has admirably represented the importance for human progress of an open exchange of opinion on all matters of great consequence:

In this manner all the great movements of thought in ancient and modern times have been nearly connected in time with government by discussion. Athens, Rome, the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, the communes and states-general of feudal Europe, have all had a special and peculiar quickening influence, which they owed to their freedom, and which states without that freedom have never communicated. And it has been at the time of great epochs of thought—at the Peloponnesian War, at the fall of the Roman Republic, at the Reformation, at the French Revolution—that such liberty of speaking and thinking have produced their full effect.[21]

{107} Elsewhere Bagehot attributes to freedom of discussion, not only the deliverance from narrow and conventional habits, but that general elevation of tone which is characteristic of such an era as the Elizabethan age in England. In short, justice or toleration, since it encourages men to push on to the limit of their powers, promotes not only originality and diversity, but a love of perfection.

It will have been observed that justice and freedom are complementary, for he who is just liberates, and he who is free receives justice. Together they constitute the basis of all the higher relationships between men, of a progressive society, and of the whole constructive movement which we call civilization.

But it is possible to construe justice and freedom only negatively, as meaning that the individual is to be allowed to go his way in peace. Such a misconception is formalistic, in that it rests on a failure to recognize the providence or fruitfulness of justice. The virtue of justice lies not in its disintegration of society, but in its enabling the members of society to unite upon the highest plane of endeavor. Justice is a method wherewith men may profit collectively, and in their organized effort, from a sum of enlightenment to which every individual contributes his best. Anarchism rests in the negative protest against {108} conformity; forgetting that the only right to liberty is founded on the possession of a reasonableness that inclines the individual to the universal; and forgetting that the only virtue in liberty lies in the opportunity for union and devotion which it provides.

There is a more restricted form of anarchism in scepticism which attaches finality to differences of opinion, and overlooks the fact that these very differences must be regarded as converging approaches to the common truth. For men can differ only in the presence of identical objects which virtually annul their difference. To be free to think as one pleases cannot but mean to think as truly as possible, and so to approach as closely as possible to what others also tend to think.

But a larger importance attaches to that mild variety of anarchism which is commonly called laissez-faire, and which Matthew Arnold calls British Atheism or Quietism. The reader will recall Arnold's quotation from the Times:

It is of no use for us to attempt to force upon our neighbors our several likings and dislikings. We must take things as they are. Everybody has his own little vision of religious or civil perfection. Under the evident impossibility of satisfying everybody, we agree to take our stand on equal laws and on a system as open and liberal as is possible. The result is that everybody has more liberty of action and of speaking here than anywhere else in the Old World.

{109} And from Mr. Roebuck:

I look around me and ask what is the state of England? Is not every man able to say what he likes? I ask you whether the world over, or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last.[22]

This is an almost perfect representation of the sentimental interest in justice. In the course of such justice, "none of us should see salvation." It leaves wholly out of account the fact that when men are left free to talk or act or live as they will, they will either stagnate, or they will strive for the best and help it to prevail. If the latter, they will be brought back to the state as the means of making right reason effective, and of extending to all not simply the leave to be what they want to be, of following what Arnold calls their "natural taste of the bathos," but the opportunity of learning better.

Justice, like purpose and prudence, is a principle of organization, owing its virtue to the larger fulfilment of interest which it makes possible. Through this principle the individual is granted independence, in order that his freedom may remove every limit from his service. He is delivered from the bondage of violence and convention, but he is delivered into the charge of his own reason, which must give bonds not only that he will keep the peace, but that he will give {110} himself wholly to that true good which he may now discern.

In justice the human secular society is perfected. By a secular society I mean a society held to be self-sufficient as it is; a society in which only those interests are acknowledged which are actually present, or have actually been admitted to a place of power or prestige. But secularism or worldliness in this sense suffers from the general error of materialism, the error of mistaking the de facto good for the whole good. It is only another case of that blindness which is the penalty of all self-sufficiency. The ancient and the modern types of worldliness present an interesting difference which will serve to illustrate their common fault.

Greek literature abounds in the glorification of the life already achieved. Thus Solon asks no more of the gods than to be fortunate and honored: "Grant unto me wealth from the blessed gods, and to have alway fair fame in the eyes of all men. Grant that I may thus be dear to my friends, and bitter to my foes; revered in the sight of the one, awful in the sight of the other." [23]

To this Pindar adds the petition that, "being dead I may set upon my children a name that shall be of no ill report." [24] Even the ideal of the philosophers is only a refinement of this; {111} recognizing the superiority of such activities as engage the imagination or reason, but nevertheless finding happiness to be complete in terms of the fulfilment of the dominant desires within the existing political community. This conception was vaguely distrusted, it is true; but it represents the characteristic enlightenment of the most enlightened centre of Greek life. Its insufficiency was not clearly demonstrated until the advent of Christianity; when it was proved to lie in a lack of pity. Now pity is not, as is sometimes supposed, a kind of weakness; it is a kind of knowledge, wherewith men are reminded of obscure and neglected interests. It is easy to understand why the Christian revolution should have been regarded as destructive of culture. For it meant not the qualitative refinement of the good, but the quantitative distribution of it. But it none the less marks an epoch in moral enlightenment; since the bringing of all men up to one level of opportunity and welfare is as essential a part of the good as the cultivation of distinction.

The modern worldliness consists not in a lack of pity, but in a lack of imagination. Philistinism, as Matthew Arnold describes it, is a complacent satisfaction with the kind of good that is praised and sought for in any given time. Such complacency is found in its most extreme form among those reformers or even religious leaders who are {112} devoted to the saving of men; for these come to overrate their wares through the very act of pressing them upon others. Matthew Arnold never tires of illustrating this from the Liberal propaganda of his day:

And I say that the English reliance on our religious organisations and on their ideas of human perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth—mere belief in machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human race onwards to a more complete, a harmonious perfection.[25]

In other words, both humanism and humanitarianism may be lacking in humanity: humanism, on account of its insensibility to pain and hunger and poverty when these lie outside a narrow radius of bright intensive living; humanitarianism, on account of its failure to honor the highest type of attainment and to prefigure a perfection not yet realized.