Consumers and Wage-Earners: The Ethics of Buying Cheap

by J. Elliot Ross

But while we must look upon everyone as our neighbor, and love him as ourselves, this does not mean that we must love each one in the same degree. We must love him as ourselves, but not necessarily as much as ourselves. We must have a universal internal love by which we wish our neighbor well in his spiritual, corporal, and material goods and succor him in necessity.

Yet the amount of good we wish him, and the strength of the obligation to effect it, vary both with the special relationship existing between us and our mutual conditions. By mutual conditions, is meant his state of indigency and ours of prosperity. Almost innumerable grades of necessity may be distinguished, but for present purposes four will be sufficient: (1) extreme necessity, in which a person is in danger of death, or will be very shortly; (2) quasi-extreme necessity, in which one is in danger of falling into extreme necessity or a grave evil, either perpetual or lasting for a long time; (3) grave necessity, where one suffers a serious evil, but not for so long a period, or not so great; (4) common necessity, when one experiences some inconvenience, but not grievous inconvenience.

The obligation varies, too, with the conditions existing on our part. For if the duty of succoring our neighbor from our own goods is to bind, we must be in possession of superfluous goods. Otherwise our own need would have a prior claim. Material possessions may be superfluous to life, that is, just more than enough to keep body and soul together; superfluous to our state in life, or goods without which we should have to sink to a lower social plane; or superfluous to the decency of our state, those over and above what are required even for the proper support of our family in accordance with the usual custom of those in the same position, the education and starting of our children in life, the giving of charity, gifts, entertainment of guests, etc. This last class of goods may be called absolutely superfluous.

Now, it would not seem rigoristic (especially in these days when the right to any private property is seriously questioned) to say, that a person in extreme or quasi-extreme necessity is to be succored from goods that are necessary to the decent support of our station in life. One merely in grave or common necessity need be helped only out of absolutely superfluous goods. This would certainly be the minimum that any Christian would require.

But this obligation also varies directly according to the closeness of our relationship with the person in want. A connection of blood, whether direct as between father and son, or collateral as between uncle and nephew, evidently produces stronger reciprocal obligations of charity than simple kinship through Adam. So, too, there is a stronger bond between those who have assumed artificial relationships, such as a pastor to his people, or those of the same religious faith, or those in the same social class, or those who have acquired, whether voluntarily or not, associational or economic ties. A captain, for example, has greater obligations of charity towards a man in his own company than towards one in another company, towards one in his regiment than towards one in another regiment, and so on.

Certainly not least strong among these artificial relationships of society is that of employer and employee. There was a time in social organization, when the permanent subjection of Gurth to Cedric brought out more clearly the mutual obligations. The ties of the relationship seemed stronger because more lasting. Fortunately or unfortunately, the right of free contract has abolished this permanency. Men wander from one employer to another, from one city to another, from one country to another. But no transitoriness of employment, no mobility of labor, should obscure the fact that while the relationship of employer and employee lasts, there also exist special and stronger obligations of charity between the two.

Not as strong, probably, as between master and serf, yet nevertheless too strong to be entirely fulfilled by the simple payment of the current wage. As Carlyle says, "Never on this Earth was the relation of man to man long carried on by Cash-payment alone.... Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another: nor could it nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.... In brief, we shall have to dismiss the Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place: we shall have to know, on the threshold, that either there is some infinitely deeper Gospel, subsidiary, explanatory, and daily and hourly corrective to the Cash one: or else that the Cash one itself and all others are fast travelling."[32]

That infinitely deeper Gospel is the teaching of Christian charity. This tells us that there is another bond between employer and employee than a mere "cash-nexus." The needy employee has a claim upon his employer in preference to others, and the employer must discharge it before dispensing charity to those in no greater necessity who stand in no such relation to him. Charity begins at home, and the employee is closer home than one related simply by the tie of a common nature.

Of course, the relation between the direct employer and his workmen is more obvious than that between the Consuming Class (which we have called the indirect employer) and these same men. But the relation of the latter is none the less real and important for being obscure. Ordinarily it will probably be less close than that of the direct employer, but circumstances are conceivable in which the situation would be reversed.

And certainly it would seem that the benefit which the laboring class confers upon the Consuming Class is such that there is some special claim arising upon their charity. Not labor in itself but consumption is the object of work, and this terminus of all activity, the Consuming Class, would seem to be bound both in justice and charity to see that their own satisfaction is not attained at the cost of the comfort and happiness of those who minister to it.