The Ethics of Coöperation

by James Hayden Tufts

Coöperation and dominance both mean organization. Dominance implies inequality, direction and obedience, superior and subordinate. Coöperation implies some sort of equality, some mutual relation. It does not exclude difference in ability or in function. It does not exclude leadership, for leadership is usually necessary to make coöperation effective. But in dominance the special excellence is kept isolated; ideas are transmitted from above downward. In coöperation there is interchange, currents flowing in both directions, contacts of mutual sympathy, rather than of pride-humility, condescension-servility. The purpose of the joint pursuit in organization characterized by dominance may be either the exclusive good of the master or the joint good of the whole organized group, but in any case it is a purpose formed and kept by those few who know. The group may share in its execution and its benefits, but not in its construction or in the estimating and forecasting of its values. The purpose in coöperation is joint. Whether originally suggested by some leader of thought or action, or whether a composite of many suggestions in the give and take of discussion or in experiences of common need, it is weighed and adopted as a common end. It is not the work or possession of leaders alone, but embodies in varying degrees the work and active interest of all.

Coöperation and competition at first glance may seem more radically opposed. For while dominance and coöperation both mean union of forces, competition appears to mean antagonism. They stand for combination; it for exclusion of one by another. Yet a deeper look shows that this is not true of competition in what we may call its social, as contrasted with its unsocial, aspect. The best illustration of what I venture to call social competition is sport. Here is rivalry, and here in any given contest one wins, the other loses, or few win and many lose. But the great thing in sport is not to win; the great thing is the game, the contest; and the contest is no contest unless the contestants are so nearly equal as to forbid any certainty in advance as to which will win. The best sport is found when no one contestant wins too often. There is in reality a common purpose—the zest of contest. Players combine and compete to carry out this purpose; and the rules are designed so to restrict the competition as to rule out certain kinds of action and preserve friendly relations. The contending rivals are in reality uniting to stimulate each other. Without the coöperation there would be no competition, and the competition is so conducted as to continue the relation. Competition in the world of thought is similarly social. In efforts to reach a solution of a scientific problem or to discuss a policy, the spur of rivalry or the matching of wits aids the common purpose of arriving at the truth. Similar competition exists in business. Many a firm owes its success to the competition of its rivals which has forced it to be efficient, progressive. As a manufacturing friend once remarked to me: "When the other man sells cheaper, you generally find he has found out something you don't know."

But we also apply the term "competition" to rivalry in which there is no common purpose; to contests in which there is no intention to continue or repeat the match, and in which no rules control. Weeds compete with flowers and crowd them out. The factory competes with the hand loom and banishes it. The trust competes with the small firm and puts it out of business. The result is monopoly. When plants or inventions are thus said to compete for a place, there is frequently no room for both competitors, and no social gain by keeping both in the field. Competition serves here sometimes as a method of selection, although no one would decide to grow weeds rather than flowers because weeds are more efficient. In the case of what are called natural monopolies, there is duplication of effort instead of coöperation. Competition is here wasteful. But when we have to do, not with a specific product, or with a fixed field such as that of street railways or city lighting, but with the open field of invention and service, we need to provide for continuous coöperation, and competition seems at least one useful agency. To retain this, we frame rules against "unfair competition." As the rules of sport are designed to place a premium upon certain kinds of strength and skill which make a good game, so the rules of fair competition are designed to secure efficiency for public service, and to exclude efficiency in choking or fouling. In unfair competition there is no common purpose of public service or of advancing skill or invention; hence, no coöperation. The coöperative purpose or result is thus the test of useful, as contrasted with wasteful or harmful, competition.

There is also an abstract conception of coöperation, which, in its one-sided emphasis upon equality, excludes any form of leadership, or direction, and in fear of inequality allows no place for competition. Selection of rulers by lot in a large and complex group is one illustration; jealous suspicion of ability, which becomes a cult of incompetence, is another. Refusals to accept inventions which require any modification of industry, or to recognize any inequalities of service, are others. But these do not affect the value of the principle as we can now define it in preliminary fashion: union tending to secure common ends, by a method which promotes equality, and with an outcome of increased power shared by all.

II

What are we to understand by the Ethics of Coöperation? Can we find some external standard of unquestioned value or absolute duty by which to measure the three processes of society which we have named, dominance, competition, coöperation? Masters of the past have offered many such, making appeal to the logic of reason or the response of sentiment, to the will for mastery or the claim of benevolence. To make a selection without giving reasons would seem arbitrary; to attempt a reasoned discussion would take us quite beyond the bounds appropriate to this lecture. But aside from the formulations of philosophers, humanity has been struggling—often rather haltingly and blindly—for certain goods and setting certain sign-posts which, if they do not point to a highway, at least mark certain paths as blind alleys. Such goods I take to be the great words, liberty, power, justice; such signs of blind paths I take to be rigidity, passive acceptance of what is.

But those great words, just because they are so great, are given various meanings by those who would claim them for their own. Nor is there complete agreement as to just what paths deserve to be posted as leading nowhere. Groups characterized by dominance, cut-throat competition, or coöperation, tend to work out each its own interpretations of liberty, power, justice; its own code for the conduct of its members. Without assuming to decide your choice, I can indicate briefly what the main elements in these values and codes are.

The group of masters and servants will develop what we have learned to call a morality of masters and a morality of slaves. This was essentially the code of the feudal system. We have survivals of such a group morality in our code of the gentleman, which in England still depreciates manual labor, although it has been refined and softened and enlarged to include respect for other than military and sportsman virtues. The code of masters exalts liberty—for the ruling class—and resents any restraint by inferiors or civilians, or by public opinion of any group but its own. It has a justice which takes for its premise a graded social order, and seeks to put and keep every man in his place. But its supreme value is power, likewise for the few, or for the state as consisting of society organized and directed by the ruling class. Such a group, according to Treitschke, will also need war, in order to test and exhibit its power to the utmost in fierce struggle with other powers. It will logically honor war as good.

A group practicing cut-throat competition will simply reverse the order: first, struggle to put rivals out of the field; then, monopoly with unlimited power to control the market or possess the soil. It appeals to nature's struggle for existence as its standard for human life. It too sets a high value upon liberty in the sense of freedom from control, but originating as it did in resistance to control by privilege and other aspects of dominance, it has never learned the defects of a liberty which takes no account of ignorance, poverty, and ill health. It knows the liberty of nature, the liberty of the strong and the swift, but not the liberty achieved by the common effort for all. It knows justice, but a justice which is likely to be defined as securing to each his natural liberty, and which therefore means non-interference with the struggle for existence except to prevent violence and fraud. It takes no account as to whether the struggle kills few or many, or distributes goods widely or sparingly, or whether indeed there is any room at the table which civilization spreads; though it does not begrudge charity if administered under that name.

A coöperating group has two working principles: first, common purpose and common good; second, that men can achieve by common effort what they cannot accomplish singly. The first, reinforced by the actual interchange of ideas and services, tends to favor equality. It implies mutual respect, confidence, and good-will. The second favors a constructive and progressive attitude, which will find standards neither in nature nor in humanity's past, since it conceives man able to change conditions to a considerable extent and thus to realize new goods.