The Ethics of Coöperation

by James Hayden Tufts

These principles tend toward a type of liberty different from those just mentioned. As contrasted with the liberty of a dominant group, coöperation favors a liberty for all, a liberty of live and let live, a tolerance and welcome for variation in type, provided only this is willing to make its contribution to the common weal. Instead of imitation or passive acceptance of patterns on the part of the majority, it stimulates active construction. As contrasted with the liberty favored in competing groups, coöperation would emphasize positive control over natural forces, over health conditions, over poverty and fear. It would make each person share as fully as possible in the knowledge and strength due to combined effort, and thus liberate him from many of the limitations which have hitherto hampered him.

Similarly with justice. Coöperation's ethics of distribution is not rigidly set by the actual interest and rights of the past on the one hand, nor by hitherto available resources on the other. Neither natural rights nor present ability and present service form a complete measure. Since coöperation evokes new interests and new capacities, it is hospitable to new claims and new rights; since it makes new sources of supply available, it has in view the possibility at least of doing better for all than can an abstract insistence upon old claims. It may often avoid the deadlock of a rigid system. It is better to grow two blades of grass than to dispute who shall have the larger fraction of the one which has previously been the yield. It is better, not merely because there is more grass, but also because men's attitude becomes forward-looking and constructive, not pugnacious and rigid.

Power is likewise a value in a coöperating group, but it must be power not merely used for the good of all, but to some extent controlled by all and thus actually shared. Only as so controlled and so shared is power attended by the responsibility which makes it safe for its possessors. Only on this basis does power over other men permit the free choices on their part which are essential to full moral life.

As regards the actual efficiency of a coöperating group, it may be granted that its powers are not so rapidly mobilized. In small, homogeneous groups, the loss of time is small; in large groups the formation of public opinion and the conversion of this into action is still largely a problem rather than an achievement. New techniques have to be developed, and it may be that for certain military tasks the military technique will always be more efficient. To the coöperative group, however, this test will not be the ultimate ethical test. It will rather consider the possibilities of substituting for war other activities in which coöperation is superior. And if the advocate of war insists that war as such is the most glorious and desirable type of life, coöperation may perhaps fail to convert him. But it may hope to create a new order whose excellence shall be justified of her children.

III

A glance at the past rôles of dominance, competition, and coöperation in the institutions of government, religion, and commerce and industry, will aid us to consider coöperation in relation to present international problems.

Primitive tribal life had elements of each of the three principles we have named. But with discovery by some genius of the power of organization for war the principle of dominance won, seemingly at a flash, a decisive position. No power of steam or lightning has been so spectacular and wide-reaching as the power which Egyptian, Assyrian, Macedonian, Roman, and their modern successors introduced and controlled. Political states owing their rise to military means naturally followed the military pattern. The sharp separation between ruler or ruling group and subject people, based on conquest, was perpetuated in class distinction. Gentry and simple, lord and villein, were indeed combined in exploitation of earth's resources, but coöperation was in the background, mastery in the fore. And when empires included peoples of various races and cultural advance the separation between higher and lower became intensified. Yet though submerged for long periods, the principle of coöperation has asserted itself, step by step and it seldom loses ground. Beginning usually in some group which at first combined to resist dominance, it has made its way through such stages as equality before the law, abolition of special privileges, extension of suffrage, influence of public sentiment, interchange of ideas, toward genuine participation by all in the dignity and responsibility of political power. It builds a Panama Canal, it maintains a great system of education, and has, we may easily believe, yet greater tasks in prospect. It may be premature to predict its complete displacement of dominance in our own day as a method of government, yet who in America doubts its ultimate prevalence?

Religion presents a fascinating mixture of coöperation with dominance on the one hand, and exclusiveness on the other. The central fact is the community, which seeks some common end in ritual, or in beneficent activity. But at an early period leaders became invested, or invested themselves, with a sanctity which led to dominance. Not the power of force, but that of mystery and the invisible raised the priest above the level of the many. And, on another side, competition between rival national religions, like that between states, excluded friendly contacts. Jew and Samaritan had no dealings; between the followers of Baal and Jehovah there was no peace but by extermination. Yet it was religion which confronted the Herrenmoral with the first reversal of values, and declared, "So shall it not be among you. But whosoever will be great among you let him be your minister." And it was religion which cut across national boundaries in its vision of what Professor Royce so happily calls the Great Community. Protest against dominance resulted, however, in divisions, and although coöperation in practical activities has done much to prepare the way for national understanding, the hostile forces of the world to-day lack the restraint which might have come from a united moral sentiment and moral will.

In the economic field the story of dominance, coöperation, and competition is more complex than in government and religion. It followed somewhat different courses in trade and in industry. The simplest way to supply needs with goods is to go and take them; the simplest way to obtain services is to seize them. Dominance in the first case gives piracy and plunder, when directed against those without; fines and taxes, when exercised upon those within; in the second case, it gives slavery or forced levies. But trade, as a voluntary exchange of presents, or as a bargaining for mutual advantage, had likewise its early beginnings. Carried on at first with timidity and distrust, because the parties belonged to different groups, it has developed a high degree of mutual confidence between merchant and customer, banker and client, insurer and insured. By its system of contracts and fiduciary relations, which bind men of the most varying localities, races, occupations, social classes, and national allegiance, it has woven a new net of human relations far more intricate and wide-reaching than the natural ties of blood kinship. It rests upon mutual responsibility and good faith; it is a constant force for their extension.

The industrial side of the process has had similar influence toward union. Free craftsmen in the towns found mutual support in guilds, when as yet the farm laborer or villein had to get on as best he could unaided. The factory system itself has been largely organized from above down. It has very largely assumed that the higher command needs no advice or ideas from below. Hours of labor, shop conditions, wages, have largely been fixed by "orders," just as governments once ruled by decrees. But as dominance in government has led men to unite against the new power and then has yielded to the more complete coöperation of participation, so in industry the factory system has given rise to the labor movement. As for the prospects of fuller coöperation, this may be said already to have displaced the older autocratic system within the managing group, and the war is giving an increased impetus to extension of the process.