The Ethics of Coöperation

by James Hayden Tufts

Exchange of goods and services is indeed a threefold coöperation: it meets wants which the parties cannot themselves satisfy or cannot well satisfy; it awakens new wants; it calls new inventions and new forces into play. It thus not only satisfies man's existing nature, but enlarges his capacity for enjoyment and his active powers. It makes not only for comfort, but for progress.

IV

If trade and industry, however, embody so fully the principle of coöperation, how does it come about that they have on the whole had a rather low reputation, not only among the class groups founded on militarism, but among philosophers and moralists? Why do we find the present calamities of war charged to economic causes? Perhaps the answer to these questions will point the path along which better coöperation may be expected.

There is, from the outset, one defect in the coöperation between buyer and seller, employer and laborer. The coöperation is largely unintended. Each is primarily thinking of his own advantage, rather than that of the other, or of the social whole; he is seeking it in terms of money, which as a material object must be in the pocket of one party or of the other, and is not, like friendship or beauty, sharable. Mutual benefit is the result of exchange—it need not be the motive. This benefit comes about as if it were arranged by an invisible hand, said Adam Smith. Indeed, it was long held that if one of the bargainers gained, the other must lose. And when under modern conditions labor is considered as a commodity to be bought and sold in the cheapest market by an impersonal corporate employer, there is a strong presumption against the coöperative attitude on either side.

The great problem here is, therefore: How can men be brought to seek consciously what now they unintentionally produce? How can the man whose ends are both self-centered and ignoble be changed into the man whose ends are wide and high? Something may doubtless be done by showing that a narrow selfishness is stupid. If we rule out monopoly the best way to gain great success is likely to lie through meeting needs of a great multitude; and to meet these effectively implies entering by imagination and sympathy into their situation. The business maxim of "service," the practices of refunding money if goods are unsatisfactory, of one price to all, of providing sanitary and even attractive factories and homes, and of paying a minimum wage far in excess of the market price, have often proved highly remunerative. Yet, I should not place exclusive, and perhaps not chief, reliance on these methods of appeal. They are analogous to the old maxim, honesty is the best policy; and we know too well that while this holds under certain conditions,—that is, among intelligent people, or in the long run,—it is often possible to acquire great gains by exploiting the weak, deceiving the ignorant, or perpetrating a fraud of such proportions that men forget its dishonesty in admiration at its audacity. In the end it is likely to prove that the level of economic life is to be raised not by proving that coöperation will better satisfy selfish and ignoble interests, but rather by creating new standards for measuring success, new interests in social and worthy ends, and by strengthening the appeal of duty where this conflicts with present interests. The one method stakes all on human nature as it is; the other challenges man's capacity to listen to new appeals and respond to better motives. It is, if you please, idealism; but before it is dismissed as worthless, consider what has been achieved in substituting social motives in the field of political action. There was a time when the aim in political life was undisguisedly selfish. The state, in distinction from the kinship group or the village community, was organized for power and profit. It was nearly a gigantic piratical enterprise, highly profitable to its managers. The shepherd, says Thrasymachus in Plato's dialogue, does not feed his sheep for their benefit, but for his own. Yet now, what president or minister, legislator or judge, would announce as his aim to acquire the greatest financial profit from his position? Even in autocratically governed countries, it is at least the assumption that the good of the state does not mean solely the prestige and wealth of the ruler.

A great social and political order has been built up, and we all hold that it must not be exploited for private gain. It has not been created or maintained by chance. Nor could it survive if every man sought primarily his own advantage and left the commonwealth to care for itself. Nor in a democracy would it be maintained, provided the governing class alone were disinterested, deprived of private property, and given education, as Plato suggested. The only safety is in the general and intelligent desire for the public interest and common welfare. At this moment almost unanimous acceptance of responsibility for what we believe to be the public good and the maintenance of American ideals—though it brings to each of us sacrifice and to many the full measure of devotion—bears witness to the ability of human nature to adopt as its compelling motives a high end which opposes private advantage.

Is the economic process too desperate a field for larger motives? To me it seems less desperate than the field of government in the days of autocratic kings. One great need is to substitute a different standard of success for the financial gains which have seemed the only test. Our schools of commerce are aiming to perform this service, by introducing professional standards. A physician is measured by his ability to cure the sick, an engineer by the soundness of his bridge and ship; why not measure a railroad president by his ability to supply coal in winter, to run trains on time, and decrease the cost of freight, rather than by his private accumulations? Why not measure a merchant or banker by similar tests?

Mankind has built up a great economic system. Pioneer, adventurer, inventor, scientist, laborer, organizer, all have contributed. It is as essential to human welfare as the political system, and like that system it comes to us as an inheritance. I can see no reason why it should be thought unworthy of a statesman or a judge to use the political structure for his own profit, but perfectly justifiable for a man to exploit the economic structure for private gain. This does not necessarily exclude profit as a method of paying for services, and of increasing capital needed for development, but it would seek to adjust profits to services, and treat capital, just as it regards political power, as a public trust in need of coöperative regulation and to be used for the general welfare.

But the war is teaching with dramatic swiftness what it might have needed decades of peace to bring home to us. We are thinking of the common welfare. High prices may still be a rough guide to show men's needs, but we are learning to raise wheat because others need it—not merely because the price is high. Prices may also be a rough guide to consumption, but we are learning that eating wheat or sugar is not merely a matter of what I can afford. It is a question of whether I take wheat or sugar away from some one else who needs it—the soldier in France, the child in Belgium, the family of my less fortunate neighbor. The great argument for not interfering with private exchange in all such matters has been that if prices should by some authority be kept low in time of scarcity, men would consume the supply too rapidly; whereas if prices rise in response to scarcity, men at once begin to economize and so prevent the total exhaustion of the supply. We now reflect that if prices of milk rise it does not mean uniform economy—it means cutting off to a large degree the children of the poor and leaving relatively untouched the consumption of the well-to-do. Merely raising the price of meat or wheat means taking these articles from the table of one class to leave them upon the table of another. War, requiring, as it does, the united strength and purpose of the whole people, has found this method antiquated. In Europe governments have said to their peoples: we must all think of the common weal; we must all share alike. In this country, the appeal of the food administrator, though largely without force of law, has been loyally answered by the great majority. It is doubtless rash to predict how much peace will retain of what war has taught, but who of us will again say so easily, "My work or leisure, my economy or my luxury, is my own affair, if I can afford it?" Who can fail to see that common welfare comes not without common intention?

The second great defect in our economic order, from the point of view of coöperation, has been the inequality of its distribution. This has been due largely to competition when parties were unequal, not merely in their ability, but in their opportunity. And the most serious, though not the most apparent, aspect of this inequality, has not been that some have more comfort or luxuries to enjoy; it is the fact that wealth means power. In so far as it can set prices on all that we eat, wear, and enjoy, it is controlling the intimate affairs of life more thoroughly than any government ever attempted. In so far as it controls natural resources, means of transportation, organization of credit, and the capital necessary for large-scale manufacturing and marketing, it can set prices. The great questions then are, as with political power: How can this great power be coöperatively used? Is it serving all or a few?