§ 14. It is evident that the issue finally at stake in any economic problem of constructive comparison, is an ethical issue. Two immediate alternatives are before one—to expend a sum of money in some new and interesting way, or to keep it devoted to the uses of one's established plan. Upon the choice, one recognizes, hinge consequences of larger and more comprehensive importance than the mere present enjoyment or non-enjoyment of the new commodity.[55] And these "more important" consequences are important because there appears to lie in them the possibility of a type of personal character divergent from the present type and from any present point of view incommensurable with it.[56] The ethical urgency of such a problem will impress one in the measure in which one can see that such an issue really does depend upon his present action and irretrievably depends. And we are able now to see what that economic quality is that attaches to ethical problems at a certain stage of their development and calls for a supplementary type of treatment.
Let us first consider certain types of juncture in conduct that will be recognized at once as ethical and in which any economic aspect is relatively inconspicuous. Temperance or intemperance, truth or falsehood, idleness or industry, honesty or fraud, social justice or class-interest—these will serve. What makes such problems as these ethical is their demand for creative intelligence. In each, alternative types of character or manners of life stand initially opposed. If the concrete issue is really problematical, if there is no rule that one can follow in the case with full assurance, constructive comparison, whether covertly or openly, must come into play. How long, then, will a problem of temperance or intemperance, idleness or industry, preserve its obviously ethical character without admixture? Just so long, apparently, as the modes of conduct that come into view as possible solutions are considered and valued with regard to their directly physiological and psychological consequences alone. Any given sort of conduct, that is to say, makes inevitably for the formation of certain habits of mind or muscle, weakening, or precluding the formation of, certain others. Attention is engrossed that is thereby not available elsewhere, time and strength are expended, discriminations are dulled and sharpened, sympathies and sensitivities are narrowed and broadened, every trait and bent of character is directly or indirectly affected in some way by every resolve concluded and every action embarked upon. If one moves a certain way along a certain line he can never return to the starting-point and set out unchanged along any other. If one does one thing one cannot do another. And when the sufficient reasons for this mutual exclusion lie in the structure and organization of the human mind and body our deliberation as between the two alternatives, our constructive comparison of them remains upon the ethical plane.
If one does one thing one cannot do another. If we substitute the well-worn saying "one cannot eat his cake and have it" we indicate the economic plane of constructive comparison with all needful clearness.
This is in fact the situation that has been already under discussion at such length above and the economic quality of which we are just now in quest arises from neither more nor less than the fact of our dependence in the working out of our personal problems upon limited external resources. The eventual solution sought under these circumstances remains ethical as before. But to reach it, it is necessary to bring into consideration not only such other interests and ends as the psycho-physical structure of human nature and the laws of character-development show to be involved, but a still wider range of interests less intimately or "internally" related to the focal interest of the occasion but imperatively requiring to be heard. If my acquisition of a phonograph turns upon the direct psychological bearing of the new interest upon my other interests, its probable effects whether good or bad upon my musical tastes and the diplomatic complications with my neighbors in which the possession of the instrument may involve me, the problem of its purchase remains clearly in the ethical phase. But when I count the cost in terms of sacrifices which the purchase price makes necessary, from literature down to food and fuel, and must draw this whole range of fact also into the adjustment if I can, the economic phase is reached. In principle two entire and very concrete schemes of life now stand opposed. Just what concrete sacrifices I shall make I do not know—this, in fact, is one way of stating my problem. Nor, conversely, do I know just what I shall be able to make the phonograph worth to me. It is my task to come to a conclusion in the case that shall be explicit and clear enough to enable me to judge in the event whether my expectation has been realized and I have acted wisely or unwisely. Thus a problem is economic when the fact of the limitation of my external resources must be eventually and frankly faced. The characteristic quality of a problem grown economic is a certain vexatiousness and seeming irrationality in the ill-assorted array of nevertheless indisputable interests, prosaic and ideal, that have to be reduced to order.
It is perhaps this characteristic emotional quality of economic problems that has insensibly inclined economists to favor a simpler and more clear-cut analysis. As for ethical problems—they have been left to "conscience" or to the jurisdiction of a "greatest happiness" principle in which the ordinary individual or legislator has somehow come to take an interest. That they arise and become urgent in us of course does human nature unimpeachable credit and economics must by all means wait respectfully upon their settlement. So much is conceded. But economics is economics, when all is said and done. What we mean by the economic interest is an interest in the direct and several satisfactions that a man can get from the several things he shrewdly finds it worth his while to pay for. And shrewdness means nicety of calculation, accuracy of measurement in the determination of tangible loss and gain. Here, then, is no field for ethics but a field of fact. Thus ethics on her side must also wait until the case is fully ready for her praise or blame. Such is the modus vivendi. But its simplicity is oversimple and unreal. It pictures the "economic man" as bound in the chains of a perfunctory deference that he would throw off if he could. For the theory of constructive comparison or creative intelligence, on the other hand, instead of a seeker and recipient of "psychic income" and a calculator of gain and loss, he is a personal agent maintaining continuity of action in a life of discontinuously changing levels of interest and experience. His measure of attainment lies not in an accelerating rate of "psychic income," but in an increasing sense of personal effectiveness and an increasing readiness and confidence before new junctures.
The possession and use of commodities are, then, not in themselves and directly economic facts at all. As material things commodities serve certain purposes and effect certain results. They are means to ends and their serving so is a matter of technology. But do I seriously want their services? This is a matter of my ethical point of view. Do I want them at the price demanded or at what price and how many? This is the economic question and it obviously is a question wholly ethical in import—more broadly and inclusively ethical, in fact, than the ethical question in its earlier and more humanly inviting form. And what we have now to see is the fact that no consideration that has a bearing upon the problem in its ethical phase can lose its importance and relevance in the subsequent phase.
There can be no restriction of the economic interest, for example, to egoism. If on general principles I would really rather use goods produced in safe and cleanly factories or produced by "union labor," there is no possible reason why this should not incline me to pay the higher prices that such goods may cost and make the needful readjustment in my budget. Is there reason why my valuation of these goods should not thus be the decisive act that takes me out of one relation to industrial workers and sets me in another—can anything else, indeed, quite so distinctly do this? For economic valuation is only the fixation of a purchase price, or an exchange relation in terms of price and quantity, upon which two schemes of life, two differing perspectives of social contact and relationship converge—the scheme of life from which I am departing and the one upon which I have resolved to make my hazard. It is this election, this transition, that the purchase price expresses—drawing all the strands of interest and action into a knot so that a single grasp may seize them. The only essential egoism in the case lies in the "subjectivism" of the fact that inevitably the emergency and the act are mine and not another's. This is the "egocentric predicament" in its ethical aspect. And the egocentric predicament proves Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld as little as it proves Berkeley or Karl Pearson. No social interest, no objective interest of any sort, is shown ungenuine by my remembering in season that if I cannot fill my coal-bin I shall freeze.[57]
§ 15. This logical and psychological continuity of the ethical and economic problems suggests certain general considerations of some practical interest. In the first place as to "egoism." I am, let us say, an employer. If I am interested in procuring just "labor," in the sense of foot-pounds of energy, then undoubtedly labor performed under safe and healthful conditions is worth no more to me than other labor (provided it does not prove more efficient). But is this attitude of interest in just foot-pounds of energy the attitude par excellence or solely entitled to be called economic? And just this may be asserted for the reason that an exclusive interest in just labor is the only interest in the case that men of business, or at least many of them, can entertain without going speedily to the wall. If, then, I do in fact pay more than I must in wages or if I expend more than a bare minimum for conveniences and safety-guards this is not because of the valuation I put upon labor, but only because I take pleasure in the contentment and well-being of others. And this is not "business" but "uplift"—or else a subtle form of emotional self-indulgence. Suppose, however, that by legislation similar working conditions have been made mandatory for the entire industry and suppose that the community approves the law, even to the extent of cheerfully paying so much of the additional cost thereby imposed as may be shifted upon them.
Shall we say that this is an ethical intrusion into the sphere of economics or shall we say that the former economic demand for labor "as such" has given place to an economic demand for labor better circumstanced or better paid? The community at all events is paying the increase of price or a part of the increase. It seems arbitrary to insist that the old price is still the economic price of the commodity and the increase only the price of a quiet conscience. The notion of a strictly economic demand for labor pure and simple seems in fact a concept of accounting. To meet the community's demand for the commodity a number of producers were required. The least capable of these could make both ends meet at the prevailing price only by ignoring all but the severely impersonal aspects of the process. Taking these costs as a base, other more capable or more fortunate producers may have been able to make additional expenditures of the sort in question, charging these perhaps to "welfare" account. The law then intervenes, making labor in effect more expensive for all by requiring the superior conveniences or by compelling employers' insurance against accidents to workmen or by enforcing outright a higher minimum wage. The old basic labor cost becomes thus obsolete. And without prejudging as to the expediency of such legislation in particular industrial or business situations may we not protest against a priori and wholesale condemnation of such legislation as merely irresponsibly "ethical" and "unscientific"? Is it not, rather, economically experimental and constructive, amounting in substance to a simple insistence that henceforth the hiring and paying of labor shall express a wider range of social interests—shall signalize a more clearly self-validating level of comprehension, on the part of employers and consumers, of the social significance of industry than the old? And may we not protest also, as a matter of sheer logic, against carrying over a producer's distinction of accounting between "labor" cost and "welfare" cost into the consumer's valuation of the article? How and to what end shall a distinction be drawn between his "esteem" for the trimmed and isolated article and his esteem for the men who made it—which, taken together, dispose him to pay a certain undivided price for it?
For the egoism of men is no fixed and unalterable fact. Taking it as a postulate, a mathematical theory of market phenomena may be erected upon it, but such a postulate is purely formal, taking no note of the reasons which at any given time lie behind the individuals' "demand" or "supply schedules." It amounts simply to an assumption that these schedules will not change during the lapse of time contemplated in the problem in hand. And it therefore cannot serve as the basis for a social science. As an actual social phenomenon egoism is merely a disclosure of a certain present narrowness and inertness in the nature of the individual which may or may not be definitive for him. It is precisely on a par with anemia, dyspepsia or fatigue, or any other like unhappy fact of personal biography.