§ 4. THE MORAL CRITERION OF POLITICAL ACTIVITY
The moral criterion by which to try social institutions and political measures may be summed up as follows: The test is whether a given custom or law sets free individual capacities in such a way as to make them available for the development of the general happiness or the common good. This formula states the test with the emphasis falling upon the side of the individual. It may be stated from the side of associated life as follows: The test is whether the general, the public, organization and order are promoted in such a way as to equalize opportunity for all.
Comparison with the Individualistic Formula.—The formula of the individualistic school (in the narrow sense of that term—the laissez-faire school) reads: The moral end of political institutions and measures is the maximum possible freedom of the individual consistent with his not interfering with like freedom on the part of other individuals. It is quite possible to interpret this formula in such a way as to make it equivalent to that just given. But it is not employed in that sense by those who advance it. An illustration will bring out the difference. Imagine one hundred workingmen banded together in a desire to improve their standard of living by securing higher wages, shorter hours, and more sanitary conditions of work. Imagine one hundred other men who, because they have no families to support, no children to educate, or because they do not care about their standard of life, are desirous of replacing the first hundred at lower wages, and upon conditions generally more favorable to the employer of labor. It is quite clear that in offering themselves and crowding out the others, they are not interfering with the like freedom on the part of others. The men already engaged are "free" to work for lower wages and longer time, if they want to. But it is equally certain that they are interfering with the real freedom of the others: that is, with the effective expression of their whole body of activities.
The formula of "like freedom" artificially isolates some one power, takes that in the abstract, and then inquires whether it is interfered with. The one truly moral question is what relation this particular power, say the power to do a certain work for a certain reward, sustains to all the other desires, purposes, and interests of the individual. How are they affected by the way in which some one activity is exercised? It is in them that the concrete freedom of the man resides. We do not know whether the freedom of a man is interfered with or is assisted until we have taken into account his whole system of capacities and activities. The maximum freedom of one individual consistent with equal concrete or total freedom of others, would indeed represent a high moral ideal. But the individualistic formula is condemned by the fact that it has in mind only an abstract, mechanical, external, and hence formal freedom.
Comparison with the Collectivistic Formula.—There is a rival formula which may be summed up as the subordination of private or individual good to the public or general good: the subordination of the good of the part to the good of the whole. This notion also may be interpreted in a way which renders it identical with our own criterion. But it is usually not so intended. It tends to emphasize quantitative and mechanical considerations. The individualistic formula tends in practice to emphasize the freedom of the man who has power at the expense of his neighbor weaker in health, in intellectual ability, in worldly goods, and in social influence. The collectivistic formula tends to set up a static social whole and to prevent the variations of individual initiative which are necessary to progress. An individual variation may involve opposition, not conformity or subordination, to the existing social good taken statically; and yet may be the sole means by which the existing State is to progress. Minorities are not always right; but every advance in right begins in a minority of one, when some individual conceives a project which is at variance with the social good as it has been established.
A true public or social good will accordingly not subordinate individual variations, but will encourage individual experimentation in new ideas and new projects, endeavoring only to see that they are put into execution under conditions which make for securing responsibility for their consequences. A just social order promotes in all its members habits of criticizing its attained goods and habits of projecting schemes of new goods. It does not aim at intellectual and moral subordination. Every form of social life contains survivals of the past which need to be reorganized. The struggle of some individuals against the existing subordination of their good to the good of the whole is the method of the reorganization of the whole in the direction of a more generally distributed good. Not order, but orderly progress, represents the social ideal.
LITERATURE
Green, Principles of Political Obligation, 1888; Ritchie, Principles of State Interference, 1891, Natural Rights, 1895; Lioy, Philosophy of Right, 2 vols., 1901; Willoughby, An Examination of the Nature of the State, 1896; Wilson, The State, 1889; Donisthorpe, Individualism, 1889; Giddings, Democracy and Empire, 1900; Mulford, The Nation, 1882; Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. II., Part V., 1882, on Political Institutions; Bentham, Fragment on Government, 1776; Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 1861, On Liberty, 1859, and The Subjection of Women, 1859; Austin, Jurisprudence, 2 vols., 4th ed., 1873; Hadley, The Relations between Freedom and Responsibility in the Evolution of Democratic Government, 1903; Pollock, Expansion of the Common Law, 1904; Hall, Crime in Its Relations to Social Progress, 1901; Philanthropy and Social Progress, Seven Essays, 1893; Stephen (J. F.), Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1873 (a criticism of Mill's Liberty); Tufts, Some Contributions of Psychology to the Conception of Justice, Philosophical Review, Vol. XV., p. 361.
FOOTNOTES:
[204] A traveler tells of overhearing children in Australia, when one of their kin had injured some one in another clan, discuss whether or no they came within the degree of nearness of relationship which made them liable to suffer.