Chapter 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.

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.