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.