THE SPHERE OF PECUNIARY VALUATION
THE SPECIAL FUNCTION OF MONEY VALUATION—PECUNIARY VALUES NOT
NECESSARILY OF A LOWER SORT—THEY ARE FORMED, HOWEVER, BY A SPECIAL
INSTITUTION—AND PERPETUATE HISTORIC WRONG—THEY HAVE ONLY A LIMITED
CONTROL OF SOCIAL LIFE—MONEY REWARD VERSUS SELF-EXPRESSION—WE NEED
TO EXTEND THE SPHERE OF MONEY VALUES
It seems that the distinctive function of money valuation is to
generalize or assimilate values through a common measure. In this way it
gives them reach and flexibility, so that many sorts of value are
enabled to work freely together throughout the social system, instead of
being confined to a small province. And since values represent the
powers of society, the result is that these powers are organized in a
large way and enabled to co-operate in a vital whole. Any _market_ value
that I, for instance, may control ceases to be merely local in its
application and becomes a generalized force that I can apply anywhere.
If I can earn a thousand dollars teaching bacteriology, I can take the
money and go to Europe, exchanging my recondite knowledge for the
services, say, of guides in the Alps, who never heard of bacteriology.
Other values are similarly generalized and the result is a mobility that
enables many sorts of value, reduced to a common measure, to be applied
anywhere and anyhow that the holder may think desirable.
We have, then, to do with a value institution or process, far
transcending in reach any special sort of value, and participating in
the most diverse phases of our life. Its function resembles that of
language, and its ideal may be said to be to do for value what language
does for thought—furnish a universal medium of communicative growth. And
just as language and the social organization based upon it are extended
in their scope by the modern devices of cheap printing, mails,
telegraphy, telephones, and the like, so the function of pecuniary
valuation is extended by uniform money and by devices for credit and
transfer, until the natural obstacles of distance, lack of knowledge,
and lack of homogeneity are largely overcome.
This mobilization of values through the pecuniary measure tends to make
the latter an expression of the total life of society, so far as the
values that stand for this life have actually become mobilized or
translated into pecuniary terms. Although this translation is in fact
only partial and, as I have tried to show, institutional, still the wide
scope of pecuniary value, along with its precision, gives it a certain
title to its popular acceptance as value in a sense that no other kind
of value can claim.
This also gives it that place as a regulator of social activity which
economists have always claimed for it. Pecuniary value provides a motive
to serve the pecuniary organism, a motive that penetrates everywhere,
acts automatically, and adjusts itself delicately to the conditions of
demand and supply. If more oranges are wanted in New York, a higher
price is offered for them in California and Sicily; if more dentists are
needed, the rewards of the profession increase and young men are
attracted into it. Thus there is everywhere an inducement to supply
those goods and services which the buying power in society thinks it
wants, and this inducement largely guides production. At each point of
deficient supply a sort of suction is set up to draw available persons
and materials to that point and set them to work.
Thus our life, in one of its main aspects, is organized through this
central value institution or market, very much as in other aspects it is
organized through language, the state, the church, or the family.
It will be well to consider here the view that the sphere of pecuniary
value, however wide, is yet distinctly circumscribed and confined to a
special and, on the whole, inferior province of life. According to this
view only the coarser and more material values can be measured in money,
while the finer sorts, as of beauty, friendship, righteousness, and so
on, are in their nature private and untranslatable, and so out of the
reach of any generalizing process.
It seems doubtful whether we can admit that there is any such clear
circumscription of the pecuniary field. All values are interrelated, and
it may reasonably be held that none can stand apart and be wholly
incommensurable with the others. The idea of a common measure which, for
certain purposes at least, may be applied to _all_ values is by no means
absurd. The argument that such a measure is possible may be stated
somewhat as follows.
Since the function of values is to guide conduct, they are in their
nature comparable. Conduct is a matter of the total or synthetic
behavior of a living whole in view of a situation: it implies the
integration of all the motives bearing on the situation. Accordingly
when a crisis in conduct arises the values relating to it, no matter how
incommensurable they may seem, are in some way brought to a common
measure, weighed against one another, in order to determine which way
the scale inclines. This commensuration is psychical, not numerical, and
we are far from understanding its exact nature, but unless each
pertinent kind of value has a part in it of some sort it would seem that
the mind is not acting as a vital whole. If there were absolute values
that cannot be impaired or in any way influenced by the opposing action
of other values, they must apparently exist in separate compartments and
not in organic relation to the rest of the mind. It does not follow that
what we regard as a high motive, such as the sense of honor, must
necessarily be overcome by a sufficient accumulation of lower motives,
such as sensuous desires, but we may be prepared to find that if the two
are opposed the latter will, in one way or another, modify the conduct
required by the former, and this I believe is usually the fact. Thus
suppose a lower value, in the shape of temptation, is warring against a
higher in the shape of an ideal. Even if we concede nothing to the
former, even if we react far away from it, none the less it has entered
into our life and helped to mould it—as sensuality, for example, helps
to mould the ascetic.
And this weighing of one kind of value against another will take place
largely in terms of money, which exists for the very purpose of
facilitating such transactions. Thus honor is one of those values which
many would place outside the pecuniary sphere, and yet honor may call
for the saving of money to pay a debt, while sensuality would spend it
for a hearty dinner. In this case, then, we buy our honor with money, or
we sell it, through money, for something lower. In much the same way are
the larger choices of society, as, for example, between power devoted to
education and power devoted to warships, expressed in pecuniary terms.
In general we do, in fact, individually and collectively, weigh such
things as friendship, righteousness, and beauty against other matters,
and in terms of money. Beauty is on the market, however undervalued, in
the form, for example, of music, art, literature, flowers, and
dwelling-sites. A friendly personality has a market value in salesmen,
doctors, writers, and teachers; indeed in all occupations where ability
to influence persons is important—and there are few in which it is not.
I notice that if there is anything attractive about a man he soon learns
to collect pay for it. And not less is it true that the need for
righteousness finds expression in a willingness to pay a (reasonable)
price for it in the market-place. Convincing preachers and competent
social workers command salaries, and great sums go to beneficent
institutions.
The truth is that the values we think of as absolute are only, if I may
use the expression, relatively absolute. That is, they so far transcend
the values of every-day traffic that we think of them as belonging to a
wholly different order, but experience shows that they do not. Life
itself is not an absolute value, since we constantly see it sacrificed
to other ends; chastity is sold daily by people not radically different
in nature from the rest of us, and as for honor it would be hard to
imagine a kind which might not, in conceivable situations, be renounced
for some other and perhaps higher aim. The idea of the baseness of
weighing the higher sort of values in the same scale with money rests on
the assumption that the money is to be used to purchase values of a
lower sort; but if it is the indispensable means to still higher values
we shall justify the transaction. Such exchanges are constantly taking
place: only those who are protected by pecuniary affluence can imagine
otherwise. The health of mothers is sacrificed for money to support
their children, and the social opportunities of sisters given up to send
brothers to college. In the well-to-do classes, at least, the life of
possible children is often renounced on grounds of expense.
There are, no doubt, individuals who have set their hearts on particular
things for which they will sacrifice without consideration almost
anything else. These may be high things, like love, justice, and honor;
they are often ignoble things, like avarice or selfish ambition. And, in
a similar way, nations or institutions sometimes cherish values which
are almost absolute, like those of national independence, or the
authority of the Pope. But in general we may say that if _X_ and _Y_ be
among our most cherished objects, then situations may occur where,
through the medium of money, some sacrifice of _X_ will be made for the
sake of _Y_.
I conclude, then, that it is impossible to mark off sharply the
pecuniary sphere from that of other kinds of value. It is always
possible that the highest as well as the lowest things may be brought
within its scope.
And yet we all feel that the pecuniary sphere has limitations. The
character of these may be understood, I think, by recurring to the idea
that the market is a special institution in much the same sense that the
church is or the state. It has a somewhat distinct system of its own in
society at large much as it has in the mind of each individual. Our
buyings and sellings and savings, our pecuniary schemes and standards,
make in some degree a special tract of thought that often seems
unconnected with other tracts. Yet we constantly have to bring the ideas
of this tract into relation with those outside it; and likewise in
society the pecuniary institution is in constant interaction with other
institutions, this interaction frequently taking the form of a
translation of values. In general the social process is an organic whole
somewhat clearly differentiated into special systems, of which the
pecuniary is one.
There are many histories that fall mainly within this system and must be
studied chiefly from the pecuniary point of view, not forgetting,
however, that no social history is really understood until it is seen in
its place as a phase of the general process. The histories I mean are
those that have always been regarded as the peculiar business of the
economist: the course of wheat from the grain-field to the
breakfast-table, or of iron from the mine to the watch-spring, the
growth of the social organizations created for purposes of manufacture,
trade, banking, finance, and so on. There are other histories, like
those of books, educational institutions, religious faith, scientific
research, and the like, which must be understood chiefly from other
points of view, although they are never outside the reach of pecuniary
relations.
To say, then, that almost any kind of value may at times be measured in
pecuniary terms is by no means to say that the latter are a universal
and adequate expression of human nature and of society. On the contrary,
pecuniary value is, in the main, a specialized type of value, generated
within a specialized channel of the social process, and having decided
limitations corresponding to this fact. I shall try to indicate a little
more closely what some of these limitations are.
Let us notice, in the first place, that the pecuniary values of to-day
derive from the whole past of the pecuniary system, so that all the
wrongs that may have worked themselves into that system are implicit in
them. If a materialized ruling class is in the saddle, this fact will be
expressed in the large incomes of this class and their control not only
of the mechanism of the market but, through prestige, of the demand
which underlies its values. If drink, child labor, prostitution, and
corrupt politics are part of the institution, they will be demanded upon
the market as urgently as anything else. Evidently it would be fatuous
to assume that the market process expresses the _good_ of society. The
demand on which it is based is a turbid current coming down from the
past and bearing with it, for better or worse, the outcome of history.
All the evils of commercialism are present in it, and are transmitted
through demand to production and distribution. To accept this stream as
pure and to reform only the mechanism of distribution would be as if a
city drawing its drinking-water from a polluted river should expect to
escape typhoid by using clean pipes. We have reason, both in theory and
in observation, to expect that our pecuniary tradition, and the values
which express it, will need reform quite as much as anything else.
Indeed we cannot expect, do what we may to reform it, that the market
can ever become an adequate expression of ideal values. It is an
institution, and institutional values, in their nature, are
conservative, representing the achieved and established powers of
society rather than those which are young and look to the future. The
slow crystallization of historical tendencies in institutions is likely
at the best to lag behind our ideals and cannot be expected to set the
pace of progress.
Suppose, however, we assume for the time being that demand does
represent the good of society, and inquire next how far the market
process may be trusted to realize this good through the pecuniary
motive.
It seems clear that this motive can serve as an effective guide only in
the case of deliberate production, for the sake of gain, and with
ownership in the product. The production must be deliberate in order
that _any_ rational motive may control it, and the pecuniary motive will
not control it unless it is for the sake of gain and protected by
ownership. These limitations exclude such vast provinces of life that we
may well wonder at the extent of our trust in the market process.
They shut out the whole matter of the production and development of men,
of human and social life; that is, they indicate that however important
the pecuniary process may be in this field it can never be trusted to
control it, not even the economic side of it. This is a sphere in which
the market must be dominated by other kinds of organization.
If we take the two underlying factors, heredity and environment, as
these mould the life of men, we see that we cannot look to the market to
regulate the hereditary factor as regards either the total number of
children to be born, or the stocks from which they are to be drawn. I
know that there are men who still imagine that “natural selection,”
working through economic competition, operates effectively in this
field, but I doubt whether any one knows facts upon which such a view
can reasonably be based. In what regards population and eugenics it is
more and more apparent that rational control and selection, working
largely outside the market process, are indispensable.
The same may be said of the whole action of environment in forming
persons after birth, including the family, the community, the school,
the state, the church, and the unorganized working of suggestion and
example. None of these formative agencies is of a nature to be guided
adequately by pecuniary demand. The latter, even if its requirements be
high, offers no guarantee that men will be produced in accordance with
these requirements, since it does not control the course of their
development.
Let us observe, however, that even in this field the market may afford
essential guidance to other agencies of control. If, for example,
certain kinds of work do not yield a living wage, this may be because
the supply of this kind of work is in excess, and the state or some
other organization may proceed on this hint to adjust supply to demand
by vocational training and guidance. Or the method of reform may be to
put restrictions upon demand, as in the case of the minimum wage.
Although the market process is inadequate alone, it will usually have
some share in any plan of betterment.
Personal and social development must, in general, be sought through
rational organization having a far wider scope than the market, though
co-operating with that in every helpful way, and including, perhaps,
radical reforms in the pecuniary system itself. It would be hard to
formulate a principle more fallacious and harmful than the doctrine that
the latter is an adequate regulator of human life, or that its own
processes are superior to regulation. We are beginning to see that the
prevalence of such ideas has given us over to an unhuman commercialism.
What I have been saying of persons and personal development applies also
to natural resources and public improvements, to arts, sciences, and the
finer human values in general. All these have a pecuniary aspect, of
more or less importance, but a money demand alone cannot beget or
control them. Love, beauty, and righteousness may come on the market
under certain conditions, but they are not, in the full sense, market
commodities. Our faith in money is exemplified in these days by the
offer of money prizes for poetry, invention, the promotion of peace, and
for heroic deeds. I would not deprecate such offers, whose aim is
excellent and sometimes attains the mark. They are creditable to their
authors and diffuse a good spirit even though the method is too naïve to
be very effectual. If money is greatly to increase products of this kind
it must be applied, fundamentally and with all possible wisdom, to the
conditions that mould character.
These higher goods do not really come within the economic sphere. They
touch it only incidentally, their genesis and interaction belonging
mainly to a different kind of process, one in which ownership and
material exchange play a secondary part. The distinctively economic
commodities and values are those whose whole course of production is one
in which the factors are subject to legal ownership and controlled by a
money-seeking intelligence, so that the process is essentially
pecuniary. Thus we may say that ordinary typewriting is economic,
because it is a simple, standard service which is supplied in any
quantity according to demand. The work of a newspaper reporter is not
quite so clearly economic, because not so definitely standardized and
affording more room for intangible merits which pay cannot insure. And
when we come to magazine literature of the better sort we are in a field
where the process is for the most part non-pecuniary, depending, that
is, on an interplay of minds outside the market, the latter coming in
only to set its very questionable appraisal on the product. As to
literature in general, art, science, and religion, no one at all
conversant with the history of these things will claim that important
work in them has any close relation to pecuniary inducement. The
question whether the great man was rich and honored, like Rubens, or
worked in poverty and neglect, like Rembrandt in his later years, is of
only incidental interest in tracing the history of such achievement. The
ideals and disciplines which give birth to it are generated in
non-pecuniary tracts of thought and intercourse, and unless genius
actually starves, as it sometimes does, it fulfils its aim without much
regard to pay. I need hardly add that good judges have always held that
a moderate poverty was a condition favorable to intellectual and
spiritual achievement.
I would assign a very large and growing sphere to pecuniary valuation,
but we cannot be too clear in affirming that even at its best and
largest it can never be an adequate basis for general social
organization. It is an institution, like another, having important
functions but requiring, like all institutions, to be brought under
rational control by the aid of a comprehensive sociology, ethics, and
politics. It has no charter of autonomy, no right to exemption from
social control.
Thus even if market values were the best possible of their kind, we
could not commit the social system to their charge, and still less can
we do so when the value institution, owing to rapid and one-sided
growth, is in a somewhat confused and demoralized condition. Bearing
with it not only the general inheritance of human imperfection but also
the special sins of a narrow and somewhat inhuman commercialism, it by
no means reflects life in that broad way in which a market, with all its
limitations, might reflect it. The higher values remain for the most
part untranslated, even though translatable, and the material and
technical aspects of the process have acquired an undue ascendancy. In
general this institution, like others that might be named, is in such a
condition that its estimates are no trustworthy expression of the public
mind.
Having in mind these general limitations upon the sphere of pecuniary
value, let us consider it more particularly as a motive to stimulate
and guide the work of the individual. For this purpose we may
distinguish it broadly from the need of self-expression, using the
latter comprehensively to include all other influences that urge one
to productive work. Among these would be emulation and ambition, the
need of activity for its own sake, the love of workmanship and
creation, the impulse to assert one’s individuality, and the desire to
serve the social whole. Such motives enter intimately into one’s
self-consciousness and may, for our present purpose, be included under
the need of self-expression.
It is true that the pecuniary motive may also be, indirectly, a motive
of self-expression; that is, for example, a girl may work hard for ten
dollars with which to buy a pretty hat. It makes a great difference,
however, whether or not the work is _directly_ self-expressive, whether
the worker feels that what he does is joyous and rewarding in itself, so
that it would be worth doing whether he were paid for it or not. The
artist, the poet, the skilled craftsman in wood and iron, the born
teacher or lawyer, all have this feeling, and it is desirable that it
should become as common as possible. I admit that the line is not a
sharp one, but on the whole the pecuniary motive may be said to be an
extrinsic one, as compared with the more intrinsic character of those
others which I have called motives of self-expression.
When I say that self-expression is a regulator of productive activity I
mean that, like the pecuniary motive, though in a different way, it is
the expression of an organic whole, and not necessarily a less
authoritative expression. What a man feels to be self-expressive springs
in part from the instincts of human nature and in part from the form
given to those instincts by the social life in which his mind develops.
Both of these influences spring from the organic life of the human race.
The man of genius who opens new ways in poetry and art, the social
reformer who spends his life in conflict with inhuman conditions, the
individual anywhere or of any sort who tries to realize the needs of his
higher being, represents the common life of man in a way that may have a
stronger claim than the requirements of pecuniary demand. As a motive it
is quite as universal as the latter, and there is no one of us who has
not the capacity to feel it.
As regards the individual himself, self-expression is simply the deepest
need of his nature. It is required for self-respect and integrity of
character, and there can be no question more fundamental than that of so
ordering life that the mass of men may have a chance to find
self-expression in their principal activity.
These two motives are related much as are our old friends conformity and
individuality; we have to do in fact with a phase of the same
antithesis. Pecuniary valuation, like conformity, furnishes a somewhat
mechanical and external rule: it represents the social organization in
its more explicit and established phases, and especially, of course, the
pecuniary institution, which has a life somewhat distinct from that of
other phases of the establishment. It is based on those powers in
society which are readily translated into pecuniary terms, on wealth,
position, established industrial and business methods, and so on.
Self-expression springs from the deeper and more obscure currents of
life, from subconscious, unmechanized forces which are potent without
our understanding why. It represents humanity more immediately and its
values are, or may be, more vital and significant than those of the
market; we may look to them for art, for science, for religion, for
moral improvement, for all the fresher impulses to social progress. The
onward things of life usually come from men whose imperious
self-expression disregards the pecuniary market. In humbler tasks
self-expression is required to give the individual an immediate and
lively interest in his work; it is the motive of art and joy, the spring
of all vital achievement.
It is quite possible that these motives should work harmoniously
together; indeed they do so in no small proportion of cases. A man who
works because he wants money comes, under favorable conditions, to take
pleasure and pride in what he does. Or he takes up a certain sort of
work because he likes it, and finds that his zeal helps him to pecuniary
success. I suppose that there are few of us with whom the desire of
self-expression would alone be sufficient to incite regular production.
Most of us need a spur to do even that which we enjoy doing, or at any
rate to do it systematically. We are compelled to do something and many
of us are fortunate enough to find something that is self-expressive.
The market, it would seem, should put a gentle pressure upon men to
produce in certain directions, spurring the lazy and turning the
undecided into available lines of work. Those who have a clear inner
call should resist this pressure, as they always have done, and always
must if we are to have progress. This conflict between the pecuniary
system and the bias of the individual, though in some sort inevitable,
should not be harsh or destructive. The system should be as tolerant and
hospitable as its institutional nature permits. Values, like public
opinion to which they are so closely related, should be constantly
awakened, enlightened, enlarged, and made to embrace new sorts of
personal merit. There is nothing of more public value than the higher
sort of self-expression, and this should be elicited and rewarded in
every practicable way. It is possible to have institutions which are not
only tolerant but which, in a measure, anticipate and welcome useful
kinds of non-conformity.
Pecuniary valuation, represented by the offer of wages, will never
produce good work nor a contented people until it is allied with such
conditions that a man feels that his task is in some sense _his_, and
can put himself heartily into it. This means some sort of industrial
democracy—control of working conditions by the state or by unions,
co-operation, socialism—something that shall give the individual a human
share in the industrial whole of which he is a member.
Closely related to this is the sense of worthy service. No man can feel
that his work is self-expressive unless he believes that it is good work
and can see that it serves mankind. If the product is trivial or base he
can hardly respect himself, and the demand for such things, as Ruskin
used to say, is a demand for slavery. Or if the employer for whom a man
works and who is the immediate beneficiary of his labors is believed to
be self-seeking beyond what is held legitimate, and not working
honorably for the general good, the effect will be much the same. The
worst sufferers from such employers are the men who work for them,
whether their wages be high or low.
As regards the general relation in our time between market value and
self-expression, the fact seems to be something as follows: Our
industrial system has undergone an enormous expansion and an almost
total change of character. In the course of this, human nature has been
dragged along, as it were, by the hair of the head. It has been led or
driven into kinds of work and conditions of work that are repugnant to
it, especially repugnant in view of the growth of intelligence and of
democracy in other spheres of life. The agent in this has been the
pecuniary motive backed by the absence of alternatives. This pecuniary
motive has reflected a system of values determined under the ascendancy,
direct and indirect, of the commercial class naturally dominant in a
time of this kind. I will not say that as a result of this state of
things the condition of the hand-workers is worse than in a former
epoch; in some respects it seems worse, in many it is clearly better;
but certainly it is far from what it should be in view of the enormous
growth of human resources.
In the economic philosophy which has prevailed along with this
expansion, the pecuniary motive has been accepted as the legitimate
principle of industrial organization to the neglect of self-expression.
The human self, however, is not to be treated thus with impunity; it is
asserting itself in a somewhat general discontent and in many specific
forms of organized endeavor. The commercialism that accepts as
satisfactory present values and the method of establishing them is
clearly on the decline and we have begun to work for a more
self-expressive order.
Notwithstanding the insufficiencies of pecuniary valuation, the
character of modern life seems to call for an extension of its scope: it
would appear to be true, in a certain sense, that the principle that
everything has its price should be rather enlarged than restricted. The
ever-vaster and more interdependent system in which we live requires for
its organization a corresponding value mechanism, just as it requires a
mechanism of transportation and communication. And this means not only
that the value medium should be uniform, adaptable, and stable, but also
that the widest possible range of values should be convertible into it.
The wider the range the more fully does the market come to express and
energize the aims of society. It is a potent agent, and the more good
work we can get it to take hold of the better. Its limitations, then, by
no means justify us in assuming that it has nothing to do with ideals or
morals. On the contrary, the method of progress in every sphere is to
transfuse the higher values into the working institutions and keep the
latter on the rise. Just as the law exists to formulate and enforce
certain phases of righteousness, and is continually undergoing criticism
and revision based on moral judgments, so ought every institution, and
especially the pecuniary system, to have constant renewal from above. It
should be ever in process of moral regeneration, and the method that
separates it from the ethical sphere, while justifiable perhaps for
certain technical inquiries, becomes harmful when given a wider scope.
As regards responsibility to moral requirements there is no fundamental
difference between pecuniary valuation and the state, the church,
education, or any other institution. We cannot expect to make our money
values ideal, any more than our laws, our sermons, or our academic
lectures, but we can make them better, and this is done by bringing
higher values upon the market.
To put it otherwise, the fact that pecuniary values fail to express the
higher life of society creates a moral problem which may be met in
either of two ways. One is to depreciate money valuation altogether and
attempt to destroy its prestige. The other is to concede to it a very
large place in life, even larger, perhaps, than it occupies at present,
and to endeavor to regenerate it by the translation into it of the
higher values. The former way is analogous with that somewhat obsolete
form of religion which gave up this world to the devil and centred all
effort on keeping out of it, in preparation for a wholly different world
to be gained after death. The world and the flesh, which could not
really be escaped, were left to a neglected and riotous growth.
In like manner, perceiving that pecuniary values give in many respects a
debasing reflection of life, we are tempted to rule them out of the
ethical field and consign them to an inferior province. The price of a
thing, we say, is a material matter which has nothing to do with its
higher values, and never can have. This, however, is bad philosophy, in
economics as in religion. The pecuniary values are members of the same
general system as the moral and æsthetic values, and it is part of their
function to put the latter upon the market. To separate them is to
cripple both, and to cripple life itself by cutting off the healthy
interchange among its members. Our line of progress lies, in part at
least, not over commercialism but through it; the dollar is to be
reformed rather than suppressed. Our system of production and exchange
is a very great achievement, not more on the mechanical side than in the
social possibilities latent in it. Our next task seems to be to fulfil
these possibilities, to enlarge and humanize the system by bringing it
under the guidance of a comprehensive social and ethical policy.