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THE ETHICS OF COOPERATION

      *      *      *      *      *

Barbara Weinstock Lectures on The Morals of Trade


THE ETHICS OF COOPERATION.
By JAMES H. TUFTS.

HIGHER EDUCATION AND BUSINESS STANDARDS.
By WILLARD EUGENE HOTCHKISS.

CREATING CAPITAL: MONEY-MAKING AS AN AIM IN BUSINESS.
By FREDERICK L. LIPMAN.

IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE?
By STANTON COIT.

SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM.
By JOHN BATES CLARK.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PRIVATE MONOPOLY AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP.
By JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS.

COMMERCIALISM AND JOURNALISM.
By HAMILTON HOLT.

THE BUSINESS CAREER IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONS.
By ALBERT SHAW.

      *      *      *      *      *

THE ETHICS OF COOPERATION

by

JAMES H. TUFTS

Professor of Philosophy in the University of Chicago







Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1918

Copyright, 1918, by the Regents of the
University of California
All Rights Reserved

Published September 1918





BARBARA WEINSTOCK
LECTURES ON THE MORALS OF TRADE


This series will contain essays by representative scholars and men of
affairs dealing with the various phases of the moral law in its bearing
on business life under the new economic order, first delivered at the
University of California on the Weinstock foundation.




THE ETHICS OF COOPERATION




I


According to Plato's famous myth, two gifts of the gods equipped man
for living: the one, arts and inventions to supply him with the means
of livelihood; the other, reverence and justice to be the ordering
principles of societies and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.
Agencies for mastery over nature and agencies for cooperation among men
remain the two great sources of human power. But after two thousand
years, it is possible to note an interesting fact as to their relative
order of development in civilization. Nearly all the great skills and
inventions that had been acquired up to the eighteenth century were
brought into man's service at a very early date. The use of fire, the
arts of weaver, potter, and metal worker, of sailor, hunter, fisher,
and sower, early fed man and clothed him. These were carried to higher
perfection by Egyptian and Greek, by Tyrian and Florentine, but it
would be difficult to point to any great new unlocking of material
resources until the days of the chemist and electrician. Domestic
animals and crude water mills were for centuries in man's service, and
until steam was harnessed, no additions were made of new powers.

During this long period, however, the progress of human association
made great and varied development. The gap between the men of
Santander's caves, or early Egypt, and the civilization of a century
ago is bridged rather by union of human powers, by the needs and
stimulating contacts of society, than by conquest in the field of
nature. It was in military, political, and religious organization that
the power of associated effort was first shown. Army, state, and
hierarchy were its visible representatives. Then, a little over a
century ago, began what we call the industrial revolution, still
incomplete, which combined new natural forces with new forms of human
association. Steam, electricity, machines, the factory system,
railroads: these suggest the natural forces at man's disposal; capital,
credit, corporations, labor unions: these suggest the bringing together
of men and their resources into units for exploiting or controlling the
new natural forces. Sometimes resisting the political, military, or
ecclesiastical forces which were earlier in the lead, sometimes
mastering them, sometimes combining with them, economic organization
has now taken its place in the world as a fourth great structure, or
rather as a fourth great agency through which man achieves his greater
tasks, and in so doing becomes conscious of hitherto unrealized powers.

Early in this great process of social organization three divergent
types emerged, which still contend for supremacy in the worlds of
action and of valuation: dominance, competition, and cooperation. All
mean a meeting of human forces. They rest respectively on power,
rivalry, and sympathetic interchange. Each may contribute to human
welfare. On the other hand, each may be taken so abstractly as to
threaten human values. I hope to point out that the greatest of these
is cooperation, and that it is largely the touchstone for the others.

Cooperation and dominance both mean organization. Dominance implies
inequality, direction and obedience, superior and subordinate.
Cooperation implies some sort of equality, some mutual relation. It
does not exclude difference in ability or in function. It does not
exclude leadership, for leadership is usually necessary to make
cooperation effective. But in dominance the special excellence is kept
isolated; ideas are transmitted from above downward. In cooperation
there is interchange, currents flowing in both directions, contacts of
mutual sympathy, rather than of pride-humility, condescension-servility.
The purpose of the joint pursuit in organization characterized by
dominance may be either the exclusive good of the master or the joint
good of the whole organized group, but in any case it is a purpose
formed and kept by those few who know. The group may share in its
execution and its benefits, but not in its construction or in the
estimating and forecasting of its values. The purpose in cooperation is
joint. Whether originally suggested by some leader of thought or
action, or whether a composite of many suggestions in the give and take
of discussion or in experiences of common need, it is weighed and
adopted as a common end. It is not the work or possession of leaders
alone, but embodies in varying degrees the work and active interest of
all.

Cooperation and competition at first glance may seem more radically
opposed. For while dominance and cooperation both mean union of forces,
competition appears to mean antagonism. _They_ stand for combination;
_it_ for exclusion of one by another. Yet a deeper look shows that this
is not true of competition in what we may call its social, as
contrasted with its unsocial, aspect. The best illustration of what I
venture to call social competition is sport. Here is rivalry, and here
in any given contest one wins, the other loses, or few win and many
lose. But the great thing in sport is not to win; the great thing is
the game, the contest; and the contest is no contest unless the
contestants are so nearly equal as to forbid any certainty in advance
as to which will win. The best sport is found when no one contestant
wins too often. There is in reality a common purpose--the zest of
contest. Players combine and compete to carry out this purpose; and the
rules are designed so to restrict the competition as to rule out
certain kinds of action and preserve friendly relations. The contending
rivals are in reality uniting to stimulate each other. Without the
cooperation there would be no competition, and the competition is so
conducted as to continue the relation. Competition in the world of
thought is similarly social. In efforts to reach a solution of a
scientific problem or to discuss a policy, the spur of rivalry or the
matching of wits aids the common purpose of arriving at the truth.
Similar competition exists in business. Many a firm owes its success to
the competition of its rivals which has forced it to be efficient,
progressive. As a manufacturing friend once remarked to me: "When the
other man sells cheaper, you generally find he has found out something
you don't know."

But we also apply the term "competition" to rivalry in which there is
no common purpose; to contests in which there is no intention to
continue or repeat the match, and in which no rules control. Weeds
compete with flowers and crowd them out. The factory competes with the
hand loom and banishes it. The trust competes with the small firm and
puts it out of business. The result is monopoly. When plants or
inventions are thus said to compete for a place, there is frequently no
room for both competitors, and no social gain by keeping both in the
field. Competition serves here sometimes as a method of selection,
although no one would decide to grow weeds rather than flowers because
weeds are more efficient. In the case of what are called natural
monopolies, there is duplication of effort instead of cooperation.
Competition is here wasteful. But when we have to do, not with a
specific product, or with a fixed field such as that of street railways
or city lighting, but with the open field of invention and service, we
need to provide for continuous cooperation, and competition seems at
least one useful agency. To retain this, we frame rules against "unfair
competition." As the rules of sport are designed to place a premium
upon certain kinds of strength and skill which make a good game, so the
rules of fair competition are designed to secure efficiency for public
service, and to exclude efficiency in choking or fouling. In unfair
competition there is no common purpose of public service or of
advancing skill or invention; hence, no cooperation. The cooperative
purpose or result is thus the test of useful, as contrasted with
wasteful or harmful, competition.

There is also an abstract conception of cooperation, which, in its
one-sided emphasis upon equality, excludes any form of leadership, or
direction, and in fear of inequality allows no place for competition.
Selection of rulers by lot in a large and complex group is one
illustration; jealous suspicion of ability, which becomes a cult of
incompetence, is another. Refusals to accept inventions which require
any modification of industry, or to recognize any inequalities of
service, are others. But these do not affect the value of the principle
as we can now define it in preliminary fashion: union tending to secure
common ends, by a method which promotes equality, and with an outcome
of increased power shared by all.




II


What are we to understand by the Ethics of Cooperation? 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, cooperation? 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 cooperation, 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 cooperating 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,
cooperation 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, cooperation 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. Cooperation'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 cooperation 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 cooperating 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 cooperating 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 cooperative
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 cooperation is superior. And if the advocate of war
insists that war as such is the most glorious and desirable type of
life, cooperation may perhaps fail to convert him. But it may hope to
create a new order whose excellence shall be justified of her children.




III


A glance at the past roles of dominance, competition, and cooperation
in the institutions of government, religion, and commerce and industry,
will aid us to consider cooperation in relation to present
international problems.

Primitive tribal life had elements of each of the three principles we
have named. But with discovery by some genius of the power of
organization for war the principle of dominance won, seemingly at a
flash, a decisive position. No power of steam or lightning has been so
spectacular and wide-reaching as the power which Egyptian, Assyrian,
Macedonian, Roman, and their modern successors introduced and
controlled. Political states owing their rise to military means
naturally followed the military pattern. The sharp separation between
ruler or ruling group and subject people, based on conquest, was
perpetuated in class distinction. Gentry and simple, lord and villein,
were indeed combined in exploitation of earth's resources, but
cooperation was in the background, mastery in the fore. And when
empires included peoples of various races and cultural advance the
separation between higher and lower became intensified. Yet though
submerged for long periods, the principle of cooperation has asserted
itself, step by step and it seldom loses ground. Beginning usually in
some group which at first combined to resist dominance, it has made its
way through such stages as equality before the law, abolition of
special privileges, extension of suffrage, influence of public
sentiment, interchange of ideas, toward genuine participation by all in
the dignity and responsibility of political power. It builds a Panama
Canal, it maintains a great system of education, and has, we may easily
believe, yet greater tasks in prospect. It may be premature to predict
its complete displacement of dominance in our own day as a method of
government, yet who in America doubts its ultimate prevalence?

Religion presents a fascinating mixture of cooperation with dominance
on the one hand, and exclusiveness on the other. The central fact is
the community, which seeks some common end in ritual, or in beneficent
activity. But at an early period leaders became invested, or invested
themselves, with a sanctity which led to dominance. Not the power of
force, but that of mystery and the invisible raised the priest above
the level of the many. And, on another side, competition between rival
national religions, like that between states, excluded friendly
contacts. Jew and Samaritan had no dealings; between the followers of
Baal and Jehovah there was no peace but by extermination. Yet it was
religion which confronted the _Herrenmoral_ with the first reversal of
values, and declared, "So shall it not be among you. But whosoever will
be great among you let him be your minister." And it was religion which
cut across national boundaries in its vision of what Professor Royce so
happily calls the Great Community. Protest against dominance resulted,
however, in divisions, and although cooperation in practical activities
has done much to prepare the way for national understanding, the
hostile forces of the world to-day lack the restraint which might have
come from a united moral sentiment and moral will.

In the economic field the story of dominance, cooperation, and
competition is more complex than in government and religion. It
followed somewhat different courses in trade and in industry. The
simplest way to supply needs with goods is to go and take them; the
simplest way to obtain services is to seize them. Dominance in the
first case gives piracy and plunder, when directed against those
without; fines and taxes, when exercised upon those within; in the
second case, it gives slavery or forced levies. But trade, as a
voluntary exchange of presents, or as a bargaining for mutual
advantage, had likewise its early beginnings. Carried on at first with
timidity and distrust, because the parties belonged to different
groups, it has developed a high degree of mutual confidence between
merchant and customer, banker and client, insurer and insured. By its
system of contracts and fiduciary relations, which bind men of the most
varying localities, races, occupations, social classes, and national
allegiance, it has woven a new net of human relations far more
intricate and wide-reaching than the natural ties of blood kinship. It
rests upon mutual responsibility and good faith; it is a constant force
for their extension.

The industrial side of the process has had similar influence toward
union. Free craftsmen in the towns found mutual support in gilds, when
as yet the farm laborer or villein had to get on as best he could
unaided. The factory system itself has been largely organized from
above down. It has very largely assumed that the higher command needs
no advice or ideas from below. Hours of labor, shop conditions, wages,
have largely been fixed by "orders," just as governments once ruled by
decrees. But as dominance in government has led men to unite against
the new power and then has yielded to the more complete cooperation of
participation, so in industry the factory system has given rise to the
labor movement. As for the prospects of fuller cooperation, this may be
said already to have displaced the older autocratic system within the
managing group, and the war is giving an increased impetus to extension
of the process.

Exchange of goods and services is indeed a threefold cooperation: it
meets wants which the parties cannot themselves satisfy or cannot well
satisfy; it awakens new wants; it calls new inventions and new forces
into play. It thus not only satisfies man's existing nature, but
enlarges his capacity for enjoyment and his active powers. It makes not
only for comfort, but for progress.




IV


If trade and industry, however, embody so fully the principle of
cooperation, how does it come about that they have on the whole had a
rather low reputation, not only among the class groups founded on
militarism, but among philosophers and moralists? Why do we find the
present calamities of war charged to economic causes? Perhaps the
answer to these questions will point the path along which better
cooperation may be expected.

There is, from the outset, one defect in the cooperation between buyer
and seller, employer and laborer. The cooperation is largely
unintended. Each is primarily thinking of his own advantage, rather
than that of the other, or of the social whole; he is seeking it in
terms of money, which as a material object must be in the pocket of one
party or of the other, and is not, like friendship or beauty, sharable.
Mutual benefit is the result of exchange--it need not be the motive.
This benefit comes about as if it were arranged by an invisible hand,
said Adam Smith. Indeed, it was long held that if one of the bargainers
gained, the other must lose. And when under modern conditions labor is
considered as a commodity to be bought and sold in the cheapest market
by an impersonal corporate employer, there is a strong presumption
against the cooperative attitude on either side.

The great problem here is, therefore: How can men be brought to seek
consciously what now they unintentionally produce? How can the man
whose ends are both self-centered and ignoble be changed into the man
whose ends are wide and high? Something may doubtless be done by
showing that a narrow selfishness is stupid. If we rule out monopoly
the best way to gain great success is likely to lie through meeting
needs of a great multitude; and to meet these effectively implies
entering by imagination and sympathy into their situation. The business
maxim of "service," the practices of refunding money if goods are
unsatisfactory, of one price to all, of providing sanitary and even
attractive factories and homes, and of paying a minimum wage far in
excess of the market price, have often proved highly remunerative. Yet,
I should not place exclusive, and perhaps not chief, reliance on these
methods of appeal. They are analogous to the old maxim, honesty is the
best policy; and we know too well that while this holds under certain
conditions,--that is, among intelligent people, or in the long run,--it
is often possible to acquire great gains by exploiting the weak,
deceiving the ignorant, or perpetrating a fraud of such proportions
that men forget its dishonesty in admiration at its audacity. In the
end it is likely to prove that the level of economic life is to be
raised not by proving that cooperation will better satisfy selfish and
ignoble interests, but rather by creating new standards for measuring
success, new interests in social and worthy ends, and by strengthening
the appeal of duty where this conflicts with present interests. The one
method stakes all on human nature as it is; the other challenges man's
capacity to listen to new appeals and respond to better motives. It is,
if you please, idealism; but before it is dismissed as worthless,
consider what has been achieved in substituting social motives in the
field of political action. There was a time when the aim in political
life was undisguisedly selfish. The state, in distinction from the
kinship group or the village community, was organized for power and
profit. It was nearly a gigantic piratical enterprise, highly
profitable to its managers. The shepherd, says Thrasymachus in Plato's
dialogue, does not feed his sheep for their benefit, but for his own.
Yet now, what president or minister, legislator or judge, would
announce as his aim to acquire the greatest financial profit from his
position? Even in autocratically governed countries, it is at least the
assumption that the good of the state does not mean solely the prestige
and wealth of the ruler.

A great social and political order has been built up, and we all hold
that it must not be exploited for private gain. It has not been created
or maintained by chance. Nor could it survive if every man sought
primarily his own advantage and left the commonwealth to care for
itself. Nor in a democracy would it be maintained, provided the
governing class alone were disinterested, deprived of private property,
and given education, as Plato suggested. The only safety is in the
general and intelligent desire for the public interest and common
welfare. At this moment almost unanimous acceptance of responsibility
for what we believe to be the public good and the maintenance of
American ideals--though it brings to each of us sacrifice and to many
the full measure of devotion--bears witness to the ability of human
nature to adopt as its compelling motives a high end which opposes
private advantage.

Is the economic process too desperate a field for larger motives? To me
it seems less desperate than the field of government in the days of
autocratic kings. One great need is to substitute a different standard
of success for the financial gains which have seemed the only test. Our
schools of commerce are aiming to perform this service, by introducing
professional standards. A physician is measured by his ability to cure
the sick, an engineer by the soundness of his bridge and ship; why not
measure a railroad president by his ability to supply coal in winter,
to run trains on time, and decrease the cost of freight, rather than by
his private accumulations? Why not measure a merchant or banker by
similar tests?

Mankind has built up a great economic system. Pioneer, adventurer,
inventor, scientist, laborer, organizer, all have contributed. It is as
essential to human welfare as the political system, and like that
system it comes to us as an inheritance. I can see no reason why it
should be thought unworthy of a statesman or a judge to use the
political structure for his own profit, but perfectly justifiable for a
man to exploit the economic structure for private gain. This does not
necessarily exclude profit as a method of paying for services, and of
increasing capital needed for development, but it would seek to adjust
profits to services, and treat capital, just as it regards political
power, as a public trust in need of cooperative regulation and to be
used for the general welfare.

But the war is teaching with dramatic swiftness what it might have
needed decades of peace to bring home to us. We _are_ thinking of the
common welfare. High prices may still be a rough guide to show men's
needs, but we are learning to raise wheat because others need it--not
merely because the price is high. Prices may also be a rough guide to
consumption, but we are learning that eating wheat or sugar is not
merely a matter of what I can afford. It is a question of whether I
take wheat or sugar away from some one else who needs it--the soldier
in France, the child in Belgium, the family of my less fortunate
neighbor. The great