Chapter 6: Social Cooperation

1. Each and All

The ultimate goal of the conduct of each of us, as an individual, is to maximize his own happiness and well-being. Therefore the effort of each of us, as a member of society, is to persuade and induce everybody else to act so as to maximize the long-run happiness and well-being of society as a whole and even, if necessary, forcibly to prevent anybody from acting to reduce or destroy the happiness or well-being of society as a whole. For the happiness and well-being of each is promoted by the same conduct that promotes the happiness and well-being of all. Conversely, the happiness and well-being of all is promoted by the conduct that promotes the happiness and well-being of each. In the long run the aims of the individual and "society" (considering this as the name that each of us gives to all other individuals) coalesce, and tend to coincide.

We may state this conclusion in another form: The aim of each of us is to maximize his own satisfaction; and each of us recognizes that his satisfaction can best be maximized by cooperating with others and having others cooperate with him. Society itself, therefore, may be defined as nothing else but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort.' If we keep this in mind, there is no harm in saying that, as it is the aim of each of us to maximize his satisfactions, so it is the aim of "society" to maximize the satisfactions of each of its members, or, where this cannot be completely done, to try to reconcile and harmonize as many desires as possible, and to minimize the dissatisfactions or maximize the satisfactions of as many persons as possible in the long run.

Thus our goal envisions continuously both a present state of well-being and a future state of well-being, the maximization of both present satisfactions and future satisfactions.

But this statement of the ultimate goal carries us only a little way toward a system of ethics.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALITY

2. The Way to the Goal

It was an error of most of the older utilitarians, as of earlier moralists, to suppose that if they could once find and state the ultimate goal of conduct, the great Summum Bonum, their mission was completed. They were like medieval knights devoting all their efforts to the quest of the Holy Grail, and assuming that, if they once found it, their task would be done.

Yet even if we assume that we have found, or succeeded in stating, the "ultimate" goal of conduct, we have no more finished our task than if we had decided to go to the Holy Land. We must know the way to get there. We must know the means, and the means of obtaining the means.

By what means are we to achieve the goal of conduct? How are we to know what conduct is most likely to achieve this goal?

The great problem presented by ethics is that no two people find their happiness or satisfactions in precisely the same things.

Each of us has his own peculiar set of desires, his own particular valuations, his own intermediate ends. Unanimity in value judgments does not exist, and probably never will.

This seems to present a dilemma, a logical dead end, from which the older ethical writers struggled for a way of escape. Many of them thought they had found it in the doctrine that ultimate goals and ethical rules were known by "intuition." When there was disagreement about these goals or rules, they tried to resolve it by consulting their own individual consciences, and taking their own private intuitions as the guide. This was not a good way out. Yet a way of escape from the dilemma was there.

This lies in Social Cooperation. For each of us, social cooperation is the great means of attaining nearly all our ends. For each of us social cooperation is of course not the ultimate end but a means. It has the great advantage that no unanimity with regard to value judgments is required to make it work. (2) But it is a means so central, so universal, so indispensable to the realization of practically all our other ends, that there is little harm in regarding it as an end-in-itself, and even in treating it as if it were the goal of ethics. In fact, precisely because none of us knows exactly what would give most satisfaction or happiness to others, the best test of our actions or rules of action is the extent to which they promote a social cooperation that best enables each of us to pursue his own ends.

Without social cooperation modern man could not achieve the barest fraction of the ends and satisfactions that he has achieved with it. The very subsistence of the immense majority of us depends upon it. We cannot treat subsistence as basely material and beneath our moral notice. As Mises reminds us: "Even the most sublime ends cannot be sought by people who have not first satisfied the wants of their animal body." (3) And as Philip Wicksteed has more concretely put it: "A man can be neither a saint, nor a lover, nor a poet, unless he has comparatively recently had something to eat." (4)

3. The Division of Labor

The great means of social cooperation is the division and combination of labor. The division of labor enormously increases the productivity of each of us and therefore the productivity of all of us. This has been recognized since the very beginning of economics as a science. Its recognition is, indeed, the foundation of modern economics. It is not mere coincidence that the statement of this truth occurs in the very first sentence of the first chapter of Adam Smith's great Wealth of Nations, published in 1776: "The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labor."

Adam Smith goes on to take an example from "a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labor has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker." He points out that "a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labor has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labor has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with the utmost industry, make one pin a day, and certainly could not make twenty." In the way in which the work is actually carried on (in 1776), he tells us: "One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head" and so on, so that "the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations." He tells how he himself has seen "a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed" yet (1) could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations."

Smith then goes on to show, from further illustrations, how "the division of labor . . . so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labor"; and how "the separation of different trades and employments from one another seems to have taken place in consequences of this advantage."

This great increase in productivity he attributes to "three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor, and enable one man to do the work of many." These three "circumstances" are then explained in detail.

"It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labor," Smith concludes, "which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people."

But this brings him to a further question, which he proceeds to take up in his second chapter. "This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for' another."

In resting the origin of the division of labor on an unexplained "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange," as he sometimes seems to do in his succeeding argument, Adam Smith was wrong. Social cooperation and the division of labor rest upon a recognition (though often implicit rather than explicit) on the part of the individual that this promotes his own self-interest that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work. And in fact, Adam Smith's own subsequent argument in Chapter 11 clearly recognizes this:

"In civilized society [the individual] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes .... Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this: Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

"Nobody but a beggar," Smith points out in extending the argument, "chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens," and "even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely," for "with the money which one man gives him he purchases food," etc.

"As it is by treaty, by barter, and by purchase," Adam Smith continues, "that we obtain from one another the greater part of those mutual good offices which we stand in need of, so it is this same trucking disposition which originally gives occasion to the division of labor. In a tribe of hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his companions; and he finds at last that he can in this manner get more cattle and venison, than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business, and he becomes a sort of armourer." And Smith explains how in turn other specialists develop.

In brief, each of us, in pursuing his self-interest, finds that he can do it most effectively through social cooperation. The belief that there is a basic conflict between the interests of the individual and the interests of society is untenable. Society is only another name for the combination of individuals for purposeful cooperation.

4. The Basis of Economic Life

Let us look a little more closely at the motivational basis of this great system of social cooperation through exchange of goods or services. I have just used the phrase "self-interest," following Adam Smith's example when he speaks of the butcher's and the baker's "own interests," "self-love," and "advantage." But we should be careful not to assume that people enter into these economic relations with each other simply because each seeks only his "selfish" or "egoistic" advantage. Let us see how an acute economist restates the essence of this economic relation.

The economic life, writes Philip Wicksteed, "consists of all that complex of relations into which we enter with other people, and lend ourselves or our resources to the furtherance of their purposes, as an indirect means of furthering our own." (5) "By direct and indirect processes of exchange, by the social alchemy of which money is the symbol, the things I have and the things I can are transmuted into the things I want and the things I would." (6) People cooperate with me in the economic relation "not primarily, or not solely, because they are interested in my purposes, but because they have certain purposes of their own; and just as I find that I can only secure the accomplishment of my purposes by securing their co-operation, so they find that they can only accomplish theirs by securing the co-operation of yet others, and they find that I am in a position, directly or indirectly, to place this co-operation at their disposal. A vast range, therefore, of our relations with others enters into a system of mutual adjustment by which we further each other's purposes simply as an indirect way of furthering our own." (7)

So far the reader may not have detected any substantial difference between Wicksteed's statement and Adam Smith's. Yet there is a very important one. I enter into an economic or business relation with you, for the exchange of goods or services for money, primarily to further my purposes, not yours, and you enter into it, on your side, primarily to further your purposes, not mine. But this does not mean that either of our purposes is necessarily selfish or self-centered. I may be hiring your services as a printer to publish a tract at my own expense pleading for more kindness to animals. A mother buying groceries in the market will go where she can get the best quality or the lowest price, and not to help any particular grocer; yet in buying her groceries she may have the needs and tastes of her husband or children in mind more than her own needs or tastes. "When Paul of Tarsus abode with Aquila and Priscilla in Corintah and wrought with them at his craft of tent-making we shall hardly say that he was inspired by egoistic motives. . . . The economic relation, then, or business nexus, is necessary alike for carrying on the life of the peasant and the prince, of the saint and the sinner, of the apostle and the shepherd, of the most altruistic and the most egoistic of men." (8)

The reader may have begun to wonder at this point whether this is a book on ethics or on economics. But I have emphasized this economic cooperation because it occupies so enormous a part of our daily life. It plays, in fact, a far larger role in our daily life than most of us are consciously aware of. The relationship of employer and employee (notwithstanding the misconceptions and propaganda of the Marxist socialists and the unions) is essentially a cooperative relationship. Each needs the other to accomplish his own purposes. The success of the employer depends upon the industriousness, skill, and loyalty of his employees; the jobs and incomes of the employees depend upon the success of the employer. Even economic competition, so commonly regarded by socialists and reformers as a form of economic warfare, (9) is part of a great system of social cooperation, which promotes continual invention and improvement of products, continual reduction of costs and prices, continual widening of the range of choice and continual increase of the welfare of consumers. The competition for workers constantly raises wages, as the competition for jobs improves performance and efficiency. True, competitors do not cooperate directly with each other, but each, in competing for the patronage of third parties, seeks to offer more advantages to those third parties than his rival can, and in so doing each forwards the whole system of social cooperation. Economic competition is simply the striving of individuals to attain the most favorable position in the system of social cooperation. As such, it must exist in any conceivable mode of social organizations. (10)

The realm of economic cooperation, as I have said, occupies a far larger part of our daily life than most of us are commonly aware of, or even willing to admit. Marriage and the family are, among other things, a form not only of biological but of economical cooperation. In primitive societies the man hunted and fished while the woman prepared the food. In modern society the husband is still responsible for the physical protection and the food supply of his wife and children. Each member of the family gains by this cooperation, and it is largely on recognition of this mutual economic gain, and not merely of the joys of love and companionship, that the foundations of the institution of marriage are so solidly built.

But though the advantages of social cooperation are to an enormous extent economic, they are not solely economic. Through social cooperation we promote all the values, direct and indirect, material and spiritual, cultural and aesthetic, of modern civilization.

Some readers will see a similarity, and others may suspect an identity, between the ideal of Social Cooperation and Kropotkin's ideal of "Mutual Aid." (11) A similarity there surely is. But Social Cooperation seems to me not only a much more appropriate phrase than Mutual Aid, but a much more appropriate and precise concept. Typical instances of cooperation occur when two men row a boat or paddle a canoe from opposite sides, when four men move a piano or a crate by lifting opposite corners, when a carpenter hires a helper, when an orchestra plays a symphony. We would not hesitate to say that any of these were cooperative undertakings or acts of cooperation, but we should be surprised to find all of them called examples of "mutual aid." For "aid" carries the implication of gratuitous help the rich aiding the poor, the strong aiding the weak, the superior, out of compassion, aiding the inferior. It also seems to carry the implication of haphazard and sporadic rather than of systematic and continuous cooperation. The phrase Social Cooperation, on the other hand, seems to cover not only everything that the phrase Mutual Aid implies but the very purpose and basis of life in society. (12)

Notes

1. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 143.

2. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 55-61.

3. Ibid., p. 57.

4. The Common Sense of Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 154.

5. Ibid., p. 158.

6. Ibid., p. 166.

7. Ibid., p. 166.

8. Ibid., pp. 170-171.

9. E.g., Bertrand Russell, passim.

10. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Human action, p. 274.

11. Prince Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development (New York: The Dial Press, 1924), pp. 30-31 and passim. Also, Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution (London: Heineman, 1915). Kropotkin's ethical ideas were based in large part on biological theories. As against Nietzsche (and in part Spencer) he contended that not the "struggle for existence" but Mutual Aid is "the predominant fact of nature," the prevailing practice within the species, and "the chief factor of progressive evolution."

12. The phrase "social cooperation," in this chapter and throughout the book, is of course to be interpreted only in its most comprehensive meaning. It is not intended to refer to "cooperation" between individuals or groups against other individuals or groups-as when we speak of cooperation with the Nazis, or the Communists, or the enemy. Nor is it intended to refer to that kind of compulsory "cooperation" that superiors sometimes insist on from subordinates-unless this is compatible with a comprehensive cooperation with the aims of society as a whole. Nor is it, for the same reason, intended to apply to cooperation with a mere temporary or local majority, when this Is incompatible with a broader cooperation for the achievement of human aims.

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