The Foundations of Morality

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.

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.

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.

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 “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 II clearly recognizes this:

In civilized society [the individual] stands at all times in need of the co-operation 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 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.