The Moral Economy | Page 8

the case of hunger appeased, or to objects in so far as
assimilated to interest, as in the case of food consumed. It follows that
goodness in a relative sense, in the sense of "good for," will attach to
whatever conduces to good in the absolute sense; that is, actions and
objects, such as agriculture and bread, that lead directly or indirectly to
the fulfilment of interest. But "good" and "good for," like their
opposites "bad" and "bad for," are never sharply distinguishable,
because the imagination anticipates the fortunes of interests, and
transforms even remote contingencies into actual victory or defeat.
Through their organization into life, the mechanisms of nature thus take
on the generic quality of good and evil. They either serve interests or
oppose them; and must be employed and assimilated, or avoided and
rejected {13} accordingly. Events which once indifferently happened
are now objects of hope and fear, or integral parts of success and
failure.
III
But that organization of life which denotes the presence of morality has
not yet been defined. The isolated interest extricates itself from
mechanism; and, struggling to maintain itself, does, it is true, divide the
world into good and bad, according to its uses. But the moral drama
opens only when interest meets interest; when the path of one unit of
life is crossed by that of another. Every interest is compelled to
recognize other interests, on the one hand as parts of its environment,
and on the other hand as partners in the general enterprise of life. Thus
there is evolved the moral idea, or principle of action, according to

which interest allies itself with interest in order to be free-handed and
powerful against the common hereditary enemy, the heavy inertia and
the incessant wear of the cosmos. Through morality a plurality of
interests becomes an economy, or community of interests.
I have thus far described the situation as though it were essentially a
social one. But while, historically speaking, it is doubtless always
social in one of its aspects, the essence of the matter is as truly
represented within the {14} group of interests sustained by a single
organism, when these, for example, are united in an individual
life-purpose. Morality is that procedure in which several interests,
whether they involve one or more physical organisms, are so adjusted
as to function as one interest, more massive in its support, and more
coherent and united in the common task of fulfilment. Interests morally
combined are not destroyed or superseded, as are mechanical forces, by
their resultant. The power of the higher interest is due to a summing of
incentives emanating from the contributing interests; it can perpetuate
itself only through keeping these interests alive. The most spectacular
instance of this is government, which functions as one, and yet derives
its power from an enormous variety of different interests, which it must
foster and conserve as the sources of its own life. In all cases the
strength of morality must lie in its liberality and breadth.
Morality is simply the forced choice between suicide and abundant life.
When interests war against one another they render the project of life,
at best a hard adventure, futile and abortive. I hold it to be of prime
importance for the understanding of this matter to observe that from the
poorest and crudest beginnings, morality is the massing of interests
against a reluctant cosmos. Life has been attended with discord and
mutual {15} destruction, but this is its failure. The first grumbling truce
between savage enemies, the first collective enterprise, the first
peaceful community, the first restraint on gluttony for the sake of
health, the first suppression of ferocity for the sake of a harder blow
struck in cold blood,--these were the first victories of morality. They
were moral victories in that they organized life into more
comprehensive unities, making it a more formidable thing, and
securing a more abundant satisfaction. The fact that life thus combined

and weighted, was hurled against life, was the lingering weakness, the
deficiency which attends upon all partial attainment. The moral triumph
lay in the positive access of strength.
Let us now correct our elementary conceptions of value so that they
may apply to moral value. The fulfilment of a simple isolated interest is
good, but only the fulfilment of an organization of interests is morally
good. Such goodness appears in the realization of an individual's
systematic purpose or in the well-being of a community. That it
virtually implies one ultimate good, the fulfilment of the system of all
interests, must necessarily follow; although we cannot at present deal
adequately with that conclusion.
The quality of moral goodness, like the quality of goodness in the
fundamental sense, lies not in the nature of any class of objects, but in
any {16} object