Work (ethics)

“ Some day the ethics of business will be universally recognized, and in that day business will be seen to be the oldest and most useful of all the professions. ”

“ But oftentimes it takes rather definite characteristics to do this.
Every business institution has, or should have, its moral, commercial, financial, artistic, and other standards with reference to personnel, according to the character of the business and other important considerations. And the man who contemplates work with any firm will examine himself to see whether he can harmonize happily with these standards. In like manner, every profession and art has its traditional standards and ethics, which should be considered. ”

“ Without this ethical factor, without a constant enrolment and subordination, modern civilisation could never have reached its present development. Yet we cannot deny that this morality of work has inner limitations. The technical side of work does indeed repress and even destroy all individual will ”

“ Alas, life is everywhere one long protest against a varying standard of ethics. Shall we separate the ethics of household service from the ethics of the shop, the ethics of the factory, the ethics of the professions? Shall we be governed by one code in the family, by another code in the church, by a third code in the school, and a fourth code in the state? Is the subject of ethics to be divided and pigeon-holed in compartments labeled “ethics for domestic service,” “ethics for skilled labor,” “ethics for unskilled labor,” “ethics for employers,” and “ethics for employees?” ”

“ Even the employer is beginning to see that practical ethics, or true Christianity, and business cannot and must not be divorced; that the man he employs, instead of being a mere animal whose services he buys, is, after all his fellow-man and his brother, and demands a treatment as such, and that when he fails to recognize this truth, a righteous God steps in, demanding a penalty for its violation. ”

“ The industry which the title of this paper designates as belated is that of domestic labor, which is belated, both ethically and industrially; the status of its ethics operating very largely as the determining factor in its industrial situation. ”

“ This is the enormous advantage which society derives from the honor of its members, and for the sake of which society permits the individual to do things which are otherwise both by ethics and law positively forbidden. ”

“ In any other view it is a maze, a mystery, a hopeless embroilment.
That ethics is involved in society is of course admitted; what is not admitted is, that ethical terms should be settled under the social science in the first place. I may refer to the leading term "law," whose meaning in sociology is remarkably clear; in ethics remarkably the reverse. The confusion deepens when the moral faculty is brought forward. In the eye of the sociologist, nothing could be simpler than the conception of that part of our nature that is appealed to for securing obedience. ”

“ The assistance which the judgment of others can give in the choice of a vocation is, for the most part, of little use to the adult; and whatever the minor advantages of an elimination of the certain amount of disturbance consequent on changes of [Pg 550] occupation, the harm to society of restriction on efforts in any direction of useful labor must more than counterbalance these. ”

“ Somehow, character must be built up, and character depends upon industry, upon thrift, upon morals, upon correct ethical perceptions. To have control of one's powers, to have skill in labor, so that work in any occupation shall be intelligent, to have self-respect, which commonly comes from trained capacity, to know how to live, to have a clean, orderly house, to be grounded in honesty and the domestic virtues,—these are the essentials of progress. ”

“ Business has during the past two centuries been the great civilizer, the great moral teacher. It has found that honesty and righteousness pay and that injustice is folly. Business has led the way to the acceptance of a new ethics, and new morals. ”

“ As business men report, their occupation is not so entirely healthy that no change and no relief could be desired. They say—we quote from varied and extensive testimony—that the trades, and even the professions, are but few in which a scrupulous regard is shown for genuine, as distinct from legal, honesty. It really seems then that some little intermission might be advocated, and accepted by the saner portion of the world. A wholesome change of occupation might improve the moral tone, and possibly revive the spirit of our business men. ”

“ Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the ‘data of ethics’ when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.” ”

“ The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions of a very different environment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth century. ”

“ On the other hand, we need a new statement of ethics in general. The philosopher, who is going to do it, will have to get much of his material from the labor movement and will in turn render a profound service to it. ”

“ In obedience, again, to another code of ethics, occupations that catered for the sensuous side of human nature, and every occupation without any fixed scale of remuneration, suffered some taint of ignominy. ”

“ The community, however, in its longer life, is subject to [Pg 40] the full influence of the certain though sometimes slow-working relations of cause to effect, relations which, among other things, bring out the essential connection between economics and ethics, and which show in the long-run the just method to be the wise method. ”

“ A fashionable counter-theory which proves to be unjustifiable. On the one hand, while we find that individual life and social life both imply maintenance of the natural relation between efforts and benefits; we also find that this natural relation, recognized before Government existed, has been all along asserting and reasserting itself, and obtaining better recognition in codes of law and systems of ethics. ”

“ It rests on the non-ethical principle that some people deserve from society a great reward for work they have pleasure in doing, while the toilers engaged 56in irksome, dangerous, dirty, distasteful work—however necessary to the whole community—are only entitled to a pittance wage. ”

“ We would make all who are capable, work. We would give the rewards to those who produce, to all who produce by intellect or labor. We would do away with those who live on the producers—the leeches who suck the life-blood. Work, intellectual or physical, should be the law of society. ”

“ Of things, whether natural products or products of human industry, as rock or star or stream, or ship or watch or engine, we cannot predicate moral character. We may speak of them as beautiful, useful, or perfect, or as ugly, useless, or faulty, but all distinctly ethical terms are inapplicable to them. ”

“ There is no department of ethics more disputed than the meaning of abstract right and wrong, and as I am not talking either on philosophy or ethics I will ask you to accept just such commonsense definitions as can be applied to the business world and that may be usefully employed as a working basis. Commercial morality and honesty are determined by each community for itself in the light of its own special needs and point of evolution. ”

“ I maintain that labor has no moral quality at all. Every function in social work which is useful to society is just as meritorious in every way as any other; each being suitable and an object of choice to the person who performs it. The moral quality depends on the way in which it is performed. The social estimate and the personal worth which should be ascribed to social functions depends on the way in which the man we have in mind does his duty. ”

“ Our ethics is only a vague outline, not a matured system, and in the details of social contact—as between employer and workman, rich and poor, Negro and white, and so on—there is such a lack of accepted standards that men have little to go by but their crude impulses. ”

“ These events epitomized and exaggerated, but at the same time challenged, the code of ethics which regulates much of our daily conduct, and clearly showed that so-called social relations are often resting upon the will of an individual, and are in reality regulated by a code of individual ethics. ”

“ Canons of professional ethics have been adopted by lawyers and doctors; any member of these professions who is guilty of breaking these canons suffers loss of prestige and, almost inevitably, financial loss. So must it be in every industry; each must be organized and must formulate for itself its code; so that pressure from within will supplement pressure from without. There is plenty of capacity for loyalty, self-denial, and discipline in men, even in captains of industry ”

“ Capitalist industry, in which his father played a growing part, was symbolized by the employer's fingers, like a legitimatized sneak-thief's, perpetually in the laborer's pocket-book. It was all the worse that accepted morality, law, even the church, pronounced it righteous. ”

“ The records of past munificence with their evidence of interest in giving as a means of grace for the giver, of indifference regarding the supposed beneficiaries, of wholesale prescriptions of what is proper for “the poor,” of breaking up of families, imposition of uniform labor and total disregard of private claims must be either unknown or forgotten by people who think a decay of neighborly respect and an inclination to regiment the dependent have been produced by the innovations of scientific social work. ”

“ Justice.—Workers are bound to give a fair return in quantity and quality of labor for the pay they receive, and to be loyal to their employer as regards his person, reputation, and property. Hence, it is unjust to loaf or come late or leave early, to turn out work too slowly or of an inferior grade, to damage machinery or property, to waste food or provisions, to act as a household spy or informer, to try to extort what is not due. ”

“ Therefore I welcome today's opportunity to outline, however briefly, why I have deemed it essential that we collectively pursue a reflection on ethics, and how we, as a people, would benefit from setting about the task of formulating an appropriate discourse for a change in public consciousness. ”

“ During the transitional stages there are necessitated successive compromises between the moral code which asserts the claims of the society versus those of the individual, and the moral code which asserts the claims of the individual versus those of the society. ”

“ An open honesty that is such and seems such, that is not beyond the aim and reach of common men, that is taught in scores of forms in "Poor Richard's Almanack," and that each man ever likes [244] to meet with and so ought ever to put forth, is in fact a preventive of conflicts between laborers and employers, and would if properly manifested have prevented multitudes of such actual conflicts. Here is the main, almost the sole, point of contact between strict Ethics and the Economics. ”

“ THE SCOPE OF SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY 469
institutions, then ethical science must wait on theoretical soci- ology. The debt and obligation are reciprocal, and progress in each science depends on parallel progress of the other. In many books on ethics the writer passes from his own data to dogmatic deductions about social relations and institutions, as if he needed no exact knowledge of these relations and institutions to com- plete his valuation and make it reliable and verifiable. ”

“ Every social relation has its ethics; and the general needs of society, as a whole, are the basis of ethics. In every age and race this may be studied, and a clear connection established always between the virtues and vices of a given people and their local conditions. The principal governing condition in the development of ethics is the economic environment. ”

“ Does the question of right depend simply, or at all, upon the degree of happiness which the laborer enjoys? And have I, then, a right to make any man work for me, according to my will and pleasure, provided I take care to feed and clothe him well, and make him as happy as any laborer can expect to be? ”

“ To deny laborers any legal status as persons, and any social status as human souls,—to give them fodder for food, and pens for homes,—to withhold from them the school, the table, and the sanctities of marriage,—if that is not "hiring them for life," what is it? To affirm, by consistent practice, that no spiritual, no human value appertains to the life of laboring men and women,—to rate them in their very persons as commercial values, measuring the virtue of their existence with coin, as cloths are measured with a yardstick,—this, we all see, is "hiring them for life"! ”

“ Every one of our actions, whether we wish it or not, exercises some influence on other human beings in the social community in which we live. By our conduct we help to uphold or undermine the principles on which the various social institutions are based ”

“ As I read and observe I think workingmen hear much indiscriminate denunciation of the alleged selfishness, injustice and heartlessness of employers of labor, and but very little, if indeed anything, in the way of admonition or advice to themselves to do faithful, intelligent and efficient work, and in that way to command desirable positions and adequate pay. ”