§1.The task of a human valuation of industry involved at the outset the arbitrary assumption of a standard of value.That standard consisted in a conception of human well-being applicable to the various forms of human life, man as individual, as group or nation, as humanity.Starting from that conception of the health, physical and spiritual, of the individual human organism, which is of widest acceptance, we proceeded to apply the organic metaphor to the larger groupings, so as to build up an intelligible standard of social well-being.This standard, at once physical and spiritual, static and progressive, was assumed to be of such a kind as to provide a harmony of individual welfares when the growing social nature of man was taken into due account.
With the standard of human well-being we then proceeded to assign values to the productive and the consumptive processes of which industry consists, examining them in their bearing upon the welfare of the individuals and the societies engaging in them.
Now this mode of procedure, the only possible, of course involved an immense petitio principii.The assumption of any close agreement as to the nature of individual well-being, still more of social well-being, was logically quite unwarranted.
Economic values have, indeed, an agreed, exact and measurable meaning, derived from the nature of the monetary standard in which they are expressed.
Now, no such standard of the human value of economic goods or processes can be established.Yet we pretended to set up a standard of social value and to apply a calculus based upon it, claiming to assess the human worth which underlies the economic costs and utilities that enter into economic values.
Has this procedure proved utterly illicit? I venture to think not.
Though at the outset our standard was only a general phrase committing nobody to anything, the process of concrete application, in testing the actual forms of work and wealth which make up industry, gave to it a continual increase of meaning.While the widest divergence would be found in the formal definitions of such terms as "human welfare" or "social progress,"a large and growing body of agreement would emerge, when a sufficient number of practical issues had been brought-up for consideration.The truth of our standard and the validity of our calculus are established by this working test.It is not wonderful that this should be so, for the nature and circumstances of mankind have so much in common, and the processes of civilisation are so powerfully assimilating them, as to furnish a continually increasing community of experience and feeling.It is, of course, this fund of 'common sense' that constitutes the true criterion.The assumption that 'common sense' is adequate for a task at once so grave and delicate may, indeed, appear very disputable.Granting that human experience has so much in common, can it be claimed that the reasoning and the feeling based on this experience will be so congruous and so sound as to furnish any reliable guide for conduct? Surely 'common sense' in its broadest popular sense can go a very little way towards such a task as a human interpretation of industry.
There is no doubt a good deal of force in this objection.If we are to invoke 'common sense' for the purposes of an interpretation or a valuation, it must evidently be what is termed an 'enlightened common sense.' And here at once we are brought into danger lest enlightenment should not supply what is required, viz., a clearer or more fully conscious mode of common sense, but a distorted or sophisticated mode.How real this danger is, especially in the conduct of public affairs, may be recognised from the excessive part played by certain highly conscious and over-vocal interests of the commercial and intellectual classes in the art of government.The most pressing task of Civilisation in the self-governing nations of our time is so to spread the area of effective enlightenment as to substitute the common sense of the many for that of the few, and to make it prevail.
It is this common sense, more or less enlightened, that the disinterested statesman takes for the sanction of his reading of the general will which he endeavours to express in the conduct of public affairs.That it is never at any time a certain, a perfectly coherent, a precise criterion, will be readily admitted.But that it is sufficiently intelligible, sufficiently sound, is the necessary presupposition of all democratic statecraft.And, so far as it is thus serviceable, it supplies a valid standard and a valid calculus of social values.Though the reading of this standard and the application of this calculus will always be subject to some bias of personal idiosyncrasy, the weight of the general judgment commonly prevails in the more important processes of social valuation.
But, in pinning our faith to enlightened common sense for an interpretation or valuation of industry, we must not allow ourselves to be deceived as to the amount of 'scientific accuracy' which attends such a procedure.
While this standard can and must supply the rules and measurements which we apply in the processes of detailed analysis and comparison by which we estimate the costs and utilities and the net human values of the various industrial activities and products, we must not put into this standard a stability it does not possess, or into the quantitative methods it uses an authority for social conduct which they are inherently disqualified from yielding.
