The Harvest of RuskinGraham, John W. (John William)
Religion
The Harvest of Ruskin
Graham, John W. (John William)
Ruskin, John, 1819-1900
“Political Economy, being a science of wealth, must be a science
respecting human capacities and dispositions. But moral considerations
have nothing to do with political economy (says Mill). Therefore, moral
considerations have nothing to do with human capacities and
dispositions.”[61]
Perhaps the logical fallacy is not very obvious, but it is there. Human
capacities and dispositions touch moral considerations on one side, and
they touch political economy on the other. But these two need not
therefore be connected. Because a man has two relations, as a citizen
and as a father, and because the state does not bring up his children,
and the two relations are separate, we must not argue that the man has
nothing to do with his family, because the state, with which he is also
connected, has nothing to do with it. All this wrong criticism was
produced by the obvious remark of Mill, that the ethical character of a
taste for diamonds is not the economist’s affair.
It is only as a first approximation, then, that economics postulates the
monster known as the economic man; cold, calculating, well informed,
shrewd, selfish with the unthinking uniformity of a machine. It is
perhaps clearer to say that it can take account only of such motives as
are sufficiently regular and predictable to be worth so much in money.
Some unselfish actions are of that kind, such as a man’s service to his
children, or if he be a Highlander to his third cousin; and we can
predict certain of his regular subscriptions. The Law of Supply and
Demand applies to ministers and missionaries and hospital nurses, though
their payment is all from charitable gifts. To some extent the Charity
Fund is a steady sum in any nation. It could be predicted that when the
national War Fund was absorbing large sums, other charities,
particularly London charities, would suffer; and such has been the case.
The same phenomenon occurred to a less degree when General Booth was
raising his Darkest England Fund. Here is a charitable motive steady
enough to be measurable.
It is not assumed here, as so constantly asserted by Ruskin, that men
are and must be treated as rogues. The argument of Ruskin was that the
qualifications to be introduced into problems due to the fact that man
is not an economic man, are not like allowances for friction, or other
mechanical matters, but are organic and revolutionary. The right reply
probably is that sometimes this is so, but far more generally not so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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