Is Political Economy Amoral?

Oscar B. Johannsen

[Reprinted from The Gargoyle, September, 1961]

Political economy is a science. Is it, therefore, amoral? The assumption underlying the physical sciences, as physics, chemistry, and astronomy, is that they are amoral, that is, they are outside the realm of ethical judgments. There is no question of right or wrong about the law of gravity, or the attraction and repulsion of electrical charges. Theses phenomena just are.

That being the case, as political economy also is a science must we assume it is necessarily amoral and questions of right and wrong have no place in it? Now, it is true that natural laws control it, but it does not follow that no ethical judgments are involved. All phenomena are controlled by natural laws. The laws of justice are as much a part of nature as any physical laws. But justice has to do with ethics, with questions of right and wrong.

In exchanging wealth, what do we do? Ordinarily, there is an actual physical exchange of wealth, as when you barter a apple for an orange. In such cases each party physically hands to the other articles of wealth. But is that all that happens? No, for in the case of the apple and the orange, rights were also transferred. Each individual had a right to the article he exchanged. That right came from the fact that he is a human being. As such, he has a God-given right to live. In order to live, however, he has to have food, clothing and. shelter. He can only obtain these things by expending his labor on the land. By so doing, he incorporates in these things his labor, his personality. They become his property because he has expended his effort to produce them in order to maintain his life. He has a right to life, and his right to the things he produces in order to maintain his life. This right to property assumes he has made due recompense to his fellowman for the exclusive use of the land to which all have equal rights.)

Thus the apple and the orange are the property of the individuals who produced them, they not only exchanged the fruit physically, but they gave to each other their respective rights to the fruit.

The mere fact that there had been the bartering of the apple for the orange would not mean that either of them had the right to do so. The fruit may have been stolen. In such a case, the fact that a physical exchange had been made would not constitute an exchange in an economic sense as no rights were exchanged, for neither party had any rights to the fruit.

All exchanges, of course, are not physical. If you sell your home, you cannot physically give it to the buyer. What you do is to give your rights to the house to the buyer. In such cases, we go through elaborate procedures by means of legal documents, as title deeds, to attest to the fact that the rights are exchanged. Thus, we usually are aware that rights are involved, but this is true of all exchanges.

In the case of land, when we pay rent for it, actually we are paying for the right to the exclusive use of the land. Since all mankind have rights to every part of the land we must pay the rent to those who have rights to the land. When we pay it to the legal "owner", we are paying him for something to which he has no greater right than anyone else. We are paying wealth to him to which he is entitled only one part out of all the totality of mankind existing. If 2 billion people exist on the earth he is entitled to his one-two billioneth share, but that is all. He is no more entitled to the rest of the rent than is the man with a stolen apple entitled to whatever he sells it for.

Political economy is concerned with rights. Its whole foundation is rights, which is probably why arguments on aspects of it almost invariably wind up in appeals to justice, to what is right. In physics, scientists do not argue that the law of gravity is correct because it is a just law. In contrast, in political, economy we are always appealing to justice to reinforce our belief in the correctness of the principles which we arrive at through pure reasoning. We can't help ourselves for the simple reason that the fundamental basis of political economy is an ethical one. Political economy is truly a moral science, not an amoral one.