This is a two-part post. It begins with four pages found in the papers of John Maurice Clark — a request for informal feedback regarding a new area for social science funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, “Ethical Issues in Economic Life”, followed by a two page informal response by the Columbia economics professor (son of John Bates Clark whose face appears in the rear-view mirror of our homepage).
Out of curiosity, I followed up to see what, if anything, followed this exchange of letters. The funding resulted in ten volumes published in a series “On the Ethics and Economics of Society” published by Harper & Brothers for the National Council of Churches (the National Council included the Federal Council of Churches that had received the first Rockefeller Foundation grant for the project in 1949). Participating economists included John Maurice Clark, Kenneth E. Boulding, William Vickrey, Frank H. Knight, Elizabeth E. Hoyt, Margaret G. Reid, Joseph L. McConnell, Janet M. Hooks, and Howard R. Bowen. Bowen’s notion of Corporate Social Responsibility captured the souls and minds of many business leaders of the time — of course in the era of Charles and David Koch, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, et al. this sounds rather quaint, but it was indeed a thing! New Harmony was once a thing too.
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Brainstorming with John Maurice Clark
THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
49 WEST 49th STREET, NEW YORK 20
THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
JOSEPH H. WILLITS, DIRECTOR
LELAND G. ALLBAUGH, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
NORMAN S. BUCHANAN, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
LELAND C. DEVINNEY, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
ROGER F. EVANS, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
BRYCE WOOD, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
CABLE ADDRESS:
ROCKFOUND, NEW YORK
July 7, 1948
Dear Clark:
I turn to you on a problem which I would very much like to think out with you. The object of this letter is to begin that process. Perhaps it is presumptuous on my part to ask to share your considered reflection on a difficult subject; but such assaults on your time are the price you pay for possessing the kind of experience and insights that men respect.
The program of The Rockefeller Foundation has emphasized support to expand knowledge. I assume it will continue to do so, since the foundation provided by such work is basic in any effort to serve human welfare. But it grows steadily more evident that illumination in the moral issues of modern society is needed, not as a substitute for, but as a building upon, the best of scientific knowledge and the facts of experience.
Each division of the Foundation has to approach this problem in terms of its own area of responsibility. In the Social Sciences division we are trying to answer the question whether Rockefeller Foundation support can function effectively in this area by examining the questions involved in this subject: “Ethical Issues in Economic Life.” In is in this connection that I would very much value your judgment.
I don’t need to elaborate this subject to you. It is evident that the ethical issues of western civilization – those growing out of corporate organization, and the organization of labor, those of individuals acting in behalf of and under the direction of others, and all those involved in the great complexities of modern social relations that lead to conflict of loyalties – are subjects of the greatest confusion in men’s minds. Studies to define these issues more clearly have the possibility of being a fruitful supplement to efforts to expand knowledge. But, I repeat, that such studies should be built upon the best of human experience and scientific knowledge and should not attempt to detour the findings from these areas.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I am asking a few men whose judgment and insights I respect whether they would assist the Foundation in its consideration of possibilities of Foundation action in the field of “Ethical Issues in Economic Life.” You are one of these.
Specifically, I am writing to ask whether you would be willing to give us, as soon as convenient, your advice on such questions as the following:
(1) Do you think this field offers a constructive opportunity for The Rockefeller Foundation?
(2) What are the objectives that could be set up to guide studies in this field?
(3) From your own study and experience, what do you consider the aspects of the problem which may most fruitfully be given attention?
(4) Do you care to suggest the names of persons who would be competent or eligible to work on the problems you indicate as important?
(5) Any suggestions as to auspices, set-up, and procedure of attack which might occur to you would be appreciated.
This sounds as though I were asking for a formal document. I do not expect that. What I am asking for is an informal, conversational letter giving your first reactions to issues in policy we are facing. I would deeply appreciate it if you would give us your views.
Sincerely yours,
[signed]
Joseph H. Willits
Professor J. Maurice Clark
512 Fayerweather Hall
Columbia University
New York 27, New York
JHW:DAA
Dictated by Mr. Willits but signed in his absence.
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John Maurice Clark’s Response
3-Corner Pond, R.D.6, Augusta, Maine, July 13, ’48
Dr. Joseph H. Willits;
Rockefeller Foundation;
49 West 49 St.;
New York 20, N.Y.;
Dear Joe:
Needless to say, your question about ethical issues in economic life interests me hugely. It’s a tremendous set of problems, and can be approached in a variety of ways which might make useful contributions, including some that might be superficially inconsistent with one another. It might be approached by separate studies, or merely by broadening the perspective of the ordinary kinds of studies so as to admit ethical questions. It might attempt to formulate ethical standards and apply them, or to preserve “scientific” objectivity and impartiality and merely report what judgments and standards of an ethical sort enter into the motivation of actual behavior. Or it may describe actual processes, and the alternatives involved in policy decisions, in terms of the values that enter into ethical judgments. In such cases the verdict may be fairly self-evident, or it may not. It may reveal a conflict of values which existing ethical generalizations do not resolve – for example, different kinds of “freedom” in conflict with one another. I am enough of a Dewey disciple to feel that one of the great services of the “social sciences” is to increase the detail and specific content of our knowledge of the nature of the alternatives that face us, thereby leading to inevitable modifications of the judgments we have made in the past, thereby causing ethical standards to evolve. In some cases, the verdict is plain enough so that the “social scientist” is warranted in recording it for himself, without fear of doing violence to accepted and prevailing standards; in other cases, it may constitute a problem needing to be submitted to whatever is the proper tribunal or symposium.
One form of approach would try to make a connection between two kinds of ethical standard, either of which might be taken as the initial starting-point. One is the kinds and degrees of consideration for the “rights” of others that are necessary to make our system work; the other is the existing conceptions of “rights” and obligations which people have to start with, on which to build toward the further developments that have been revealed as necessary. The result may be to put new content into the existing standards.
I tend to accept the prevailing set of standards of western or American society – the underlying ones, as I conceive them – as given data for most of our studies. I have been looking at a little book called “Advanced Economic Theory” by an Indian, J.K. Mehta, which undertakes the interesting job of tying together the neo-classical standard of maximizing utility with the Indian standard of attaining happiness through elimination of all wants, which he accepts as the highest standard, but attainable by only a select few. I don’t see that he succeeds very well – after all, even the select few have to eat, though he appears explicitly to disregard this necessity. For us, the expansion of wants seems to be dictated by the requirement of jobs, in our system; also by the requirement of economic power available for defense, as long as there is threat of war, and as long as we are incapable of living up to the ethic of non-resistance.
All of this may not be getting very close to the specific problems of Foundation studies. I think the field is tremendously important; but I have reservations about the advantage of setting it up as a distinct field, with the “ethical” label. There are undoubtedly some studies that could be set up in that way; but they make up only a part, and perhaps a relatively small part, of the whole area involved.
In the field of actual loyalties and conceptions of rights, the work that Bakke is doing at Yale seems significant, from what little I know about it. And you might get good leads from Ordway Tead and Beardsley Ruml. From the more distinctively ethical angle, I have a nephew, John Alden Clark, who is professor of philosophy at Colby College, who is trying to relate the development of ethical standards to the kind of findings as to facts and relations which the social sciences deal with; and you might be interested in getting in touch with him and finding out more than I can tell you offhand about what he is doing and whether it would fit in. There seems to be an important, and tremendously difficult job, in the field of actual motivation of business in its price and production policies, including the elements of responsibility for long-run good social policy, insofar as it may enter in. I’m thinking of the doing of a bigger and better job of the sort Hall and Hitch did in their Oxford study. The abstract theorists have given unconscious testimony to the significance of that job by the fervor with which they have attacked it. It seems to have gotten to them where they live – got under their skins. I am casually wondering whether Joel Dean would be useful in that connection.
Well, I have taken you at your word, and been thinking out loud, not too formally or systematically, and seem to have run out of constructive suggestions. There’s a lot there.
Sincerely yours;
J.M.Clark.
Source: Columbia University Libraries. Manuscript Collections. John M. Clark Collection. Box 28 (Economic Theory and Methodology). Folder “Welfare Economics”.
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MORAL AND ETHICAL PROBLEMS
IN MODERN SOCIETY
EXPLORATORY STUDIES
Thanks to grants from the Rockefeller Foundation program, the Study Committee of the Federal Council of Churches published the multi-volume series The Ethics and Economics of Society (Harper & Brothers). The first Rockefeller Foundation grant was for 1949-51, the second grant for 1952-[ca. 1955/56].
The Department of the Church and Economic Life of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America began the study of Christian Ethics and Economic Life in 1949. At the beginning of 1951 the Federal Council merged with other interdenominational organizations to form the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.
The Rockefeller Foundation in 1948 appropriated a fund of $25,000 to be used by officers of the Social Sciences in exploring opportunities for research on the moral and ethical problems in modern society.
It is planned to make a few grants to other agencies and to invite memoranda from men of affairs who have significant ideas to contribute.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation. Annual Report 1948, p. 250.
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Project Publications
- Goals of Economic Life (1953) edited by A. Dudley Ward (Director of the Project, staff member of the National Council of Churches)
Editorial Committee: John Maurice Clark (economist); Theodore M. Greene (philosopher); Reinhold Niebuhr (theologian); William Vickrey (economist).
Other contributors: Kenneth E. Boulding (economist); Clarence H. Danhof (economist); Eduard Heimann (economist); Robert Morrison MacIver (sociologist/political scientist); Frank H. Knight (economist); Clark C. Bloom (economist); Walton Hamilton (jurist); Alfred E. Emerson (zoologist); Ralph Linton (anthropologist); Donald Snygg (psychologist); John C. Bennett (theologian).
- The Organizational Revolution. A Study in the Ethics of Economic Organization (1953) by Kenneth E. Boulding (economist).
- Social Responsibilities of the Businessman (1953) by Howard R. Bowen (economist). – Considered to be the origin of the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility.
- American Income and Its Use (1954) by Elizabeth E. Hoyt (economist), Margaret G. Reid (economist), Joseph L. McConnell (economist), and Janet Montgomery Hooks (economist).
- The American Economy—Attitudes and Opinions (1955) by A. Dudley Ward.
- Christian Values and Economic Life (1954) by John Coleman Bennett (theologian), Howard R. Bowen (economist), William Adams Brown, Jr. (economist) and G. Bromley Oxnam (president of World Council of Churches, 1948-54).
- Ethics in a Business Society (1954) by Marquis W. Childs (journalist) and Douglass Cater (journalist, later special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson). “Our volume was originally stimulated by the series itself. During our writing we have had access to both the published volumes and the manuscripts wstill to be published and other sources. What we have written, therefore, is not a part of the study series itself but rather our interpretaion and reflection on all the materials we have used.”
- Social Responsibility in Farm Leadership (1956) by Walter W. Wilcox (agricultural economist).
- Social Responsibilities of Organized Labor (1957) by John A. Fitch (industrial relations)
- Responsibility in Mass Communication (1957) by Wilbur Schramm
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Christian Principles and Assumptions for Economic Life. Adopted by the General Board of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (September 15, 1954).
“Ten Books on Ethics and Economics” article in Christianity Today (22 June 1959). Full access requires subscription.