Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/283

 CRITERION OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE 269

ground of desert. Or if desert were attributed to it this would be solely on the ground that during the time thus occupied we might have been engaged in serving ourselves instead of those to whom we are supposed to be personally indifferent. In a word we are considered to deserve well of others only in so far as the attempt to serve them has involved genuine sacrifice of inclina- tion in some form or other. Any interpretation of the term less thoroughgoing than this the moralist must hold to be inadmissible. Thoughtful advocates of the existing industrial system fre- quently attempt to vindicate its justice on the ground that it involves an exchange of equivalents, value for value, service for service, so that a man's share of the world's wealth is propor- tional to the amount he has contributed to its production. Denying the fact, many socialists have held up this same prin- ciple of reward according to service as the ideal to be striven for. But whatever may be said in favor of such a plan on the score of "expediency," our definition shows that it does not involve even remotely the apportionment of reward according to desert. The amount of social service which any person actually performs is determined only in part by the faithfulness with which he devotes himself to his business. Keen powers of observation, good judgment, insight, tact, a tenacious memory, the power of combining facts apparently remote, and even a sound digestion, good spirits, and excellent health, to say nothing of dispatch and native energy, determine very largely the amount of a man's contribution to the world's wealth. One brakeman out of a hundred thousand may rise to be the presi- dent of a railroad, but who does not know that his faithfulness to his humbler duties was but a small element in his success ? The main point was that he had "brain- ." This would hold true in Utopia itself. The amount of service any man is capable of performing depends to a very large extent on gifts which nature implanted in him at birth, and how far the abilities he possesses at any given time are dependent upon that original endowment, and how far upon conscientious cultivation, no human being can ever know.