? This is a matter of my ethical point of view. Do I want
them at the price demanded or at what price and how many? This is the
economic question and it obviously is a question wholly ethical in
import--more broadly and inclusively ethical, in fact, than the ethical
question in its earlier and more humanly inviting form. And what we have
now to see is the fact that no consideration that has a bearing upon the
problem in its ethical phase can lose its importance and relevance in
the subsequent phase.

There can be no restriction of the economic interest, for example, to
egoism. If on general principles I would really rather use goods
produced in safe and cleanly factories or produced by "union labor,"
there is no possible reason why this should not incline me to pay the
higher prices that such goods may cost and make the needful readjustment
in my budget. Is there reason why my valuation of these goods should
_not_ thus be the decisive act that takes me out of one relation to
industrial workers and sets me in another--can anything else, indeed,
quite so distinctly do this? For economic valuation is only the fixation
of a purchase price, or an exchange relation in terms of price and
quantity, upon which two schemes of life, two differing perspectives of
social contact and relationship converge--the scheme of life from which
I am departing and the one upon which I have resolved to make my hazard.
It is this election, this transition, that the purchase price
expresses--drawing all the strands of interest and action into a knot so
that a single grasp may seize them. The only essential egoism in the
case lies in the "subjectivism" of the fact that inevitably the
emergency and the act are mine and not another's. This is the
"egocentric predicament" in its ethical aspect. And the egocentric
predicament proves Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld as little as it proves
Berkeley or Karl Pearson. No social interest, no objective interest of
any sort, is shown ungenuine by my remembering in season that if I
cannot fill my coal-bin I shall freeze.[57]

Sec. 15. This logical and psychological continuity of the ethical and
economic problems suggests certain general considerations of some
practical interest. In the first place as to "egoism." I am, let us say,
an employer. If I am interested in procuring just "labor," in the sense
of foot-pounds of energy, then undoubtedly labor performed under safe
and healthful conditions is worth no more to