For men find that they best promote their own interests in the long run not merely by refraining from injury to their fellows, but by cooperating with them. Social cooperation is the foremost means by which the majority of us attain most of our ends. It is on the implicit if not the explicit recognition of this that our codes of morals, our rules of conduct, are ultimately based. We shall find also, when we have explored the subject further, that there are no irreconcilable conflicts between egoism and altruism, between selfishness and benevolence, between the long-run interests of the individual and those of society. In most cases in which such conflicts appear to exist, the appearance exists because only short-run consequences, and not consequences over the long run, are being taken into consideration.
Social cooperation is, of course, itself a means.
It is a means to the never completely attainable goal of maximizing the happiness and well-being of mankind. But the great difficulty of making the latter our direct goal is the lack of unanimity in the tastes, ends, and value judgments of individuals. An activity that gives one man pleasure may be a great bore to another. One man's meat is another man's poison. In brief, the aim of each of us to satisfy his own desires, to achieve as far as possible his own highest happiness and well-being, is best forwarded by a common means, Social Cooperation, and cannot be achieved without that means.