3.3. Morality and lack Responses to lacking can be broken down into three categories. First, people may use the surrounding nature to satisfy their needs. From an economic point of view, productive efforts depend on human ingenuity and available tools. In the sense of satisfaction of human needs, however, this relationship with the surrounding world is limited. It is relatively inefficient because it is devoid of cooperation and specialization. Second, in order to meet one’s needs, a person may seek to derive benefit through coercion against other individuals: through war, robbery, theft, or slavery. Third, people can engage in voluntary relationships with others through mutual work and division of labor, cooperation, and voluntary exchange. Human activity, or simply our response to scarcity, is linked with morality in two ways. Firstly, only voluntary relationships that are free from violence can be regarded as moral. The absence of coercive elements distinguishes moral action from immoral. Violence, envy and deceit bring injustice, conflict, and impoverishment. This evil, man-induced lack is oppressive. It obscures lack as a primordial principle. Secondly, a response to scarcity may be a way to establish peaceful, voluntary, and efficient relations: Consistently practicing exchange as an expression of transformation of scarcity and facing it as a universal phenomenon, we see that human activities, as well as their ethical assessment, are closely related and influence each other (Matulevičius 2016: 237).
In the economic sense voluntary human relationships are much more efficient than coercion. It is impossible to objectively state that any coercive action is productive because it is impossible to compare the aggressor’s benefit to the damage that is suffered by the coerced party. More than that, because violence brings damage at least to one of the parties, it is less productive than relations in which both sides benefit. 56
