Pickering: Have you no morals, man?Doolittle: Can’t afford them, Governor.

This exchange occurs in George Bernard Shaw’s play "Pygmalion" (1912–1913), during a scene in which Alfred Doolittle—Eliza Doolittle’s father, a witty and opportunistic dustman—sparrs verbally with Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering. Pickering, a gentleman of conventional decency, challenges Doolittle about his ethics. Doolittle replies that morality is a luxury: the poor, he argues, are pressured by necessity and excluded from the social respectability that “morals” often presuppose. Shaw uses Doolittle as a comic mouthpiece for social criticism, exposing how Victorian/Edwardian moral judgments can ignore economic reality and class constraints.

Doolittle’s retort turns a moral accusation into an economic diagnosis. “Morals” here are not timeless principles but a social commodity—something easier to practice when one has security, leisure, and the protection of respectability. Shaw highlights how the language of virtue can function as class discipline: the poor are condemned for choices made under pressure, while the comfortable treat their own circumstances as evidence of character. The line also captures Doolittle’s self-aware cynicism: he is not claiming to be immoral by nature, but insisting that society has priced him out of conventional virtue. It is a compact critique of moralizing that ignores material conditions.