Studi umanistici/Humanities

This paper is meant to find a way out of deadlocks in Malthus scholarship concerning his relationship to utilitarianism. The main claim is that Malthus viewed his own population theory and political economy as Hifsdisziplinen to moral and political philosophy, that is, empirical enquiries required in order to be able to pronounce justified value judgments on such matters as the Poor Laws. On the other hand, Malthus’s population theory and political economy were no value-free science and his policy advice - far from being ‘utilitarian’ - resulted from his overall system of ideas and was explicitly based on a set of traditional moral assumptions. These in turn were justified by a peculiar meta-ethical theory, which has been named in a somewhat improper way ‘theological utilitarianism’ and which I propose to name instead ‘consequentialist voluntarism’. The theoretical item that has misled interpreters is mention of the ‘test of Utility’ as a way of discovering whether a principle is a moral law or a ‘law of nature’. The point is that for Malthus, the test of utility is just a way for discovering the will of the Creator, and accordingly the laws of nature that he has ‘imposed’ to his creatures. The test is not, unlike Bentham and his followers, a standard for establishing what is right and wrong in itself. The issue of poverty and its remedies is the one where Malthus’s peculiar approach, once applied to a real-world issue, displays it potentialities, yielding a kind of policy-advice that is softer and more flexible than the one that may be drawn from Benthamite utilitarianism. The reconstruction shows how, through subsequent approximations and under pressure of critics, Malthus yields finally a kind of institutional approach to policies concerning poverty, making room for generalised basic education, free markets for labour and (from a certain date on) for corn, colonies, and allowing for a subsidiary role for private beneficence. The goal to be aimed at by such a mix of policies is bringing about “circumstances which tend to elevate the character of the lower classes of society”, so that they will no more accept to deprive “themselves and their children of the means of being respectable, virtuous and happy”

Table of contents

Preface

1. Introduction: Malthus the Utilitarian vs. Malthus the Christian moral thinker

2. Eighteenth-century Anglican ethics

ETHICS IN THE CONTEXT OF CAMBRIDGE EDUCATION
A NON-CALVINIST ETHICAL TRADITION
CAMBRIDGE MORAL PHILOSOPHY AT MALTHUS’S TIME
Hey
Watson
Paley
Watts
NON-OFFICIAL SOURCES
Tucker
Hume

3. Malthus’s metaethics

MORAL ONTOLOGY
Happiness
Laws of nature
MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY
Religion, morality, and the veil of ignorance
Conscience
The Golden Rule
The test of Utility
The function of general rules
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Mind, inertia, and the need for stimuli
Passions and self-love
Moral sentiments


4. Malthus’s early normative ethics: a morality of freedom

MALTHUS’S 1798 POLITICS
MALTHUS’S FIRST THEODICY
THE PLACE FOR MORALITY IN A DISMAL WORLD
MALTHUS’S FIRST THEODICY UNDER FIRE

5. Malthus’s intermediate normative ethics: a morality of prudence

PALEYITE THEODICY AND THE PLACE OF MORALITY
Paley’s Theodicy
Malthus’s second theodicy
NATURAL VIRTUES
Benevolence
Chastity
ARTIFICIAL VIRTUES
Respect for rights
Love of equality
Love of liberty
PRUDENCE


6. Malthus’s mature normative ethics: a morality of humanity

HUMANITY
THE MALTHUSIAN CONTROVERSY QUA APPLIED THEOLOGY
Critics from the right and critics from the left
Evangelicals: Gisborne
Evangelicals: Sumner
Evangelicals: Chalmers
MALTHUS’S THIRD THEODICY AND HIS RESTYLED ETHICS
Malthus’s1806 ethics
Malthus’s 1817 ethics
PARTIAL CONCLUSIONS: MALTHUS THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER



7. Malthus’s applied ethics

WAR ON POVERTY AS MORAL REFORM
Inequality as evil
More swings than ratios
Policies of self-reliance
FROM SEXUAL MORALITY TO PROCREATION ETHICS
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
REFORM
CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION AND THE IRISH ISSUE
WAR AS EVIL
ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE

8. General conclusions: strengthening the theological foundations

This paper discusses, first, the kind of Newtonian methodology Malthus had been exposed to at Cambridge; secondly, the views on algebra and the doctrine of proportions he inherited from MacLaurin and the contribution of his colleague Bewick Bewin in devising a special role for this doctrine in the moral sciences; thirdly, Malthus’s ideas on language and the reasons for rejection of an artificial language for political economy. Then it discusses his idea of political economy as a moral science and his claims to be Adam Smith’s true heir. The conclusion is that Hollander is right when he contends that Malthus’s and Ricardo’s methods, as contrasted with their methodologies, were just two opposite poles within one spectrum, but also that the Cantabrigian and Scottish tradition provided staple for a design of a moral and political science alternative to the Utilitarian Benthamite programs.

The paper discusses Ricardo’s relationship to Mill and Bentham. It discusses first the origins of the myth of Ricardo’s dependence from Bentham through Mill, and Halévy’s contribution to the freezing of such a myth. The paper reconstructs what were their shared political commitments and activities and the kind of specific political views and agenda that may be ascribed to Ricardo himself. The paper discusses then the question of Ricardo’s adhesion to Benthamite ethics. It examines fragments in Ricardo’s correspondence with Maria Edgeworth and Francis Place, and adds fresh light on the issue by highlighting the partial overlapping between Bentham’s ethics and the kind of intuitionism with theological consequentialism that Ricardo had learned from the Unitarian minister Thomas Belsham.

Starting with the reading of Adam Smith’s oeuvre I have carried out in previous papers, I discuss first the reasons why the 19th century mythology of homo economicus involved Adam Smith and Bentham in a constellation named ‘utilitarianism’ made of individualism, harmony of interests, hedonism, rationalism. Secondly, I try to reconstruct the main lines of Adam Smith’s philosophy of action, stressing the role of imagination, deception, and limited rationality. I argue that the limits-to-knowledge thesis plays an essential role not only in Smith’s epistemology, ethics, and natural theology, but also in his philosophy of action. In more detail, I argue that according to Smith action is prompted by limited knowledge of future events while the full knowledge of a (fully)ideal spectator would make choice and action impossible. Thus, Smith’s agent, even when he is not irrational, is steered by passions, sentiments, a degree of sympathy, self-interest (with limited knowledge of the real character of one’s own interests), and blindness to remote consequences. Thirdly, I discuss in this light the figures of the prudent man and the wise man. Fourthly, I try to shed light, on the basis of Adam Smith’s philosophy of action, on his characterization of landlords, labourers, merchants and manufacturers, and people in the middling ranks.

This paper reconstructs the ways in which metaphors are used in the text of “The Wealth of Nations”. Its claims are: a) metaphor statements are basically similar to those in the “Theory of the Moral Sentiments”; b) the metaphors’ ‘primary subjects’ refer to mechanics, hydraulics, blood circulation, agriculture, medicine; c) metaphors may be lumped together into a couple of families, the family of mechanical analogies, and that of iatro-political analogies. Further claims are: a basic physico-moral analogy is the framework for Smith’s psychological theory as well as for his overall social theory and for his theory of market mechanisms; a iatro-mechanical analogy is as pervasive as the physico-moral analogy and provides the framework for his overall evolutionary theory of society; the invisible-hand simile relies on the physico-moral analogy, and elaborates on the role of vis attractiva and vis a tergo in mechanics

The relationship between Adam Smith's official methodology and his own actual theoretical practice as a social scientist may be grasped only against the background of the Humean project of Moral Newtonianism. The main features in Smith's methodology are (i) the provisional character of explanatory principles, (ii) 'internal' criteria of truth, (iii) the acknowledgement of an imaginative aspect in principles, with the related problem of the relationship between internal truth and external truth understood as mirroring 'real' causes. Smith's Newtonian (as opposed to Cartesian) methodology makes room for progress in social theorizing as it allows for a decentralization of the various fields of Moral Science, contributing to the shaping of political economy. On the other hand, the Cartesian legacy in Smith's Newtonian methodology makes the relationship problematic between phenomena and principles.

The paper reconstructs the reception of Descartes's work by Scottish eighteenth-century philosophers. The Scots' image of Descartes was a by-product of a scientific controversy; philosophical arguments were brought into the picture more as asides than as a primary focus of interest. As soon as the Cartesian physics withered away as a real alternative to Newtonian physics, only the philosophical arguments were left, with no memory of the context out of which they originated, and the focus of the discussion shifted from physics to the philosophy of mind and the theory of knowledge.

I argue that Mirowski's attempt to apply two ideas from contemporary philosophy of science to the reading of economic texts is quite fruitful, even if slightly less novel than he believes; yet these ideas, namely (a) a constant interaction between theories and observations, (b) a metaphorical character of the re-description of phenomena by theories, may yield results partially different from his own; in more detail, the history of the relationship of physics and economics did not start in 1870 and it was not the story of a one-way influence of Cartesianism over economics.
Yet the story was an intricate one: there were borrowings of substantive items before the methodological justification for the borrowing, and there were methodological programs that seem to open the way to ‘scientific’ economics and then turn ‘back’ toward Cicero; yet this is not so bad, since Cicero was not so obscurantist as to represent an outright alternative to ‘science’.
The fact that the story was complex does not imply that it was a messy one and that Newtonianism was just a confused catch-all label; the problem is instead that it makes little sense discussing whether Smith was more like Kuhn or like Putnam, while it does make sense asking whether he was closer to a voluntarist or to a intellectualist vie of natural law; the ‘Newtonian philosophy’ for the Scots was a third way beyond Rationalism and Empiricism that promised a way out of the knot of theological voluntarism and political authoritarianism that had apparently locked up post-Reformation Northern Europe into a deadlock; thus, far from being a sixteenth-century sceptic or a twentieth-century epistemological relativist, Smith – pace Berry who claims that the Newtonian inspiration was for him “a general orientation rather than a specific agenda” – was at his best a ‘Newtonian’ precisely while writing The Wealth of Nations.

Scottish natural jurisprudence, which tried to find a middle way between skepticism and extreme voluntarism, is less secular and more empirical than received wisdom admits. There emerged, as one of its 'accidental' outcomes, a systematic, self-contained and empirical economic theory from the search for an empirically based normative theory of social life. The basic assumption of such a theory, namely, the notion of societal laws as embedded in transindividual mechanisms, derives from the voluntarist view of natural law as 'imposed' law.

Both Adam Smith's epistemology and his political theory lead to a stalemate. The former is under the opposing pulls of an essentialist ideal of knowledge and of a pragmatist approach to the history of science. The latter still tries to provide a foundation for a natural law, while conceiving it as non-absolute and changeable. The consequences are (i) inability to complete both the political and the epistemological works projected by Smith; (ii) decentralization of the social order, giving rise to several partial orders, such as that of the market.

I argue the existence of two tensions in Smith's system of ideas: the first is that between the postulate of an invisible 'noumenical' order of the universe and the imaginary principles by means of which we connect the phenomena; the second is a tension between the noumenical order of the world where 'is' and 'ought' converge, and the various partial orders that may be reconstructed in social phenomena that leave room for irrationality, and injustice. My first claim is that these tensions are dialectical tensions in a unitary, albeit rhapsodically presented in writing. My second claim is that, the system’s unanswered question in the moral domain is a ‘metaphysical’ and ‘theological’ question, namely the problem of evil; by implication, I contend also that Smith was no secularist, but instead a post-sceptical fideist or agnostic, who took Bayle's question: "why are men wicked and unhappy?" quite seriously. His private ethics of prudence, justice, benevolence and his public ethics of liberty, justice, equality were modest proposals for coping with social evil in our imperfect world.

In this paper I want to reconstruct and criticize the first from Anscombe's  three well-known theses, namely the claim that a 'philosophy of psychology' is a preliminary task to the construction of any possible ethical theory, or that moral philosophy 'should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking' .
I argue that Anscombe’s idea of a “philosophy of psychology” cannot be simply identified with that of “moral psychology ” with which we are familiar now; that her main claim, namely that actions are analogous to language is quite promising; that among the implications there is not only a criticism to consequentialism but also acknowledgement of a central role for judgement, and accordingly not just a blunt refusal, but instead an unaware rediscovery of Kantian ethics; that her rediscovery of the idea of virtue is promising enough, albeit misunderstood by Anscombe herself when she presents it in terms of coming back to Aristotelian and Thomist ethics as contrasted with modern moral philosophy.

I reconstruct the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive  objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, has to be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism.

I argue that in the second half of the second Millennium, three parallel processes took place.
1. Normative ethics, or natural morality, that had been a distinct subject in the education of European elites from the Renaissance times to the end of the eighteenth century, disappeared as such, being partly allotted to the Churches via the teaching of religion in State School, and partly absorbed by the study of history and literature, assumed to be channels for imbibing younger generations with the shared values of the State, the Nation, or the People. 2. Religion, or better the prevailing religion or, in most countries, the “State Religion,” became a compulsory subject in the State school. Both the State school and Religion as a discipline were indeed novelties. 3. A result of a tacit pact between two ruling groups was that the canon of European culture was transformed into something less consistent and less comprehensive than its previous post-Renaissance version had been. In more detail, the tradition to be transmitted to younger generations was construed around a fable, or better a lie, namely that the modern European is the ancient Greek’s grandson, and the ancient Hebrew had nothing to bequest to the Modern European. Besides, the canon was reduced to a bark without a kernel, in so far as literature and history took the place that used to belong to “philosophy” or to Studia Humanitatis.

In this paper I discuss Sidgwick’s reaction to Whewell’s moral philosophy. I show
how, to Sidgwick’s eyes, Whewell’s philosophy looked as an emblem of the set of beliefs,  primarily religious, into which he had been socialised, and that his reaction was  over-determined by both his own ambivalent feelings to his own Anglican upbringing  and his subtle rhetorical strategy practised by presenting new shocking ideas hidden  between an amount of platitudes and playing the neutral observer or the ‘philosopher  of morality’ instead than acting the part of the preacher of a new morality. Then I  discuss Sidgwick’s assessment of Whewell’s doctrine as an idle systematisation of received  opinion and the reasons why in the Methods he feels entitled to dismiss historically  given intuitionism as ‘dogmatic intuitionism’ without detailed criticism and discusses  instead a so-called ‘intuitional method’ as one of the procedures allegedly used  by common sense. Besides, I show how individual instances of detailed criticism to  Whewell’s doctrines are meant to be not ‘real’ criticism of a rival outlook but instead  illustrations of the limits of ‘common-sense morality’. My final claims are: first, Sidgwick  ends with a short-circuit between a inner dialectic of his own argument and discussion  of rival doctrines; second, the weight of Whewell’s legacy in Sidgwick’s ethics  has been heavily underemphasized.

I discuss the ideas of common sense and common sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences, in order to reach also in the moral field the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was really worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of the naïve positivist starting point Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations.

I esamine that part of the controversy between John Stuart Mill and WIlliam Whewell which verged on ethical theory.
I intend to reconstruct the weight of rational and non-rational factors in ethical controversies and to highlight the mixed bequest this controversy left to 20th century analytic ethics.
I argue that the structure of the controversy includes Kuhnian factors, rhetoric and pragmatic dimensions, and that a consistent self-criticism of his own previous views may be detected in Mill’s writings published after the controversy. I argue that the controversy’s bequest for analytic ethics includes both anti-empiricist elements that Sidgwick took from Whewell without paying due acknowledgement and consequentialist elements that Sidgwick took from Mill, on the latter’s  authority and without due scrutiny of counter-arguments.

I discuss Whewell’s philosophy of morality, as opposed to systematic morality, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in  the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such  as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of  the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out more similar to Kantian ethics than commentators have believed, and quite different from what Sidgwick has meant by intuitionism, namely a handful of unjustified prescriptions.

We reply to Philippe Depoortere’s paper “On Ricardo’s method: The Unitarian influence examined. Some comments on Cremaschi and Dascal’s article ‘Malthus and Ricardo on Economic Methodology’”. Depoortere asks two questions: (1) was Ricardo’s ‘conversion’ to Unitarianism sincere? (2) did Ricardo follow the methodology of Priestley and Belsham? His answers are that he was a “religious sceptic” and he was not an ‘empiricist’ like Priestley and Belsham. We reply that the sincerity of Ricardo’s religious beliefs is irrelevant since we start with the evidence that he was exposed for a long time to the intellectual influence of Belsham, primarily in matters of philosophy, and to deny this would imply a negative answer to a different question, namely, did Ricardo attend Unitarian meetings over at least 11 years? Then we reply that Ricardo inherited Belsham’s version of Newtonian methodology, which omitted the fourth rule, that is the most anti-Cartesian and anti-systematic rule, and this has little to do with empiricism but instead with apriorism.