Malthus’S War On Poverty As Moral Reform

The paper aims at finding 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”.