Utilitarian Ethics and Methodological Individualism

In one very important respect, however, Paley and Hey were at one. The normative social theory of each was utilitarian in the original, Cambridge, sense. Utilitarian ethics seem to have originated with John Gay’s ‘Dissertation concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality’ published as a Preface to the English translation by Paley’s patron Edmund Law (1731) of William King’s De Origine Mali (1702). Gay, who was a Fellow of Christ’s from 1724 to 1732, argued that the happiness of mankind is willed by God, and therefore that humans are obliged to act so as to maximise the happiness of their fellow creatures. This position seems to have been taken for granted in Cambridge from the mid-eighteenth century and would undoubtedly have been taught at Christ’s when Paley was an undergraduate (1759-1763)—as it had been when his father was an undergraduate during Gay’s tenure as a Fellow. Paley develops the theme in Principles, which was almost contemporaneous with Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Bentham’s utilitarianism is sometimes characterised as ‘Paley with God left out’. Paley begins his ‘economics’ chapter in Principles by declaring that ‘The final view of all rational politics is to produce the greatest quantity of happiness in a given tract of land’ (Paley 1785: 587). In Hey’s lectures on contracts, ‘the good of mankind’ is similarly normative (e.g. Hey (deposited 1815): volume III, 1,280-1,281).

Utilitarian thinking is congruent with both political and methodological individualism. The latter was implicit in much eighteenth-century economic thought, as in The Wealth of Nations in which the individual decision-maker, each independent master acting entirely for his own benefit, is the prime mover (see Arrow 1994). But Paley seems to have been the first economic thinker to make explicit the assumptions of both kinds of individualism. At the outset of ‘Population and Provision’, he states his position in a passage the first sentence of which foreshadows a somewhat similar declaration by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:

[A]ltho’ we speak of communities as sentient beings; altho’ we ascribe to them happiness and misery, desires, interests and passions, nothing really exists or feels but individuals. The happiness of a people is made up of the happiness of single persons; and the quantity of it can only be augmented by encreasing the number of the percipients, or the pleasures of their perceptions (Paley ibid.: 587—588; italics in original).

In one interesting respect, the penultimate clause of this affirmation is eccentric. How can ‘the happiness of a people’ possibly be ‘augmented by encreasing the number of the percipients’?

Paley assumed—subject to important qualifications—that the ‘happiness’ of each individual is rather like his weight: it could be represented as a scalar magnitude and thereby aggregated with those of others in order to get a total happiness (weight, etc.) of the relevant social unit: ‘[T]he collective happiness will be nearly in the exact proportion of the numbers, that is, twice the number of inhabitants will produce double the quantity of happiness’ (ibid.: 588). Moreover, although this only holds true in ‘adjoining periods, in the same country’, in general ‘it may, and ought to be assumed in all political deliberations, that a larger portion of happiness is enjoyed among ten persons, possessing the means of healthy subsistence, than can be produced by five persons, under every advantage of power, affluence and luxury’ (ibid.: 588-589; italics in original).

In effect, Paley has implicitly formulated the first social welfare function: ‘collective happiness’ U = U(N), where N is population and U' > 0. In the macroeconomic analysis which occupies much of the rest of his ‘economics’ chapter, maximisation of population is the policy goal. It is essential to distinguish Paley’s reasons for this from those of the ‘political economists’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for whom the maximisation of population was likewise a policy goal. Political economists from Antoine de Montchretien to Steuart sought to increase the wealth and military power of the nation state. Population was merely instrumental: more bodies meant lower wages and larger armies. Their normative criterion was the welfare of le roi soleil and other heads of state. Paley was radically ‘modern’ in identifying the welfare of individuals, rather than that of the sovereign, as the proper object of public policy: ‘The riches, strength, and glory of nations.. .have no value farther than as they contribute to.. .the happiness of a people’ (ibid.: 587).