Journal of the History of Philosophy

"The Poor Have a Claim Founded in the Law of Nature": William Paley and the Rights of the Poor THOMAS A. HORNE 1~ Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the debate over the adoption and later the operation of the Poor Law Amendment in 1834, a debate took place over the right of the poor to subsistence.' However ambiguous the defenders of government assistance to the poor felt about the actual operation of the Poor Laws, they asserted that the poor had a right to a job or to relief. While the level of subsistence this right required remained unclear, both sides of the debate understood that aid called forth by rights would be greater than aid based on charity. One of the most important sources used by the defenders of this right was the Reverend William Paley's (1743-1805) widely used textbook, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (a785). Paley was an Anglican clergyman who lectured on moral philosophy at Cambridge University from 1768 to 1776. He wrote The Principles in the hope it would be less pedantic and more interesting to students. As a text, it was enormously successful. In Arneri'ca, it was "the most popular text on moral philosophy from the 179o's to the Civil War. ''* In England The Principles was the "classical manual of morals at This paper was completed with the assistance of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. ' The literature on the Poor Lawsis immense. Two classicsare Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government:English Poor Law History:Part z. The Old PoorLaw (1927);Part 2. The Last Hundred Years 0929); and Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944). More recent studies includeJ. R. Poynter, SocietyandPauperism(1969); Raymond G.Cowherd, PoliticalEconomistsand the English Poor Laws 0977); and Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty 0984). Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Collegesand Universities, r636-x goo 0939), 67- [51] 5 2 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:1 JANUARY 198 5 Cambridge University," and, more generally, "the acknowledged representative of the utilitarian philosophy" for half a century. ~ We will find in the property theory of William Paley a sophisticated and influential account not only of the idea that the poor should receive charity from individuals but also that they had a right to receive assistance from governments. 4 Critics of government aid to the poor insisted that the right of the poor to assistance could not exist because it was inconsistent with the laws of nature. A speech by the Lord Chancellor, Henry Brougham, in 1834 excused the legislators who originally had framed England's Poor Laws on the ground that they had legislated before Malthus had written, but averred that nothing would be more ridiculous, or "in defiance of the ordinary laws of nature, [than that] the human lawgiver should decree, that all poor men have a right to live comfortably. ''5 The idea that the poor had welfare rights violated the economic truism "that men should be employed and paid according to the demand for their labor, and its value to the employer. ''6 The Reverend Thomas Spencer wrote, "This natural right to a maintenance is... wholly imaginary," and that a country that recognized such a right would soon be reduced to universal poverty. It is God's divine plan "that industry should have its food, and idleness its hunger. ''7 And in an 1837 Edinburgh Review article (also published as a pamphlet) the theory of Ricardo was invoked to assert that a compulsory system of relief "must annihilate all property. ''8 The belief that the right to relief threatened the nation's prosperity was often linked to the fear that the recognition of such a right would upset the social hierarchy. In his famous report of 1833, Edwin Chadwick argued that the right to subsistence wa s so vague that it only would feed the imagination of the poor, fill them with the hope of satisfying their desires, and, when relief in the hoped for amount was not forthcoming, cause violent riots. 3 Elie Hal6vy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism 0955), 23. 4 Paley is equally well known as the author...