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Economics and Ethics under the Same Umbrella: Edgeworth's ‘Exact Utilitarianism’, 1877–1881

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2013

SHIRI COHEN KAMINITZ
SHIRI COHEN KAMINITZ*
Affiliation:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, coshiri@gmail.com
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Abstract

Edgeworth's original mathematical formalization of utilitarianism as presented in his works of 1877–81 illustrates an intriguing phase in the mutually intertwined history of economics and utilitarianism. In this article I analyse Edgeworth's motivations and point to its interesting implications. In particular, it is pointed out that the starting point of Edgeworth's project had little to do with the field of economics, but formed part of an attempt to present utilitarianism in the most scientific way possible; an attempt made in the context of intensive dispute between the three opposing camps in the field of ethics at the time. Nevertheless, the project concluded with the monograph Mathematical Psychics (1881) that embodied an original relationship between economics and utilitarianism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 487 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 This was also noticed by Creedy, J., Edgeworth and the Development of Neoclassical Economics (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Mirowski, P., Introduction to Edgeworth on Chance, Economic Hazard, and Statistics (London, 1994)Google Scholar; T. Uemiya, ‘F. Y. Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics and his Utilitarianism: The Derivation from the “Sidgwick-Barratt Controversy”’, Ideas, Discussion Paper Series (2008), pp. 1–29; Barbé, L., Francis Ysidro Edgeworth: A Portrait with Family and Friends (Northampton, MA, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 That is, ‘economics’ in a later sense, such as welfare economics or social choice theories; back then it was referred to as ‘mathematical ethics’.

3 See Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism (Peterborough, ON, 2000)Google Scholar; Jevons, W. S., ‘John Stuart Mill's Philosophy Tested: IV Utilitarianism’, Contemporary Review 36 (1879), pp. 521–38Google Scholar.

4 Sandra Peart has shown how Jevons was at one with Mill in using utilitarian evaluations, together with the criterion of promoting liberty, in order to assess and justify a wide range of policy issues. Peart, S., The Economics of W. S. Jevons (New York, 1996), pp. 152–69Google Scholar.

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11 Edgeworth mentions Sidgwick twenty-eight times in his short monograph, always in a highly positive manner and at times as an admired figure (see instances in Edgeworth, New and Old, pp. 11, 13, 14, 32, 60, 68).

12 R. Harrison, ‘Utilitarians and Idealists’, Cambridge Histories Online, <http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/> (2008); Schneewind, Sidgwick's Ethics, ch. 5.

13 Barratt, ‘The Suppression’; Barratt, ‘Ethics and Psychogony’.

14 Barratt, A., Physical Ethics or: The Science of Action (London, 1869), pp. iv, 1, 3–4Google Scholar.

15 Barratt, Physical Ethics, pp. 70–5, 252–4.

16 Note his defence of ‘physical ethics’ from eight possible intuitionistic attacks: Edgeworth, New and Old, pp. 18–22.

17 ‘But if the dawn of Physical Ethics is not yet at hand, we ought not in the meanwhile to neglect the domestic light of introspection’ (Edgeworth, New and Old, p. 22).

18 Edgeworth, New and Old, pp. 28–33.

19 Edgeworth, New and Old, p. 28.

20 Edgeworth, New and Old, p. 33.

21 Sidgwick, Methods p. 416, and bk I, ch. 1; Schneewind, Sidgwick's Ethics, p. 191.

22 Thus, Sidgwick's project was ultimately about providing systematic, objective, nuanced and comprehensive philosophical research into the alternative methods of ethics, and was not concerned with mathematization of the field whatsoever.

23 Note the use of the distinction between ‘new’ and ‘old’ which was used in psychology as well as in ethics (and economics). See Hatfield, Gary, ‘Psychology: Old and New’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, ed. Baldwin, T. (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 91–106Google Scholar, at 94.

24 See Schabas, M., The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005), pp. 134–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maas, H., William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics (New York, 2005), pp. 159–69Google Scholar.

25 See: Daston, L., ‘British Responses to Psycho-Physiology, 1860–1900’, ISIS (1978), pp. 192–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hatfield, ‘Psychology: Old and New’.

26 The main problem with introspection was for him that it was subjective by definition and thus could not serve as an objective scientific method of investigation; see Daston, ‘British Responses’, p. 195; Hatfield, ‘Psychology: Old and New’, p. 96.

27 Valentine, E., ‘James Sully’, The Psychologist 14 (2001), p. 405Google Scholar.

28 Fechner's famous psychological law suggested that sensation varies as the log of the stimulus value times a constant (which means that felt intensity goes up arithmetically while the stimulus intensity increases geometrically). See Hatfield, ‘Psychology: Old and New’, p. 99. Edgeworth did not uphold the logarithmic functions in his own mathematical interpretations.

29 That feature economists associated with diminishing ‘marginal utility’, ‘final degree of utility’ in Jevons's words. Note that Edgeworth used that principle as a postulate, basing it on ‘every-day experience’, recognized by Laplas, and confirmed by the new formulations of Fechner and Wundt (apparently disconnected with Jevons's formulation); Edgeworth, New and Old, p. 41, 69; Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro, ‘The Hedonical Calculus’, Mind 4 (1879), pp. 394–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 397.

30 Edgeworth, New and Old, pp. 43–4, 54–5; Edgeworth, ‘The Hedonical Calculus’, p. 394.

31 See the many presentations of mathematic integrals in both works. Edgeworth, New and Old, pp. 38, 44–53, 58–9, 67; Edgeworth, ‘The Hedonical Calculus’, pp. 394, 399, 400, 402, 403.

32 See Edgeworth, ‘The Hedonical Calculus’, pp. 397, 405, 406.

33 Edgeworth, ‘The Hedonical Calculus’, p. 395; in addition, the different capacities in acquiring pleasures are paralleled with different capacities to suffer labour.

34 Sidgwick rejected Spencer's view of ethics and referred to them as ‘deductive hedonism’, i.e. an approach that deduced moral principles out of systems external to morals such as biology and evolution. See Weinstein, David, ‘Deductive Hedonism and the Anxiety of Influence’, Utilitas 12 (2000), pp. 329–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sidgwick, H., ‘The Theory of Evolution in its Application to Practice’, Mind I (1876), pp. 52–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Edgeworth, New and Old, p. 72.

36 Edgeworth, New and Old, pp. 67–8; Edgeworth, ‘The Hedonical Calculus’, p. 400.

37 See Weinstein, D., Equal Freedom and Utility: Herbert Spencer's Liberal Utilitarianism (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar; Sidgwick, ‘The Theory of Evolution’.

38 Edgeworth, New and Old, p. 74; Edgeworth, F. Y., Mathematical Psychics (London, 1881), p. 117Google Scholar.

39 This is a case where the distribution of wealth is at a maximum ‘when the lower classes sacrificed to that of the higher classes. And again the happiness of part of the second generation may be sacrificed to that of the succeeding generations’ (Edgeworth, ‘The Hedonical Calculus’, p. 404).

40 Famously, this adherence to the differential calculus was heavily inspired by the mathematical physics of the period; see Mirowski, P., More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics (New York, 1989), pp. 217–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics, pp. 15–16.

42 Note that the three were also members of the same London clubs (Savile and Athenaeum); see Barbé, Edgeworth, pp. 87–9.

43 See Creedy, Edgeworth and the Development, chs. 3, 4, 6.

44 Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics, pp. 52–3.

45 See for example Broome, J., Ethics out of Economics (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Edgeworth's work could actually be interpreted as a pioneering work of this kind.

46 The Correspondence of Alfred Marshal, Economist, ed. J. K. Whitaker, vol. 1 (1868–1890) (New York, 1996), Letter of 8 February 1880.

47 Whitaker, J. K., The Early Economic Writings of Alfred Marshall 1867–90, vol. 2 (New York, 1975), p. 317Google Scholar.

48 Whitaker, The Early Economic Writings, pp. 318–19.

49 Whitaker, The Early Economic Writings, p. 317.

50 See Collison Black, R. D., ‘Jevons, Marshall and the Utilitarian Tradition’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy 37 (1990), pp. 5–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raffaelli, T., ‘Utilitarian Premises and Evolutionary Framework of Marshall's Economics’, Utilitas 8 (1996), pp. 89–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dardi, M., ‘Marshall on Welfare, or: the “Utilitarian” Meets the “Evolver”’, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 17 (2010), pp. 405–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Idealism and neo-Hegelianism in particular (through the interpretations of Maurice and Grote). See Cook, S., The Intellectual Foundations of Alfred Marshall's Economic Science (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 See Dardi, ‘Marshall on Welfare’, pp. 411–22. Dardi nicely names this ‘monetary utilitarianism’ (at p. 415).

53 See Maloney, J., Marshall, Orthodoxy and the Professionalisation of Economics (New York, 1985), pp. 181–5Google Scholar; Creedy, J., ‘Marshall and Edgeworth’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy 37 (1990), pp. 18–39, at 21–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 See Winch's resent discussion of the debates between economists and their critics in the 1880s and the 1890s under the title of ‘the old generation of political economists and the new’; Winch, D., Wealth and life (New York, 2009), pp. 241–50Google Scholar.

55 The article is the product of research conducted at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University, spring 2012. I would like to thank Kevin Hoover, Philip Mirowski, Neil De Marchi, Marina Bianchi and David Weinstein for constructive comments.