On the Prehistory of Technical Population Ethics, Malthusianism, in Condorcet's Art of Government
Once I made fun of MacAskill's rewriting of the history of population ethics (recall here). In response, Gustaf Arrhenius reached out to me, first, to force me to be precise between [I] 'the technical version of population ethics,' which theorizes about (and now I quote work by Arrhenius), "the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives (or their life-time welfare or well-being—we shall use these terms interchangeably here), and their identities may vary." And [II] "the popular version of population ethics," which MacAskill defines as "the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be." (MacAskill's What We Owe to the Future., p. 168). (Recall this post.)
The popular version is more or less co-equal with the history of post-Platonic European philosophy and where it mixes with political economy or, as Foucault would call it, biopolitics. Gustaf himself suggests that the history of the technical version of population ethics originates in Sidgwick. In response (recall this post) I pointed to a striking passage in Cantillon’s (1755) Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général translated as An Essay on Economic Theory, Translated by Chantal Saucier, part 1, chapter 15. (Recall: “It is also a question…whether it is better to have a great multitude of inhabitants, poor and badly provided for, or a smaller number with better means; a million who consume the product of six acres per head or four million who live on the product of an acre and a half.") That passage is not quite technical in the sense that Arrhenius posits, but it already points to a way of framing that is technical in the sense of Arrhenius.
Now Cantillon was in most respects the pre-eminent economist before the physiocrat school of Quesnay. Turgot (who sometimes is treated as a physiocrat) and Condorcet (who worked for and with Turgot) were shaped by Cantillon and Quesnay. So I would be really surprised if Condorcet (1743 – 1794) were unfamiliar with Cantillon’s Essay. (There is evidence he owned all his works.)
Now, Condorcet’s posthumously published (1794) sketch of an historical view of the progress of the human mind advocates for the introduction of probabilistic reasoning in social and political life. In fact, the final chapter (‘or epoch’) of the work has a good claim to be the inventor of the mathematically grounded, social insurance model of the welfare state, although Condorcet allows it can also be organized in terms of voluntary mutual aid societies. (A few years before, his personal acquaintance, Thomas Paine had suggested a state funded pension scheme.) It’s worth quoting the passage so you get a sense of his mode of reasoning.
These establishments, which may be formed in the name of the social power, and become one of its greatest benefits, might also be the result of individual associations, which may be instituted without danger, when the principles by which the establishments ought to be organised, shall have become more popular, and the errors, by which a great number of such associations have been destroyed, shall cease to be an object of apprehension. [See French here]
This is not a mere aside in Condorcet. In the Sketch he had already repeatedly claimed that treating probability in mathematical fashion had a pay-off in the sciences.
In the previous chapter Condorcet had praised (without explaining why) Johan De Witt’s political economy: De Witt (who Condorcet treats as a follower of Descartes) had “perceived how necessary it was that political economy, like every other science, should be governed by the principles of philosophy and subjected to the rules of a rigid calculation.” De Witt’s main contribution was, in fact, proposing a mathematically worked out system of life annuities as a mechanism to raise taxes reliably and to secure the buyer of the annuity a desirable fixed income. De Witt’s scheme (see here) may be the first mathematically grounded, incentive compatible project in which state and citizen can achieve mutually desirable, but distinct ends. Some other time I may return to this because Condorcet also sketches a version of the difference principle.
The previous paragraphs would have been sufficiently meaty for a Digression about Condorcet’s Sketch. But today I treat it as background. For the tenth chapter/epoch of the Sketch culminates in a vision in which improvements in science, education, and the economy (due to free markets and property rights) can create the conditions of open-ended progress that clearly shaped progressive thought for the next century and a half. Now, for eighteenth-century thinkers like Turgot and Adam Smith the Holy Grail of political economy is to find a set of institutions and policies where population outstrips food-supply and, thereby, eliminate the risks of famine; and where each individual can expect to become better off. Condorcet’s Sketch argues that with the right (rights protecting and productivity enhancing) policies this is within reach. Here’s the key passage:
Thus, not only the same species of ground will nourish a greater number of individuals, but each individual, with a less quantity of labour, will labour more successfully, and be surrounded with greater conveniences. [French]
Now, usually in eighteenth century writings ‘utility’ means something like ‘socially useful’ or ‘conducive to common good’ (often in an economic sense). I wouldn’t want to insist that here ‘utility’ has he exact technical sense that it starts to have in Bentham (who Condorcet may well have known through intermediaries), as somethings that individuals can possess and be compared among them. (There are, in fact, as Emma Rothschild has argued good reasons to be very cautious about treating him as a proto-Utilitarian.) But it’s explicitly clear that the utility he is describing can be subject to mathematical calculation and is hedonistic in character.
Okay, Condorcet then continues in a way that evokes Cantillon:
It may, however, be demanded, whether, amidst this improvement in industry and happiness, where the wants and faculties of men will continually become better proportioned, each successive generation possess more various stores, and of consequence in each generation the number of individuals be greatly increased; it may, I say, be demanded, whether these principles of improvement and increase may not, by their continual operation, ultimately lead to degeneracy and destruction? Whether the number of inhabitants in the universe at length exceeding the means of existence, there will not result a continual decay of happiness and population, and a progress towards barbarism, or at least a sort of oscillation between good and evil? Will not this oscillation, in societies arrived at this epoch, be a perennial source of periodical calamity and distress? In a word, do not these considerations point out the limit at which all farther improvement will become impossible, and consequently the perfectibility of man arrive at a period which in the immensity of ages it may attain, but which it can never pass?
We are now on the threshold of the repugnant conclusion. Now, Condorcet’s worry is not the main worry we find in contemporary technical version of population ethics. His real worry is to what degree progress can be really open-ended or whether at some limit a stationary state is hit and the problem of famine recurs, but then on a more massive scale. This is a worry that Malthus also extracted from Smith a few years later, and developed in much greater detail.
I could stop here. But it’s worth noting that Condorcet tends to think of social systems as tending toward equilibrium. (He says this explicitly earlier.)* And so, he thinks it is possible that when a system overshoots, there will be forces that return it to a new equilibrium. (Hence the periodicity he mentions.) In this case, it would imply massive starvation (and we end up in a kind of permanent Malthusian traps).
But Condorcet is an incredible optimist. And so he assumes that as we grow ever more rational we will figure out what Malthus would later call ‘preventive checks’ and ‘moral restraint’ in order to avoid the necessity of mass infanticide.
But supposing the affirmative, supposing it actually to take place, there would result from it nothing alarming, either to the happiness of the human race, or its indesinite perfectibility; if we consider, that prior to this period the progress of reason will have walked hand in hand with that of the sciences; that the absurd prejudices of superstition will have ceased to infuse into morality a harshness that corrupts and degrades, instead of purifying and exalting it; that men will then know, that the duties they may be under relative to propagation will consist not in the question of giving existence to a greater number of beings, but happiness; will have for their object, the general welfare of the human species; of the society in which they live; of the family to which they are attached; and not the puerile idea of encumbering the earth with useless and wretched mortals. Accordingly, there might then be a limit to the possible mass of provision, and of consequence to the greatest possible population, without that premature destruction, so contrary to nature and to social prosperity, of a portion of the beings who may have received life, being the result of those limits.
*”What are the laws of that equilibrium between the wants and resources of men which is continually tending to establish itself; and from which results, on the one hand, a greater facility of providing for those wants, and of consequence an adequate portion of general felicity, when wealth increases, till it has reached its highest degree of advancement; and on the other, as wealth diminishes, greater difficulties, and of consequence proportionate misery and wretchedness…”