The substantial agreement of his views with the doctrines of the Moral and Political Philosophy no doubt helped to bring Malthus under the common prejudice against “Pigeon Paley,”[[742]] the defender of things as they are and preacher of contentment to starving labourers. When Paley became an open convert to the Essay on Population, the public would no doubt believe their suspicions confirmed. But Malthus and Paley agree not as disciple and master, but at most as disciples of the same master. Malthus tries to work out his own philosophy for himself.[[743]]
It is open to many criticisms. In his ethics he seems to have made no distinct analysis or classification of the passions. He takes for granted that the Passions are on one side and Reason on the other, and there is no middle term between the two except the Design of God, which is worked out by the passions of men as by external nature, and which is (we are left to infer) in some way akin to human reason, for human reason can find it out. The impulse of benevolence, for example, is said to be, like all our natural passions, “general” (by which he seems to mean vague), “and in some degree indiscriminate and blind;” and, like the impulses of love, anger, ambition, the desire of eating and drinking, or any other of our “natural propensities,” it must be regulated by experience and frequently brought to the test of utility, or it will defeat its own purpose.[[744]] In other words, Malthus treats all human impulses as if they were appetites, co-ordinate with each other, primary and irresolvable. All desires are equally natural, and abstractedly considered equally virtuous,[[745]] though not equally strong, and therefore not equally fit at first sight to carry out their Creator’s purpose.
The Reason of Man, therefore, must assist the Reason of his Maker in carrying out the teleology of his passions, as well as the teleology of nature itself.[[746]] The “apparent object” (or evident final cause), for example, of the desire of marriage is the continuance of the race and the care of the weak, and not merely the happiness of the two persona most concerned.[[747]] To take another example, the object of the impulse of benevolence is to increase the sum of human happiness by binding the human race together.[[748]] Self-love is made a stronger motive than benevolence for a wise and perfectly ascertainable purpose. The ascertainment of the purpose, however, presents a difficulty. Acknowledging that we ought to do the will of God, how are we to discover it?
We are told in answer to this question, that the intention of the Creator to procure the good of His creatures is evident partly from Scripture and partly from experience; and it is that intention, so manifested, which we are bound to promote. What on God’s side is teleology, on man’s is utility; utility is the ruling principle of morals. Not being a passion it cannot itself lead to action; but it regulates passion, and that, so powerfully, that all our most important laws and customs, such as the institution of property and the institution of marriage, are simply disguised forms of it.[[749]] As animals, we follow the dictates of nature, which would mean unhindered passion; but as reasonable beings we are under the strongest obligations to attend to the consequences of our acts, and, if they be evil to ourselves or others, we may justly infer that such a mode of indulging those passions is “not suited to our state or conformable to the will of God.” As moral agents, therefore, it is clearly our duty to restrain the indulgence of our passions in those particular directions, that by thus carefully examining their consequences, and by frequently bringing them to the test of utility, we may gradually acquire a habit of gratifying them only in the way which, being unattended with evil, will clearly “add to the sum of human happiness, and fulfil the apparent purpose of the Creator.”[[750]] All the moral codes which have laid down the subjection of the passions to reason have been really (thinks Malthus) built on this foundation, whether their promulgators were aware of it or not. “It is the test alone by which we can know independently of the revealed will of God whether a passion ought or ought not to be indulged, and is therefore the surest criterion of modern rules which can be collected from the light of nature.” In other words, our theological postulates lead us to control our passions so as to secure not merely our own individual happiness, but “the greatest sum of human happiness.” And the tendency of an action to promote or diminish the general happiness is our only criterion of its morality.[[751]]
From this it directly follows that, because the free and indiscriminate indulgence of benevolence leads to the reverse of general happiness, we ought to practise a discriminating charity which blesses him that gives and him that takes. There is what Bastiat would call a harmony between the two.[[752]]
In this case, indeed, nature reinforces utility by making the passion of self-love stronger in men than the passion of benevolence. Every man pursues his own happiness first as his primary object, and it is best that he should do so. It is best that every man should, in the first instance, work out his own salvation, and have a sense of his own responsibility. Not only charity but moral reformation must begin at home. Benevolence apart from wisdom is even more mischievous than mere self-love, which is not to be identified with the “odious vice of selfishness,” but simply with personal ambition, the person to whom it is personal including as a rule children and parents, and in fact a whole world besides the single atom or “dividual self.”[[753]] If the desire of giving to others had been as ardent as the desire of giving to ourselves, the human race would not have been equal to the task of providing for all its possible members. But because it is impossible for it to provide for all, there is a tendency in all to provide for themselves first; and, though we consider that the selfish element in this feeling ought to grow less in a man in proportion as he becomes richer and less embarrassed by his own wants, we must recognize that its existence has been due to a wise provision for the general happiness.[[754]] Malthus does not deny at the same time that benevolence is always the weaker motive, and needs continually to be strengthened by doctrine, reproof, and correction. It ought always to be thought a “great moral duty” to assist our fellow-creatures in distress.[[755]]
With these ethical views, it was easy for Malthus to meet the objection that the general adoption of the moral restraint recommended in his Essay on Population would diminish the numbers of the people too far. He (or his spokesman) answers[[756]] that we might as well fear to teach benevolence lest we should make men too careless of their private interests. “There is in such a case a mean point of perfection, which it is our duty to be constantly aiming at; and the circumstance of this point being surrounded on all sides with dangers is only according to the analogy of all ethical experience.” There is as much danger of making men too generous or too compassionate, as there is of “depopulating the world by making them too much the creatures of reason, and giving prudence too great a mastery over the natural passions and affections. The prevailing error in the game of life is, not that we miss the prizes through excess of timidity, but that we overlook the true state of the chances in our eager and sanguine expectations of winning them.[[757]] Of all the objections that were ever made to a moralist who offered to arm men against the passions that are everywhere seducing them into misery, the most flattering, but undoubtedly the most chimerical, is that his reasons are so strong that, if he were allowed to diffuse them, passion would be extinguished altogether, and the activity as well as the enjoyments of man annihilated along with his vices.”[[758]]
In his view of the passions and of the moral sentiments, Malthus is clearly a man of the eighteenth century, and on the whole is more nearly at one with Paley than with any moralist after Tucker. There are points of divergence. He could not, in view of his cosmology, have fully approved Paley’s definition of virtue, “doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”[[759]] He may have seen how it followed that a solitary man had no duties, that a pagan had no power to do right, that the moral imperative was hypothetical, and that it had no force for any who abjured their future bliss. At least he contents himself with agreeing that “the will of God is plainly general happiness, as we discover both by Scripture and the light of nature;”[[760]] and, “provided we discover it, it matters nothing by what means;”—there are clear marks of design in the world showing that its Maker willed the happiness of His creatures; and what He willed they should will.
In other words, the ethical system of both is a utilitarianism which is narrow and personal in its motive (the private happiness of the individual in another world), but broad and catholic in its end (the general happiness of human beings in the present world). It is as if God induced us to promote other people’s happiness now, by telling us that He would in return promote our own by-and-by. There are signs that Malthus took a larger view, and thought rather of the development of the human faculties[[761]] than of mere satisfaction of desires, both in this world and in the next; but he nowhere distinctly breaks with Paley, and his division of passions into self-love (or prudence) and benevolence is taken straight from that theologian.[[762]]
By the vagueness of their phraseology when they spoke of the general sum of happiness, the older utilitarians avoided some of the difficulties that encounter their successors. Apart from the hardness of defining happiness and a sum of happiness,[[763]] there is a difficulty in fixing the precise extent of the generality. The tendency of utilitarianism in the hands of Bentham was towards equality and the removal of privilege; every one to count as one, no one as more than one. But both with him and with the older members it may be doubted whether the doctrine did not tend to benefit the majority at the expense of the minority.