Eavesdropping on a virtuous circle Richard Whately and the Oriel Noetics. Elena Pasquini Douglas uwa business School


End:     Increase in virtue - moral progress of society. Means



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End:     Increase in virtue - moral progress of society.

Means:    The catallaxy: the social system for exchange

Tenets:

1.     The human is a reciprocating social animal who instinctively engages in social interactions driven by sympathy and survival including trade in goods and services, sharing, knowledge creation and other forms of value creation.

2.     The focus of the science should be exchange, reciprocity and cooperation at the social level, not economising.

3.     Divine providence and the social instinct combine to create this exchange dynamic. The pursuits of individuals, through exchange, produce social benefits. Private property, the division of labour and specialisation lead to increases in wealth. Free self-organising exchange will lead to more international trade which will reduce the incentive for, and benefits of, wars.

4.     Before applying deductively derived economic laws (science) to a particular context, the dynamics and measurements of that context must be thoroughly understood, as well as the moral consequences of the action. Science is one thing, policy another. 

5.     The end of each human life is moral improvement and there is a hierarchy of moral states. The end of societies and communities is to reach states of higher moral attainment and commercial societies which increase wealth are the means.

6.     Wealth and virtue are not in opposition. Increasing wealth which brings comfort will, in the main, increase the proportion of human activity which is applied to higher pursuits beyond survival. As wealth increases, the stock of knowledge and human virtue will increase; a virtuous circle.

7.     At the individual level, as humans develop, there is a tendency as for them to do a higher proportion of things that are beneficial beyond their own survival like create knowledge. As they develop and mature, so do their motivations and moral attaintment. Education and enlightenment of both spiritual and scientific truths (including political economy) lead to practical and moral improvement (which are correlated in any event).

8.     All forms of knowledge – moral, reasoning power, scientific knowledge - are forms of wealth. Humans can develop character which is developed through acquisition of knowledge, reasoning power and moral imagination and the practice of the virtues until they become innate.

9.     Distinctions between types of knowledge are important in the pursuit of truth. The division of knowledge into ‘scientific knowledge’ from observation and experimentation, and ‘moral knowledge’ from revealed religion and the human moral faculty is essential. 

10.     A morally informed, elite clerisy is required to aid in the discernment of the good for the society, and to guide the knowledge sets that individuals should attain. However, there will be an open public contest for knowledge which will destroy fallacies in a free, rational debate.

 

This is a unique conception and articulation of classical, Christian Political Economy in the mainstream Smithian tradition. It highlights certain dimensions of social life and human purpose, which are perhaps more implicit here, rendered more clearly by this Noetic moral philosopher a generation or two post-Smith.



Chapter 7  Conclusion

This paper is designed to be both a portrait and an argument. A portrait of Richard Whately in context, set against the intellectual and social landscape of his times. We meet him with his collaborators at Oriel College, Oxford, drawing on their shared intellectual inheritance and approach, engaged in the central philosophical contests of the day.

It is an argument for a close reading of texts and exploration of their language and meaning in their historical context. A reading which in this instance, frames Richard Whately and the Noetic intellectual product, as in the mainstream Smithian and virtue ethics traditions.

To summarise what we have learned. Firstly, that the Noetics were informed by a Newtonian natural theology God whose handiwork is revealed in the working of complex natural and social systems. Secondly, that they shared a Christian moral philosophy that embraced self-love as an essential duty, which, when combined with our natural social sympathy, transforms private benefit into public benefit. Thirdly, that the moral consequence of society itself is virtue, as we seek to know, share and create knowledge, goods and forward progress. An illustration of Richard Whately’s Catallaxy-Virtue-Synthesis has been provided in some detail. This is a unique conception of political economy and moral analysis, done in separate stages, but which together can bear the weight of guiding policy. This product is in the Smithian, as well as virtue ethics-traditions which allowed me to respond to Deidre McCloskey’s (2008) contention that Adam Smith was “the last of the former virtue ethicists” with Whately as a later writer in this tradition.

In concluding, I wish to don the hat, not of an intellectual historian, nor a student of the history of economics, but that of a cultural commentator. I seek to illustrate the philosophical implications of Whately’s model. Whately argues that it is against the standards of virtue, not utility, which we should assess the efficacy of the economic system. His contention, that an economic system can and that the determination of these ends is not the work of a political economist, or economist, but the work of a moralist.

An economic system can be set to achieve different ends, for example:



Virtue  Utility  Pain minimisation

This is consistent with Robbins (1945) position36. The efficacy of the economic system then should be assessed against the attainment of the specified ends: virtue was the end sought by the Oriel Noetics (and it is argued, by Smith), utility was the end sought by the utilitarians and other philosophers have argued for pain minimisation.

My final argument is that we live in an age which fails to properly discern the ends; an age which has mistaken the need for a separation between scientific and moral knowledge, which has descended into an age of ‘value-neutrality’. I argue that this age while born as a consequence of the economic and political debates of the early nineteenth century, leaves out essential dimensions conceived in the mind of its midwives. The distinction between scientific and religious knowledge upon which our age is based, had been “altogether absent in pre-Enlightenment social theory” (Waterman 1991 p262). I argue that those who created the distinction, Whately being the first to apply it to political economy, had no intention that means and ends be given such inconsistent weight in the practice of “the science of the wise legislator”. They assumed, and their programmes and practice demonstrate, that moral philosophy, deductive logic and theology, were essential capabilities of those who would develop and implement policy.  It is indeed ironic that their distinctions became the scaffolding for the present paradigm. Whether by design or unconsciously, in our age, the collective moral discernment in which the Noetics passionately engaged, has been ‘crowded out’ in the polities of late modernity, in favour of endless disputes over means37.

Whatever the ends, the economic system is but the means.

Modern economists, Robbins in particular have been called to reassert the distinction between means and ends (Robbins 1945). Robbins explains that the Classical Political Economists professed the body of scientific knowledge they called ‘political economy’ to have laws derived from systematic enquiry into the “nature of economic relationships and their mode of development in different circumstances” (Robbins 1953, p174) and that with the exception of Physiocracy, that this was the first time a reform movement based its prescriptions on the basis of systematically derived, scientific laws. He goes on to make a critical point, consistent with the view of Whately, a view sometimes lost in our contemporary context:

“You need goals as well – a general objective, a criterion of the expected results of action. It is all very well to know how the world works, why certain relations emerge in certain condition, how these relations change when conditions are altered. But unless you have some test whereby you can distinguish good from bad, desirable from undesirable, you are without an essential constituent of a theory of policy. You are like the captain of a ship equipped with charts and compasses and all the means of propulsion and steering, but without an assigned destination. A theory of economic policy, in the sense of a body of precepts for action, must take its ultimate criterion from outside economics. (Robbins 1953, pp. 176-177).

From Whately’s starting point the observation of laws, when applied in the context of the social world, meant context and consequences needed to be taken into account against standards of social virtue, not utility.  Whately buttressed the importance and need for political economy to deliver its value-free analysis of what actually occurs. On the battle-front with the Philosophical Radicals, he exhorted that “political economy by itself can be of no use in the formation of public policy, additional value premises are necessary. Athiesm has as much difficulty supplying value premises (‘the good’) as religion has in justifying evil and that knowledge of the good may come from scripture but cannot be had from utilitarian principles alone” (Waterman 1991, p32). Whately “explicated the scope and method of political economy” as a corollary of his epistemology the dimension of science is value free including enquires into the nature, distribution and production of wealth, but not its connection to virtue and happiness (Waterman 1991, p13).

With the Evangelicals on one side and Philosophical Radicals on the other, Whately conceived of this third way: Aristotelian in its social conception; Newtonian in its dynamic complexity; grounded not in the scarcity of Malthusian gloom but in the gains to be had by cooperation, reciprocity, exchange and trade. This is a vision of homo catallacticus, not homo economicus and it which deserves a much closer reading in our times.

For Whately, precisely because it is a value-free means and nothing more, a discernment of ends is also required. Means are necessary, but not sufficient. They cannot be sought by science, but must be sought among religious and moral truths, beyond the Bible, but also from study by those in the clerisy, trained to play the role of moral philosophers in society. Whately’s conception was perhaps more complete than ours. We are left with the question for our times, who or what should comprise the clerisy, and what role should economists play within it?

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1 Since the rise of the cities of Babylon four thousand years ago all societies have had, at the centre of political life, the ends to which they aspired and have celebrated the virtues best suited to attaining these ends. Macintrye (2007) starts the story with the Greeks.
2 Taken from T.B. Macaulay’s phrase (1829) and quoted in Collini, Winch, Burrow (1983 p v): “…that noble science of politics which, of all sciences, is the most important to the welfare of nations, - which, of all the sciences, most tends to expand and invigorate the mind, - which draws nutriment and ornament from every part of philosophy and literature, and dispenses in return, nutriment and ornament to all”. This ‘science of politics’ was interchangeable with “philosophy, which could prize systematic knowledge and objectivity in the assignment of causal influences, but it did not entail anxiety to achieve what a late nineteenth century generation of social sciences would call ‘value-neutrality’” (Collini et al. 1983, p14).
3 This is the opening line in the novel The Go Between by Lesley Hartley (1953).
4 In Samuelson’s terms it could be called, ‘Whig history’.
5 Donald Winch is an intellectual historian of long standing who has produced several important studies of the political and economic debates of the nineteenth-century (Wealth and Life, 2009, Riches and Poverty 1996).
6 See Moore (2011) for an introduction to the “Sussex Three” who constitute the Sussex School. Donald Winch, Stefano Collini and John Burrows are at times, and in jest, known as ‘Burrincini” Their’s is a collegial enterprise since they shared a base at the University of Sussex between the terms of Prime Minister Wilson and Prime Minister Thatcher. Moore (2011) illustrates ten features of the Sussex school.
7  This is the term elucidated by Collingwood (1939, 1946)
8 In fact, when Coleridge coined the term ‘the clerisy’, in his influential essay On the Constitution of the Church and State, he was speaking of the Oxford dons who then acted as the filters of knowledge in the Britain of 1830. The leading figures amongst this class were of course, the Noetics. Here he conceived of “the support and maintenance of a permanent class or order…to remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science; (Coleridge, 1830) pp43-45.
9 This picture of a broadly popular monarchy and the role of the Church of England as a symbol of national unity was novel when presented in 1985. Clark sought to redress the excesses of both the whig and the Marxist interpretations of the early nineteenth century. Both of these portraits had excluded religion as a shaping force in the society of the period.  Clark’s purpose was to clarify this critical understanding: “my aim throughout has been to reintegrate religion into an historical vision which has been almost wholly positivist; to discard economic reductionism; to emphasise the importance of politics in social history, and to argue against the familiar picture of eighteenth century England as the era of bourgeois individualism by showing the persistence of the ancien regime until 1828-1832, and the autonomous importance of religion and politics in its final demise” (Clark 1985, ppix-x).
10 These fears were not altogether unwarranted. The Cato Street Conspiracy (1820) was an unsuccessful attempt to kill most of the Members of Cabinet and overthrow the government and precipitate a French-style revolution. This widely publicised event contributed to the perception of precariousness
11 Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, (1764 –1845), also known as Viscount Howick was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 22 November 1830 to 16 July 1834. He was a member of the Whig Party and the leader of the group known as the “Foxite liberals”. For a character sketch see Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Warren Hastings’Edinburgh Review LXXIV (October, 1941), pp. 160–255.
12 The laws were introduced by the Importation Act 1815 (55 Geo. 3 c. 26) and repealed by the Importation Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. 22)
13 Whately was a major figure of the period. There are three principal biographies recounting his life and no autobiography. The first of these was William John Fitzpatrick’s Memoirs of Whately, 2 vols (London, 1864). The second was a biography and collection of correspondence written and edited by Whately’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth Jane Whately. This was published as The Life and Correspondence of Whately, 2 vols. (London, 1866). More recently, Donald Harman Akenson (1981) wrote A Protestant in Purgatory The Conference of British Studies biography series. (new series) 2. The National Dictionary of Biography, 1885-1900 by James McMullen Rigg contains a five thousand word entry on Whately’s life and work. This account identifies him as an “indpenedent liberal”, social science pioneer, anti-evangelical, advocate of the rights of dissenters, Catholics and Jews, outstanding teacher, social science pioneer and reformer of tertiary education. There is an entry on Whately in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, viii: 287-8 by Mary Prior and an entry in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Online), by R.D. Collison Black. The most felicitous of the available portraits of Whately is the chapter on him in Pre-Tractarian Oxford: A Reminiscence of the Noetics by Tuckwell (1909). There is a stipple-engraved portrait of him in the National Museum and he sat for a portrait by Catterson Smith which is in the Royal Hibernian Academy. We are left with all two million words of his writing. According to World Cat Identities, there are 765 works in 2,131 publications in 16 languages and 16,151 library holdings of his work. The largest single collection of Whately’s papers is held at the Library of Oriel College, Oxford.

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