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

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.

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:

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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