Chapter 5  Whately’s Noetic intellectual inheritance

5.1 Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the intellectual milieu in which Whately thrived; the Oriel Noetics and Oxford. Several things will be considered: the derivation of the moniker ‘noetic’; the members that constituted the group; a review the major themes in their moral philosophy, illuminating their shared mental universe, and the ideas that underpinned the development of their political economy and the reform programmes they initiated; and an examination of one of these collective reform programmes. This analysis will confirm that the Noetics were, like Adam Smith, both mainstream political economists and bearers of the virtue ethics tradition. Finally, the chapter will conclude by demonstrating that the Noetics can be regarded as a ‘scientific community’ in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1969).

5.2 Meaning of ‘Noetic’

To the student of Aristotle’s Ethics, as the Oriel men were in no small degree, a ‘noetic’  is a man who develops, through exercise, his highest mental faculties. There is no doubt that the development of the capacity to reason and think was at the heart of the Noetic programme, and framed each of their intellectual and cultural endeavours.  The name was in common use during their lifetimes and has been confirmed in contemporaneous sources (Tuckwell 1909, p. 2).

5.3 Membership of the group

In terms of who was in the group, Tuckwell includes: Eveleigh, (Provost 1781-1814); Copleston; Whately; Arnold, (Fellow 1814-1819); Hampden, (Fellow 1814-1817); Hawkins, (Fellow 1813-1828); (Provost, 1828-1874); Baden Powell, Degree, 1817. Died 1860; and Blanco White, Fellow 1826. Died 1841. To this group I would add Whately’s protégé, Nassau Senior. Tuckwell does not include him as he was never a Fellow of Oriel College, but, in terms of intellectual contribution, as Whately’s collaborator on Elements of Logic (1828), and as his nominee for the inaugural Drummond Chair in Political Economy at Oxford, he should definitely be in the frame.

It is appropriate to treat Whately as the lead spokesman of a group endeavour. The nature of the intellectual product of the Noetics was collective. Some of Whately’s writing was the product of decade long conversations, a point he made himself, particularly in respect of his most influential work Elements of Logic (1826 ). While this bore his name, he claimed its very existence was impossible to imagine, in the absence of formation by, and continued dialogue with, Edward Copleston. Whatever merit belonged to his very popular book, “at least half belonged to Copleston”(Whately 1826, p. iii).

5.4 Beliefs: Reformist clerics, faith and reason

In terms of their religious faith, Moore (2009, p3), describes the Noetics as “unconventional reformist clerics… [who] deployed logical processes to bolster their religious beliefs, which they held in an unsentimental fashion, and thereby to some extent practised that most contradictory of creeds, a logical faith”. Although the Noetics sought to preserve continuity with the pre-enlightenment social orders and traditions, where moral development was an essential pursuit of all classes, they accepted that religion could not be at odds with science. These “clerical economists” (Hilton 1986, p49), were men devoted to two masters: faith and reason. They “had to overcome a widespread conviction that political economy was not only dry and repulsive but also wicked and dangerous…threatening to open up Jacobinical enquiries into thrones and altars” (Hilton 1986, p. 49).

5.5 The Noetics as a clerisy – filters of suitable knowledge

The primary intellectual challenge for thinkers in this religion-infused period is to ensure that the canonical texts of late eighteenth century economic thought (especially Smith, 1776) could be read as congruent with the theological assumptions which prevailed in the contemporary Anglican orthodoxy (Waterman 1991). The Noetics played the role of a ‘clerisy’, to employ again the Coleridgian trope. Coleridge’s conception involved the learned of all denominations:

“which constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the Theological Under the name of Theology, or Divinity, were contained the interpretation of languages; the conservation and tradition of past events; the momentous epochs, and revolutions of the race and nation; the continuation of the records; logic, ethics, and the determination of ethical science, in application to the rights and duties of men in all their various relations, social and civil; and lastly, the ground- knowledge, the prima scientia as it was named, -- PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas (Coleridge 1830, p47).

In this capacity, the Noetics were the arbiters of what would pass as knowledge and how it would be transmitted to the elites, and then into the broader social landscape

5.6 Moral philosophy and natural theology

I suggest that there are five fundamental points of natural theology and Christian moral philosophy that underwrote the Noetic political economy, which was a sub-strand of what become known as “Christian Political Economy” (D Winch 1996; A. Waterman 1991; Hilton 1986). Each of these points which were embraced by Whately as a Noetic, are discussioned in sub-section 5.6.1 to 5.6.5 inclusive.

5.6.1 Application of Newtonian science to moral questions

They were inheritors and proselytisers of the application of Newtonian natural theology which, unlike in France, was a project “not perceived as subversive” (Berlin quoted in Waterman 2008, p42). Newton, a devoted Christian, an enthusiastic student of scripture (and alchemy!), imparted a cosmology which confirmed the existence of a God of first causes; a cosmology where the laws of nature were the laws of God. Whereas in Catholic countries, the metaphysics of Aquinas provided the intellectual machinery for the formulation of economic thinking, the transition by the Scottish and English to Newtonian natural philosophy and natural theology, allowed political economy to find a path to establishment acceptance, with science as an ally not an enemy (Waterman 2008):“For not only does natural science demonstrate the unity, omnipotence and omniscience and goodness of God…. It disposes us to wonder and revelation” (Newton, as quoted in Waterman, p127). How attractive for a Jacobin haunted elite - a scientific commendation of wealth by free exchange and God!

5.6.2 The existence of God: Argument from design.

Another essential component of the intellectual inheritance of the Noetics was the teleological argument for the existence of God provided by Archdeacon William Paley and Bishop Sumner amongst others²². God’s existence in this apology is grounded in the evidence around us of his subtle craftsmanship. This is a remote deistic God, first cause and creator of laws in which the complex world around us evolves, in which the intricacy of the social world are revealed as the masterwork alongside that of nature. This was an attractive half-way house God for a scientifically, rationalist yet believing people. Paley and Sumner’s writing played a critical role in educating the minds and morals, in politics and philosophy, of a generation of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century members of the clerisy²³.

While the Noetics valued Paley’s broader contribution, on other matters of moral philosophy, they were more critical. In particular Paley’s denial of a moral sense they regarded as error. This is an important dimension of Whately’s contribution - the correction of Paley - to thwart its application by the utilitarians. We will explore this further in section Chapter 6, section 6.6.

5.6.3 ‘Butlerian self-love’

The third element of Christian Moral Philosophy we will examine here is the important role of the social benefits of self-love in solving the paradox laid down by Mandeville in the Fable of the Bees – Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Mandeville had, as a rhetorical device, created a conflict between the creators of wealth by commercial exchange and the strictures of Christian morality. For this perceived paradox to exist, Christian morality must exclude self-love which it patently does not (Waterman 2008). Joseph Butler solved this riddle in his sermon (1726) which showed that private endeavours and public good could coincide: “self-love is one chief security of our right behaviour towards society,” and that “under providence there is seldom any inconsistency between what is called our duty and what is called our interest” (Butler 1736, p. 27).

Smith’s TMS (1759) became the most influential of all the attempts to rise to the rhetorical challenge set by Mandeville by employing these foundational concepts of natural theology provided the theological and philosophical moorings for the WON (Waterman, 2008).

5.6.4 Responses to Malthus theodicy

Malthus, another “man of the cloth”, wrote for polemical effect. He portrayed a world in which human fertility was set against land scarcity; where rising population would doom the lower orders of society to misery or vice. For the higher orders, life may no longer be “nasty, brutish and short”, but for the poor, increased population with less to go round would keep them in Hobbesian darkness. Malthus framed the negative consequences rather than the sunlit uplands of trade and commerce creating quite the storm (Winch 1996). Only an evil God would allow more children to be born than providence could provide for²⁴. The furore which erupted infected the perceptions of economists more broadly with enduring consequences. It was at this moment that a cultural fault-line between the Romantics, (as represented by Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle and, later, Dickens, Ruskin and Morris) and the political economists appeared. The Romantics framed it as “the economists against the human beings” (Southey quoted in Waterman 2008, p131; Winch 1996, p402, 418).

Malthus was a better economist than he was a theologian, and the more theologically able rallied to save Christian Political Economy (Waterman 2008). Paley was one of the first to solve this theodicy riddle implicit in Malthus work²⁵. He argued that population pressure could be reconciled with Butlerian “self-love” where duty and interest nearly always coincided, and ‘moral restraint’ could provide a Christian solution that would lead to higher survival rates. Paley and Sumner’s (1818) use of Butler’s ‘discipline and trial’ and ‘moral restraint’ arguments, as the path to escape misery and vice, were used by Malthus in his 1817 revision of the Essay. Copleston, founder of the Oriel Noetics, used these themes, in his letters to Peel on the Poor Laws in 1819 (Waterman 1991).

5.6.5 Moral sense school

 

Man not only desires to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; but to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred.

Adam Smith, TMS, (1790) p113-114.

The Noetics were inheritors of the moral sense school²⁶. Smith and Hume, influenced by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, are the best known members of this school which holds that (i) human nature is grounded in a ‘moral sense’ prior to reason, and (ii) that it is these natural moral sentiments which provide the basis for ordering human social behaviour.

5.7  Smithian Virtue Ethics

The following section sets out how the Noetics inherited the virtue-ethics tradition from both Smith as well as from Christian teaching. It illustrates my contention that Whately is, like Smith, a mainstream political economist and a bearer of the virtue-ethics tradition. Smith, Whately, and the Noetics, see humans as profoundly social, and that social life flows from the social sentiments of benevolence and fellow feeling, as much from the exigencies of survival. Whately defined a human as an animal which converses and trades (Whately 1832, p. 41).  

The virtue-ethics tradition is a complete moral theory that commenced with Plato and Aristotle, was inherited by the Romans and Stoics and was formally embraced by Christianity in the 13^th Century mainly through the writing of Albert the Great (1200-1280) and his more famous student Aquinas (1225-1274). The foundation-insight is the same as that which animates the moral sense school: that human nature is innately social. The virtue- ethics tradition, however, is more explicitly Aristotelian, and departs from a definition of the purpose, the telos, of a human life. The purpose is to contribute to be good and to contribute to the development of a polity that pursues and achieves the good. To do this, humans, as individuals, must develop characteristics that aid in the achievement of that purpose; “excellences”or “virtues”. A virtue is “an excellence which aids in the achievement of the common human social purpose”²⁷. Character is developed through habit forming practice so that these characteristics, virtues, become innate.

Important recent scholarship has reclaimed Smith as a bearer of the virtue-ethics tradition (McCloskey 2008; Phillipson 2010). In Adam Smith, the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists McCloskey (2008) argues against the picture of Adam Smith as an economist in what she calls “the anti-ethical sense”; that “Smith was a virtue ethicist first and last” (McCloskey 2008, p. 65)²⁸. The pursuit of wealth alone is not sanctioned by Smith as a moral code, he describes the perfectly virtuous man as one who acts according to “the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence” (Smith as quoted in McCloskey 2008 p51).

The WON, McCloskey asserts, is a letter to a wise (or virtuous) legislator with ‘fit to purpose’ rhetoric. The legislator’s role is not to teach morality, but to create a system of laws of freedoms which enable the population to pursue wealth and happiness as individuals with access to enlightenment and education (McCloskey 2008). This complements the TMS (first published 1759), which was written to understand what the moral development in societies depends upon.

Phillipson’s (2010) thesis is that Adam Smith can only be understood in the context of the intellectual project which dominated his life, the development of a complete ‘Science of Man’²⁹. Phillipson argues that the TMS was written to provide the first part of the analysis of: “how men and women satisfy their moral needs and learn to live at ease with themselves in the world around them, a theory of sociability as well as ethics, providing what was in effect, an account of the moral economy of a recognisably modern civil society” (Phillipson 2010, pp. 2-3). Understanding Smith’s approach to self and society are keys to understanding his purpose. To see Smith in this light is to see that “the human beings who inhabit the types of societies about which he writes are driven by moral, aesthetic as well as material needs” (Phillipson 2010, p. 7). Smith is exploring the “human personality, and the customs habits and institutions which made political life and the progress of civilisation possible, could be explained in terms of the imaginative and sympathetic response of an indigent species to the never ending pressures of need” (Phillipson 2010, p. 279).

Smith is a virtue ethicist as he examines the process by which we acquire the senses of propriety, justice, political obligation and beauty, upon which our skills in the arts of social intercourse and our character depend.  In doing so, he had introduced into his analysis, a simple observation about the principles of human nature that had been ignored by modern philosophy:

“that man’s natural indigence had somehow gone hand in hand with a love of improvement which he would exercise whenever he felt secure enough to do so…. it had allowed him to suggest that a reasonably stable society will follow a material, moral, spiritual and political path of development, that was more natural and more secure than one which was determined by the whims of its sovereigns” (Phillipson 2010, p. 280).

The TMS offered a powerful conjecture on the nature of the civilising process, how citizens set out to satisfy their moral needs and the way in which some acquire that “sense of fitness and ethical beauty which makes it possible to aspire to a life of virtue” (Phillipson 2010, p. 157).

This picture of Smith promoting moral outcomes is not in any way in conflict with the Smith in the WON who promotes commercial society as the means to bring prosperity which will aid moral improvement through liberating people from the pressing demands of survival. Phillipson and McCloskey are clear Smith’s oeuvre is a testament that human maturity relies upon the development of moral imagination at the individual and collective level. The combination of Smith’s works explains the process that best frees people from pressing need: a commercial society. This synthetic picture of Smith promoting commercial society as the means to bring about moral outcomes is, I would argue, the Noetic reading. For the Noetics, there was no Das Adam Smith problem.

In conclusion, while I agree with McCloskey’s conviction that Smith is a virtue ethicist but he is not “the last of the former”. Whately, and his sometimes collaborator and sometimes mouthpiece, Nassau Senior, were mainstream economists who nested economics within a broader ethical framework focused on human development in a social setting. In other words, Whately was clearly of the moral sense school as well as a virtue ethicist. There are many examples in his writings to demonstrate that claim, and these will be examined in the Chapter which follows.

5.8 The Noetic method applied: The Poor Laws

Whately and the Noetics responded to these intellectual currents in three main collaborative projects: they increased the study of logic in the Oxford curriculum to improve rigour (Moore & White 2009, pp. 3-17); they synthesized the moral philosophy of the age (Waterman 1991 p206-215, 2008, p128, 132; Winch 1996; Oslington 2001, p838-849); and they contributed to the reform of the Poor Laws (Offer 2006). For the purpose of this paper, I will use the Noetic contribution to Poor Law reform as an example to illustrate the application of the Noetic method to a joint endeavour.

The Noetics are credited with being a driving force, in the reform of the Poor Laws (Mandler 1990 p82; Hilton 1986). Copleston had written a widely influential published letter to Peel on the state and need for reform of the Poor Laws to cope with the changing economic conditions and to update the system which had its origins in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some parishes were being bankrupted by the demand.

The Noetic conception, summarised by Offer (2006 p285), was that the provision of relief should be done in such a way that it did not exacerbate the situation by encouraging the able bodied to take it. They came early to the ‘principle of less eligibility’. The Noetics saw the opportunity of improvement in the hands of the individual who could pursue virtue (not happiness, or solely material goods). For them the presence of scarcity encouraged prudence (delayed child-rearing), industry (work). The accumulation of wealth would enable benevolence. Suffering could be overcome through duty and virtue.

Copleston’s letters and behind the scene consultations were highly influential. Whately also contributed letters and guidance to the reform agenda and promoted Nassau Senior as the Noetic representative in the event of the establishment of a Commission of inquiry. Following the Swing Riots, the Earl Grey Government set up the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws (1832) and Nassau Senior was appointed to the Commission. Edwin Chadwick, a leading Benthamite was the Secretary and John Bird Sumner another member.

Once Whately went to Ireland, and saw conditions there, far worse than those in Britain, we see a spectrum of views emerge among the Noetics. Whately argued that in the absence of any demand for labour, there is no threat of work being discouraged by the provision of relief. On the contrary, relief is the only thing that will keep people alive. “the population are, not from any want of their own, in permanent need” (Whately quoted in Mandler 1990, p101). Senior held the original line. Whately’s Irish experience changed his attitude on the conditions in which poor people were responsible for their own circumstances; when living virtuously would not trump destitution. The aim of policy should be to maintain the incentive to improve where this was possible (Offer 2006, p283-302).

5.9 Noetic Political Economy – A mainstream economic school of thought

Having considered both their shared intellectual inheritance, as well as their shared projects, we can regard the Noetics as mainstream, and as a formal school in the sense defined by Kuhn (1969) and Lakatos (1973).

The Noetics who were occupied with political economy as one of their particular contributions were Edward Copleston, Whately and Nassau Senior. Each have been included in surveys of the development of economics in the Britain of the period. You couldn’t get more mainstream than Oxford, in the early nineteenth century. The Noetics formed part of what Coleridge (1830) described as the clerisy.  To a student of history and culture, the Noetics are the mainstream. However, identifying the Noetic political economists as mainstream on the doctrinal record requires an examination beyond a tightly drawn doctrinal history of the discipline common to most textbooks. Recent scholarship in the history of economic thought has, however, illuminated the diversity of views and voices that comprised this three decade period between the publication of Malthus’ first version of the Essay on Population (1798) and the end of the ancien regime, which also parallels, the rise of the Philosophical Radicals (James Mill, David Ricardo and J.S. Mill).

Christian Political Economy, while it did not win the day in the canon of the doctrines that we pass on in undergraduate economics, was certainly a mainstream set of opinions (Hilton 1986; Waterman 1991; Winch 1996). Reconciling the ‘science of wealth’ with the tenets of Christian theology was an intention shared by all but the Philosophical Radicals. Their project was a departure from the Christian project but still mainstream, although over time, certainly by mid-century, they had won the debate in the court of public opinion and become the mainstream current. Our question relates to the earlier period (1798-1832) so our answer is: there are two schools in the mainstream in this period, the Christian and the Radical. Later on, we will see Christian Political Economy separate into three schools, the Noetic, the Evangelical and the Realists focused at Cambridge.

As to whether they were a formal school, Copleston and Whately’s engagement and influence on members of the broader group demonstrates the standards of a school properly defined as “a community to an extent unparalleled in most other fields they have undergone similar educations and professional initiations; in the process they have absorbed the same technical literature and drawn many of the same lessons from it. Usually the boundaries of that standard literature mark the limit of a scientific subject matter (Kuhn 1969, p177)” (my italics). 

The Noetics certainly shared similar educations and professional initiations. They were formed by the education they received over time at Oriel College with its common room which “stunk of logic”. Secondly, they did absorb the same technical literature and draw the same lessons from it. Their common grounding included five principal intellectual sources: Aristotelian logic and virtue ethics; Newtonian natural philosophy; Chrstian theology; Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy; and Smithian political economy. They had all read Aristotle, Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, Butler, Tucker, Paley, Malthus and Sumner. They shared intellectual touchstones, tacit knowledge and an approach to the development and refinement of ideas. They were four successive generations of teachers engaged in creating the shared professional initiations: becoming Fellows; giving lecture series; preparing students for exams; co-writing books on logic, then moral philosophy and ethics, then political economy³⁰. Finally, they engaged in several collaborative endeavors of philosophy and rhetoric, reform and intellectual endeavor³¹.

Within the mainstream history of economics canon, we find Nassau Senior, Whatley’s protégé, who was selected as the inaugural Drummond Chair of Political Economy, Oxford as Whately’s recommendation. His lectures in this capacity, which he held twice, were influential. He rose to high office and was appointed to the Commission to review the Poor Laws (1934) and was one of the principle re-drafters of the resultant legislation. He became the main economic adviser of the Whigs and a political economist to whom history has been kinder with her attentions than to our present subject, Whately³². Senior was often acting as a conduit for Copleston and Whately’s views. Waterman goes as far as to say that “in a nutshell, the essential Oxford contribution to Christian Political Economy lay in Copleston’s correction of Malthus’ economics and Whately’s correction of Paley’s ethics” (Waterman, 1991 p215).

5.10 Conclusions

This chapter has sought, using contextualist methods, to engage deeply with the intellectual life of the Noetics. To understand the influences that formed their mental universe, and how they applied this in their collaborations in the development of theory, philosophy and reform programmes. The discussion has confirmed one of the central contentions of this research paper: that the Noetics were bearers of the same virtue-ethics-political-economy tradition as Smith.

A subset of the Noetics, Copleston, Whately and Senior, were a school of political economy within the broader Noetic tradition. They existed within the rubric of Christian Political Economy, but had their own identity and conception, as revealed by their divergence from Paley’s Christian utilitarianism. They differed from the Evangelical wing of Christian Political Economy in that they were rationalists to the core. They agreed on the scientific value of deductive political economy, relying on the discernment of the ‘good’ through other means, so they were hostile to the programme of the Philosophical Radicals. They had a unique offering: a version of political economy formed within a tradition of Noetic moral philosophy.

Chapter 6  The Whatelian ‘Cattalaxy - Virtue Synthesis’

6.1 Introduction

This chapter builds toward the final presentation of the product of Whately’s combination of political economy and moral philosophy, his ‘Catallaxy-Virtue Synethsis’, which focused as much on virtue and knowledge, as wealth.

First, Whately’s grand strategy “war on two fronts” (Waterman 1991, p206), will be laid out. Secondly, his newly named “catallactics, the science of exchange”, will be reviewed. This will include: the scope he proposed for this science, the refocusing of political economy based on a social understanding of human nature and the distinction between scientific and moral knowledge; the promise and purpose of the new science; the method for its conduct; and the deductively derived laws it yields. Finally, the dynamics of knowledge and virtue creation: social desire; emulation; approbation; reason; fairness and transparency. Within the small compass of this paper, only two of Whately’s interventions are considered: (1) his mid-wivery of the science of economics (covered in Introductory Lectures to Political Economy (delivered in 1831 published in 1832); and, (2) his direct attack on the utilitarians by correcting Paley’s doctrine of Christian utilitarianism on whose coat tails they had ridden into mainstream acceptance³³.

6.2 A war on two fronts

Richard Whately was a pugnacious man, who charted a course through the Scylla of the nostalgic evangelicals, with their “post Malthusian economics of sin”, and the Charybdis of the ‘amoral’ utilitarians, who “sought to annex political economy to their own subversive ends”(A.M.C. Waterman 1991b, p. 207). Whately’s ends were divine, but as to means, he took the world as he found it; “political economy as natural theology”, where the design of the universe reflected the munificence of the creator who had endowed man with the social instinct for cooperation and reciprocity and therefore exchange and commerce. He believed that the pragmatic consequence of this new commercial society would be the capacity for virtue, moral restraint, benevolence and generosity.

While optimistic by nature, Whately saw little hope of converting the radicals to Christianity and instead sought to challenge the least tenable of their “avowedly atheistic” doctrines. He thought better of his prospects of persuading the “high-church men” of the concordance of political economy with natural theology and the improvement of society (A.M.C. Waterman 1991a, p. 207). By 1820 the storm over Malthus supposed theodicy had been met by the work-around provided by Paley, Sumner and Copleston. Other than the most intransigent romantics (the Lake poets and their circle), mainstream Christian opinion settled down. The real threat was now the Philosophical Radical’s plan to hijack the new science for their utilitarian reform programme. Having established the Westminster Review in 1824 and the University of London in1826 to propagate their views, Bentham, James Mill and their allies (including Ricardo until his death in 1823), were gaining the ascendancy in harnessing the new science of political economy to the cause of ‘radical’ reform.

6.3  Whatelian political economy – a ‘Catallaxy of wealth, virtue and knowledge’

 “As the world always has been, and must be, governed by political economists, whether they have called themselves so or not, and whether skilful or unskilful; so, there must always be a tendency, in a country where all stations are open to men of superior qualifications – there must always, I say, be a tendency, in proportion to intellectual culture spreads, towards the placing of his power in the hands of those who have most successfully studied the subject” (Whately 1832, vi)

In these lectures, Whately’s also took the opportunity to create a bright line between ‘scientific’ and ‘religious’ knowledge. This line laid the foundation of methodological orthodoxy in political economy and in what is now called ‘economics’. Precisely because of Whately’s demarcation, deductive political economy came to be seen as a distinct and non-competing inquiry from the moral philosophy and theology from which it derived. Scripture now had a different role: “Scripture is not the test by which the conclusions of Science are to be tried”, its purpose rather “is to reveal to us religious and moral truths” (Whately 1832, p19-20). Scripture is one source, there are others, and one of the tasks of education is to build the mind and the moral truths:

…must be admitted with considerable modification. God has not revealed to us a system of morality such as would have been needed for Beings who had no other means of distinguishing right and wrong. On the contrary, the inculcation of virtue and reprobation of vice in Scripture are in such a tone as seems to presuppose a natural power, or a capacity for acquiring the power, to distinguish them. (Whately 1832, p 19-20)

Hypotheticals are one thing, real action another. Whately, like Senior, J.S Mill and Malthus:

“In their different ways, all of these figures adopted a more restricted – or perhaps it was simply safer and tidier – view of the scope of the ‘pure’ science of political economy, one that made a firmer distinction between ethically neutral questions of the hypothetical science and its far from ethically neutral applications to final goals or policy” (Winch 1996, p399).

6.4  Reading ‘the great book of human transactions’

In these lectures, Whately sought to recast the scope of study of political economy, away from its origins from the Greek for ‘household management’, oeconomia, to Catallactics, a Greek word which simply translated to English means ‘exchange’³⁴. A richer translation, however, includes connotations of ‘reciprocity’, ‘mutual reward’ and it is clear that Whately intended these (Whately, 1832, Levy & Peart, 2010). Whately sought to restore the social to the frame and to evoke directly the spontaneous order, conceived by Divine wisdom, which market-exchange represented. Whately defined man as an animal that trades, which behaviour flowed from our profoundly social nature: “there are few, perhaps none, who deny Man to be by nature a social Being, incapable, except in community, of exercising or developing his most important and most characteristic faculties” (Whately 1832, p59). He quotes Aristotle and Cicero in his justification:

  “Both of these writers stood opposed to those, of their own times, who represented the social union as expedient…. They both agreed that social union, is not formed by men with a view to those advantages, but from an instinctive propensity…that without society, though a man should possess all other goods, life would not be worth living” (Whately 1832, p59)³⁵.

Whately speaks of the new science which will teach people “to read the great book of human transactions”, a science “concerned universally, and exclusively, with exchange” (Whately 1832, p6). In fact, if there is no one to exchange with, a Robinson Crusoe situation for example, then wealth creation and economising is outside the scope of political economy (Whately 1832). For Whately man is a beneficiary of trade, not an economiser: homo catallacticus not homo economicus.

Echoes of Newtonian natural theology abound in Whately’s treatise. Everywhere we see the wisdom of providence in having made us social, rational and free, abounds:

the “marks of contrivance  with a view to a beneficial end, as we are accustomed to admire (when our attention is drawn to the study of Natural Theology) …the beneficent wisdom of Providence, to contemplate, not corporeal particles, but rational free agents, co-operating in systems no less manifestly indicating design, yet no design of theirs; and though acted on, not by gravitation and impulse, like inert matter, but by motives addressed to the will, yet advancing as regularly and effectually the accomplishment of an object they never contemplated, as if they were merely the passive wheels of a machine” (Whately 1832, p54).

Self-love and benevolence commuted to public benefit, just as God intended. He also analogises political economy with medicine, which would not have risen but for disease. The new science rises to understand the impediments to “good health” to restore “full liberty from “unjust interference” and “perfect freedom of intercourse between all mankind” (Whately 1832, p54). Finally, like Smith (1776), he gives us the example of the city, marvel of “supplying with daily provisions of all kinds such a city as our metropolis containing above a million of inhabitants”. Whately challenges us to put ourselves in the role of central planners and consider the “anxious toil which such a task would impose on a Board of the most experienced and intelligent commissaries” and, as history records, would achieve nothing like the same efficiency (Whately 1832, p60).

6.5  ‘In Virtue, True Wisdom and Happiness’

Whately made the consideration of virtue and moral improvement even more explicit than Smith. Like Smith, he believed that the telos, the end of the human animal was moral improvement; wealth its means. Whately supplemented the essential core of this economistic theology with accounts of the human capacity for improvement, the progress of civilised society, in knowledge and virtue, the benefits of emulation and social sentiments. This is how he reconciled wealth and virtue.

Although Whately made clear that the “strict object of political economy is to inquire only into the nature, production, and distribution of wealth; not, its connexion with virtue or with happiness” (Whately 1832, p32) and that “such an enquiry would be more suitable in an ethics treatise” (Whately 1832, p96), he also argued, like Smith (McCloskey 2008; Phillipson 2010) that the purpose of all of the moral sciences was to unlock the secrets of civil moral progress. His framework is the question, what advances civilisation? That there is a hierarchy of civilisations, based on their moral attainment is axiomatic: “the apparent design of Providence evidently is, the advancement of mankind, not only as Individuals but as Communities” (Whately 1832, p67). That this moral attainment and progress transcends wealth is essential to the Whatelian conception. In a lecture entitled Progress of Society in Wealth:

“It appears that Society…has a tendency, so far as wars, unwise institutions, imperfect and oppressive laws, and other such obstacles, do not interfere, to advance, in Wealth and in the Arts which pertain to human life and enjoyment” (Whately 1832, p104). 

As society’s increase in wealth, more energy is devote to nobler causes: “a devotedness to temporal objects is no characteristic of a more wealthy and civilised, as distinct from a more barbarian, state of society” and “in a civilised life [emulation] is frequently directed (however seldom in comparison with what it should be) to many nobler objects” (Whately 1832, p96). Whately argued for wealth as a good.

Just as science was not an enemy of God, so wealth was not an enemy of virtue but its ally. “as the Most High has evidently formed Society with a tendency to advancement in National Wealth, so, He has designed and fitted us to advance, by means of that, in Virtue, and true Wisdom, and Happiness” (Whately 1832, p119).

6.6 The Catallaxy explained 

This section explains Whately’s proposed method for the conduct of the new science as well as the key economic insights he affirmed in lectures I and III (Whately 1832). Whately was a firm proponent of deductive theory. He believed the axiomatic principles of political economy were few and could be gleaned from rational observation of the world. The science required two things: data from which we are to reason; and correctness in the process of deducing conclusions from the data. He invokes Bacon, and describes a spectrum of sciences between mathematics, in which no induction is required, and geology, which relies on the collection of information. Political economy, he explains, is a branch of natural philosophy to be found half-way between the two. In political economy, facts are few and simple. The challenge is the need to collect the information on the context, before any policy prescription is applied. He compares this to mechanics or geometry where knowledge of the laws does not suffice, measurement of the site of work is all critical. The challenge of economics is the application of the facts of political economy to the particular context in the real world, which must be measured and understood.

In terms of economic analysis, and what drives the increase in national wealth, Whately’s introductory lecture did not contain a great deal of new material. He affirms the centrality of security of property and quotes extensively from Sumner (1818) and elaborates in his own words:

‘I have spoken of security of property as the most essential point, because, though no progress can be made without a division of labour, this could neither exist without security of property, nor could fail to arise with it’ (Whately 1832, 86-7).

He quoted vast tranches of Smith (WON) about the division of labour, money and trade and explains the power of each. (Whately 1832, p105).

Whately also emerges as an early opponent of the labour theory of value, “pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them; but on the contrary, men dive for them because they fetch a high price” (Whately 1832, p167). He is also vociferous against war and an advocate of ‘trade not war’ as the best means to national prosperity and security through raising the gains of trade (Whately 1832 p112). It is also claimed he is the first to consider rent, interest and wages reflect different aspects of the more general problem asset pricing (Rashid 1977 p153)..

6.7  Progress of Knowledge

Where Whately’s political economy does add dimensions of new analysis, is in his understanding of the psychology and economics of knowledge creation. He is acutely aware of the heuristic impediments to decision making. If “logic is the grammar of reasoning”, (Whately 1849, p5) then attacking the logical fallacies which had hitherto linked poverty with moral goodness was correcting the vocabulary of ideas. He also attacks the “noble savage” conceptions of the continent and he urges us to make wealth and its products “goods to us, by studying to use them aright, and to promote, through them, the best interests of ourselves and our fellow creatures” (Whately 1832, p38). 

Throughout the text he uncovers numerous other fallacies and errors of reasoning which impair individual and collective decision making. This is Whately’s gospel, and it applies to all classes, nothing will be as beneficent to the wealth of nations as good reasoning. For Whately, logic itself is a social enterprise. Logic trades in meaning, and meaning has a social context; passing bad arguments in the rhealm of ideas, is no different from fraud in the material world (Levy & Peart 2010). In the Whatelian catallaxy, fallacies are sinful. Whately, was no fan of long causal chains. Levy (2010) describes his model for “kattalactic rationality” based on self-love “subject to a reciprocity constraint” thus:

“a society of fair-minded individuals, each with their own presuppositions and biases, as the nexus of fallacy detection stands in contrast to the platonic vision of experts who free themselves from pre-suppositions and bias and consequently have no need for fairness” (Levy & Peart 2010, p176).

This adds depth to the picture of the clerisy Whately had in mind which bears further reflection beyond our scope here.

To summarise or our purposes now, knowledge is created, and fallacies cleansed because of a mix of our self-love, and desire to win praise, and to be praiseworthy; our desire to emulate those we admire and to receive their approbation; and because of our sheer love of knowledge and truth. Whately:

“desire of gaining knowledge, a desire (found, I imagine, on sympathy) of communicating it to others, as an ultimate end. This, and also the love of display, are, no doubt, inferior motives, and will be superceded by a higher principle, in proportion as the individual advances in moral excellences” (Whately 1832, p106).

Here he highlights both the social dimensions of the desire to create knowledge, as well as his vision of moral improvement that he assumes we attain as we, and the society around us, know more; another virtuous circle.

6.8 Correcting Paley’s moral errors

We turn now to the war on the other front; smiting the utilitarians. The Philosophic Radicals based their programme of reform on Bentham’s secularised version of Paley’s utilitarian ethics (Crimmins 1989). Whately made a major contribution to virtue ethics when he corrected the most influential moral philosophical tract of the day, Paley’s Moral Philosophy: With Annotations (Whately 1859). This was Whately’s second most influential book (after Elements of Logic 1826). Paley was the Christian orthodox vessel on which the philosophical radicals entered mainstream waters. For the utilitarians, the analysis of scientific reform sufficed, the only analysis to be done was of consequences and these could be judged scientifically. Moral considerations had been thus eliminated. For Whately they were correct in regarding political economy as a valuable instrument for implementing the social values which should guide public policy, but they were wrong to suppose “that the hedonistic calculus can be a reliable source of (or substitute for) those values. Only a moral sense preferably illuminated by Holy Scripture can determine those ends to which political economy is the only means” (Waterman 1991, p210).

Whately’s battle was fought on the pages of his annotation of Paley’s text which he thought laid the foundations of Moral Philosophy for “many hundreds – probably thousands – of Youth while under a course of training designed to qualify them for being afterwards the Moral instructors of Millions… therefore cannot fail to exercise a very considerable and extensive influence on the Minds of successive generations” (Whately 1832, preface i). His principal correction:

“man according to him [Paley], has no moral faculty, - no power of distinguishing right from wrong, - no preference of justice to injustice, or kindness to cruelty, excepts when one’s own personal interest happens to be concerned. ….The truth, I conceive, is actually the reverse of this, viz., that Man having in himself a Moral-faculty…by which he is instinctively led to approve virtue and disapprove of vice. (Whately 1859, p. 77).

Whately describes the ‘calculations of utility’ which cannot discern goodness as being unsurprisingly met with disgust (Whately 1859, p. 42). In a materialistic universe presupposed by Bentham (Crimmins 1989) human pleasure and pain are reducible to the interaction of ‘discrete physical objects’. The effect of this can be evaluated –subjectively and provisionally - by each individual. But without some of the necessarily theological understanding of a ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ to human life, it is impossible for anyone to be sure about the value even of his own pleasures and pains, let alone those of anyone else. This is Whately’s challenge to Paley:

“For as the believer in God is at a loss to account for the existence of evil, the believer of no God is equally unable to account for the existence of good, or indeed anything at all that bears the mark of design (Whately 1859, p68).

Absent an innate ‘moral sense’ men and women are impotent to discern good from evil in their own lives, let alone comparisons with others, or between societies. The Benthamite system “can afford no information about what ought to be in public affairs; and his advocacy of political economy in policy formation is at best unhelpful and at worst a mere fraud” (Waterman 1991, p 215). This inability to explain the good is the central deficiency of utilitarian ethics and remains unanswered to this day.

Whately thought he had dealt a decisive blow against the Philosophical Radicals and their utilitarian programme. Intellectually he had. But science doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it is subject to the themes and currents of the culture in which it is set. One wonders whether he was aware that it was the moral authority of the Christian clerisy that was about to suffer the mortal blow. Whately’s critique of utilitarianism was published weeks before the release of a book of epochal importance, Charles Darwin’s (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Whately and the Noetics had a lot riding on Paley’s “argument from design” God, and the ‘Watchmaker’ was to prove no match for the atavistic randomness of natural selection in the court of public opinion. Whately’s critique of utilitarianism, flowing as it did from ‘argument from design’ theology, and tainted by association as the product of the Christian clerisy, can perhaps be regarded as collateral damage in the explosion of the Origin of Species onto the landscape.

6.9 The Whatelian Virtue synthesis – a virtuous circle

This chapter has presented all of the building blocks that now allow us to present the Whatelian Cattalaxy-Virtue Synthesis in the formation of economic policy. In summary terms: