The Dutch exchange their labor in navigation, fishing and manufacturing, principally with foreigners, for the products of their land. Otherwise, Holland could not support half of its population. England buys from abroad considerable amounts of timber, hemp and other materials or products of the soil and consumes much wine for which she pays in minerals, manufactured goods, etc. That saves the English a great quantity of the production of their soil. Without these advantages, the people of England, based on their standard of living, could not be as numerous as they are. The coal mines save them several million acres of land, which would otherwise be needed to grow timber.
But all these advantages are refinements and exceptional cases, which I mention only incidentally. The natural and constant way of increasing population in a state is to find employment for the people there, and to make the land provide their means of support.
It is also a question outside of my subject 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.--Cantillon (1755) Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général translated as An Essay on Economic Theory, Translated by Chantal Saucier, part 1, chapter 15. [See here for the original French.]*
Last week, with some bravura, I made fun of MacAskill's rewriting of the history of population ethics (recall here). And I insisted that population ethics was as old as (Plato inspired) philosophy. However, Gustaf Arrhenius reached out to me, first, to force me to be precise between (what I ended up calling) [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.)
While I continue to insist that the popular version is more or less co-equal with the history of European philosophy, in response to Gustaf I was mum about the history of the technical version of population ethics. It's pretty clear that the technical version of population ethics is in Sidwick. In fact, Gustaf reminded me of a passage from Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics that is often mentioned (see here for example) in the context of discussions of the repugnant conclusion.
If we foresee as possible that an increase in numbers will be accompanied by a decrease in average happiness or vice versa, a point arises which has not only never been formally noticed, but which seems to have been substantially overlooked by many Utilitarians. For if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible, – as appears to be often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthus – but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum.” (quoted from the fifth edition)
It is worth noting that the snarky aside about "the political economists of the school of Malthus" is missing from the first 1874 edition (here)! (I don't know in which edition it was added by Sidgwick.) I noticed it was missing from the first edition of Sidgwick's Methods because it is quoted partially in Edgeworth's (1877) New and Old Methods of Ethics: Or, "Physical Ethics" and "Methods of Ethics", p. 35. And this made me check the first edition!
Now, I mentioned Edgeworth's significance to eugenics in the post responding to MacAskill's claims. (I learned of his significance through the work of David M. Levy and Sandra Peart.) It is worth noting that Edgeworth (whose Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, is rather important in the development of mathematical economics) insists that, in so far as Sidgwick is a kind of exact utilitarian for whom the "greatest quantity of happiness of sentients" is the proper end that this is kind of anticipated in Gustav Theodor Fechner's (1846) Ueber das höchste Gut (here). I am unsure if we find a population ethics in the technical sense in it. But it's a short book, and worth finding out (go for it).
As I was looking at the reception of Sidgwick's passage, a comment by Myrdal (in The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory) sent me back to a different passage in Edgeworth, reviewing Sidgwick's The Elements of Politics in 1891 in the Economic Journal (which he edited). And it's this review that let me to the passage in Cantillon quoted above. In the passage, Edgeworth gives a kind of mini history of technical population ethics in the technical sense, and treats Sidgwick as its founder (as Sidgwick himself had suggested.) Let me first quote Edgeworth:
Discoveries are hardly possible in ethics, practical principles have grown slowly; but we hold that the nearest approach to an absolutely new idea of first - rate importance in morals was made by the following momentous passage which occurs in the fourth book of the Methods of Ethics (ch . 1 ): 'Political economists of the school of Malthus often appear to assume that no increase of numbers can be right which involves any decrease in average happiness. But if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be allowed to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible, but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches a maximum."
Bentham was not led to regard the lot of happiness' enjoyed by a nation as a function of the number of population considered as variable. J. S. Mill was so preoccupied by the evils of overpopulation as hardly to have indicated whether there is an opposite extreme. Even, if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it,' he says with respect to the increase of population. Cantillon indeed, had stated, but did not attempt to answer the question, whether it is better to have a large population poor and without comforts, or a smaller population with more affluence; a population of a million consuming the produce of six acres (arpens) per head, or of four millions, each living on an acre and a half.' And Cournot, in his later writings, had pointed to the insolubility of such questions as the rock on which economic optimism foundered. But the question is not regarded as unanswerable, nor is it left unanswered, by Dr. Sidgwick..--P. 784
Edgeworth is here quoting the fourth (1890) edition of Methods of Ethics. And the way I read Edgeworth, he is saying that in the middle of the eighteenth century, Cantillon basically asks the question in such a way that could have led to (somewhat) technical population ethics, but left it aside. It is worth noting, as an aside, that in the sense Parfit and MacAskill use atheism/secular, Cantillon's treatment is entirely secular. (In fact, theorizing about population in the early modern period was nearly always also means to undermine any Biblical narrative--this can be easily seen if you go to Damilaville's (1765) entry on population in Diderot's Encyclopedia.)
Since this is pretty much the length of a solid digression, I will stop here. But I will leave you with a question and a thought: first, to what degree was Cantillon's question really so out of the ordinary? (See here for the claim that it was.; I am not so sure) In part, this requires an engagement with early modern political economy and political arithmetick. Second, and this is my observation, stated as such, Cantillon's question is already modelled in Socrates' account of the city of pigs, where a large healthy population poor and without comforts, is explicitly preferred over any with luxuries (and where population and conforts are explicitly traded off each other). As Cannan (an important commentator on Adam Smith) notes without mentioning Plato, Paley (yes that Paley) writing later in the eighteenth century agreed with Socrates.
*Here's a 'Français modernisé par Stéphane Couvreur" (2011):
Les Hollandais échangent leur travail, soit dans la navigation, soit dans la pêche ou les manufactures, avec les étrangers généralement, contre le produit des terres. La Hollande sans cela ne pourrait entretenir de son fond la moitié de ses habitants. L’Angleterre tire de l’étranger des quantités considérables de bois, de chanvres, et d’autres matériaux ou produits de terre, et consomme beaucoup de vins qu’elle paie en mines, manufactures, etc. Cela épargne chez eux une grande quantité de produits de terre ; et sans ces avantages, les habitants en Angleterre, sur le pied de la dépense qu’on y fait pour l’entretien des hommes, ne pourraient être si nombreux qu’ils le sont. Les mines de charbon y épargnent plusieurs millions d’arpents de terre, qu’on serait obligé sans cela d’employer à produire des bois.
Mais tous ces avantages sont des raffinements et des cas accidentels, que je ne considère ici qu’en passant. La voie naturelle et constante, d’augmenter les habitants d’un État, c’est de leur y donner de l’emploi, et de faire servir les terres à produire de quoi les entretenir.
C’est aussi une question qui n’est pas de mon sujet de savoir s’il vaut mieux avoir une grande multitude d’habitants pauvres et mal entretenus, qu’un nombre moins considérable, mais bien plus à leur aise ; un million d’habitants qui consomment le produit de six arpents par tête, ou quatre millions qui vivent de celui d’un arpent et demi.
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