Utilitarianism and Malthus

Autor: Sergio Cremaschi

Título: Utilitarianism and Malthus’ Virtue Ethics: Respectable, Virtuous and Happy

Editorial: 2014, Routledge Studies in the History of Economics

Resumen: This book reconstructs Malthus’s meta-ethics, his normative ethics and his applied ethics on such topics as population, poverty, sexuality and war and slavery. They show how Malthus’s understanding of his own population theory and political economy was that of sub-disciplines of moral and political philosophy. Empirical enquiries required in order to be able to pronounce justified value judgments on such matters as the Poor Laws. But Malthus’s population theory and political economy were no value-free science and his non-utilitarian policy advice resulted from his overall system of ideas and was explicitly based on a set of familiar moral assumptions.