Against Benevolence
Whether one calls Malthus a ‘‘demoralizer’’ or a “moralizer” depends in large part on one’s own moral standpoint.20 Malthus challenged the traditional pronatalism of the established church as well as its reassurances that God would provide for his children.
He also implicitly challenged some Christian ideals. According to his argument, charitable assistance to the poor could lead to the same population growth and immiseration as the official poor relief. Loving one’s neighbor as thyself—in this way, at least—could do more harm than good.Yet Malthus was a clergyman with strong moral principles who found ways to reconcile his arguments with established doctrine. He emphasized the religious doctrine of original sin, which urged all Christians to accept the imperfections of the status quo. The sufferings of the poor were transitory. The meek and virtuous among them would find reward in Heaven. An emerging Christian political economy insisted that poverty and inequality could be interpreted as a ‘‘deliberate contrivance by a benevolent God for bringing out the best in His children and so training them for the life to 5521
come.
Smith had welcomed benevolence in its place; Malthus described it as a weak feminine sentiment. Describing the inevitable demise of Godwin’s ideal state, he explained that self-love would ‘‘resume his wonted empire’’.22 Men were not the masters of their own fate and should acknowledge forces beyond their control. Only the Deity could successfully practice benevolence.23 Men should settle for less ambitious goals.
Smith had suggested that differences in social institutions were relatively unimportant, because of the natural benevolence of the wealthy. Malthus insisted that any society based on principles of equality or sharing was doomed to failure.24 Any imaginable society would evolve into a system based on the distinction between rich and poor, a society, ‘‘divided into a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers, and with self-love for the mainspring of the great machine.”25 In a distinct break with Enlightenment principles, he argued that self-love did not need to be controlled, contained, domesticated, or tempered. He considered it a marker of civilization as well as an engine of progress:
To the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-love, which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition, we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilized from the
26 savage state.
Though Malthus never actually used the word “greed”, he imposed few conceptual limits on self-love that might distinguish it from the vice still enshrined within the Christian lexicon. A footnote in an appendix to the 1806 edition distinguished between self-love and selfishness, describing the former as ‘‘that passion which under proper regulations is the source of all honourable industry, and of all the necessaries and conveniences of life,” and the latter as ‘‘the same passion pushed to excess, when it becomes useless and disgusting, and consequently vicious.’’27 Self-love equates with that which is good, selfishness with that which is bad. The operative distinction is virtually utilitarian: that which is good is that which has good consequences for society (though these are never specified), and vice versa. On closer consideration, the footnote is inconsistent with the larger thrust of the Essay. Malthus never described any necessary or proper regulations of self-love other than delayed marriage.