Insistence that self-interest should be virtuous gradually began to dissipate, displaced by new interpretations of the tensions between moral and political economy.
The English clergyman and writer Thomas Robert Malthus argued not only that the pursuit of self-interest would serve the common good, but that benevolence would undermine it. Malthus did not abandon the traditional religious emphasis on virtue.
Rather, he recast virtue as control over lust rather than greed, describing poverty as punishment for the sexual self-indulgence of early marriage and rapid population growth. In his usage, the term ‘‘moral restraint” conveyed something quite specific: delayed marriage that could keep population growth in check.Malthus's redefinition of vice represented an important conceptual innovation that has been described as part of a ‘‘demoralization of society''.1 It could better be described as a ‘‘remoralization'', one sought a new compromise between religious values and political economy.2 Malthus shifted concern away from greed (economic desire carried to harmful extremes) toward lust (sexual desire carried to harmful extremes). Indeed, the problem with the poor and working classes, he argued, was that they allowed their sexual interests to overwhelm their economic ones. Yet Malthus's arguments were also subversive of the established order, eliciting attacks from both right and left. He used economic reasoning to challenge the pronatalist notion that men and women had a God-given duty to replenish the earth by conceiving children regardless of the consequences.