ABSTRACT
Part V concerns Thomas Robert Malthus. Chapter 11 is my response to Sergio Cremaschi’s position in his Utilitarianism and Malthus’s Virtue Ethics (2014), which distinguishes between a distinctive, theologically-based utilitarianism attributed to Malthus and the utilitarianism of the Philosophical Radicals. Here I restate and reinforce the case made out in my The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus (1997) for a coalescence of the Malthusian and secular utilitarian perspectives. For while seeking to reconcile theology and welfare Malthus effectively undermined the former by radically reinterpreting the scriptures to justify a reduced birth rate. The theological dimension is absent from his adoption in the 1820s to the Ricardian vision of industrial development which turned on perceived changes in the empirical and legislative environment. And while Malthus at times perceived virtue as divorced from consequences for happiness, so too it is easy to show did Ricardo and J.S. Mill even when at odds with the wealth and happiness components of the utilitarian maximand.
