ABSTRACT
Utilitarianism properly understood was Bentham’s own invention; this resulted from secularization of a theological argument as well as from transfer of a meta-ethical argument to normative ethics, yielding the Benthamite ‘new morality’. Malthus never attempted to reconcile ‘dogma’ with ‘utility’, nor did he ever undermine any theological foundation he had laid before for his work. He just modified on a number of points his 1798 theological views, thus yielding different, albeit no less, and indeed even more, theological views. The real novelty was wider scope for morality and the related possibility of some kind of ‘worldly’ harmonious design of human society, a picture that does rest on a theological foundation. The alleged counterpart of dogma, ‘utility’, in turn, was just one element in Malthus’s ethics, going with others, which for Bentham were pure nonsense, such as laws of nature and rights.
