Edgeworth's exact and naturally weighted evolutionary utilitarianism and the happiness of Mr. Pongo

TL;DR

This paper reconstructs Edgeworth's utilitarianism as an exact, evolutionary science grounded in psychophysics, highlighting its naturalized social hierarchies and its influence on economic thought.

Contribution

It reveals how Edgeworth's mathematical approach to utilitarianism incorporated evolutionary biology and psychophysics, and how it justified social inequalities.

Findings

Edgeworth modeled individuals as quasi-Fechnerian functions.

He applied the maximization of welfare across evolutionary hierarchies.

Economists later removed the philosophical foundations, focusing on tools.

Abstract

This article challenges the conventional reading of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth by reconstructing his intellectual project of unifying the moral sciences through mathematics. The contribution he made in the first phase of his writing, culminating in \textit{Mathematical Psychics}, aimed to reconfigure utilitarianism as an exact science, grounding it in psychophysics and evolutionary biology. In order to solve the utilitarian problem of maximizing pleasure for a given set of sentient beings, he modeled individuals as ``quasi-Fechnerian'' functions, which incorporated their capacity for pleasure as determined by their place in the evolutionary order. The problem of maximization is solved by distributing means according to the individuals' capacity for pleasure. His radical anti-egalitarian conclusions did not stem from an abstract principle of justice, but from the necessity to maximize welfare among naturally unequal beings. This logic was applied not only to sentients of different evolutionary orders, such as Mr. Pongo, a famous gorilla, and humans, but also to human races, sexes, and classes. The system, in essence, uses the apparent neutrality of science to naturalize and justify pre-existing social hierarchies. This analysis reveals that the subsequent surgical removal of his utilitarianism by economists, starting with Schumpeter, while making his tools palatable, eviscerates his overarching philosophical system.