From Cardinal to Ordinal Utility Theory: Darwin and Differential Capacity for Happiness

I Lionel Robbins Remembers JUST SIX YEARS AFTER his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science created a stir in economics with its query about the scientific status of interpersonal utility comparisons (Robbins [19321 1935: 136-140), Lionel Robbins remembered how he came to be a "provisional" utilitarian: My own attitude to problems of political action has always been one of what I might call provisional utilitarianism.... I have always felt that, as a first approximation in handling questions relating to the lives and actions of large masses of people, the approach which counts each man as one, and, on that assumption, asks which way lies the greatest happiness, is less likely to lead one astray than any of the absolute systems. I do not believe, and I never have believed, that in fact men are necessarily equal or should always be judged as such. But I do believe that, in most cases, political calculations which do not treat them as if they were equal are morally revolting. (1938: 635) A. C. Pigou's utilitarian analysis, involving "the delicate balancing of gain and loss," was attractive: (1) It follows, therefore, that when I came to the study of economics, I had the strongest bias in favour of a utilitarian analysis. The delicate balancing of gain and loss through intricate repercussions of policy which I found in such works as the Economics of Welfare, fascinated me; and I was powerfully attracted by the proposition, urged so forcefully by Edwin Cannan and others, that recent developments of the theory of value could be invoked to demonstrate the desirability of the mitigation of inequality. When I look back on that frame of mind, I find it easy to understand the belief of Bentham and his followers that they had found the open sesame to problems of social policy. (1938: 635-636) Then doubts set in about the feasibility of such a utilitarian calculus: But I began to feel that there were profound difficulties in a complete fusion between what Edgeworth called the economic and the hedonistic calculus. I am not clear how these doubts first suggested themselves; but I well remember how they were brought to a head by my reading somewhere--I think in the works of Sir Henry Maine--the story of how an Indian official had attempted to explain to a high-caste Brahmin the sanctions of the Benthamite system. "But that," said the Brahmin, "cannot possibly be right. I am ten times as capable of happiness as that untouchable over there." I had no sympathy with the Brahmin. But I could not escape the conviction that, if I chose to regard men as equally capable of satisfaction and he to regard them as differing according to a hierarchical schedule, the difference between us was not one which could be resolved by the same methods of demonstration as were available in other fields of social judgment. (1938: 636) (2) In this essay, we provide the context for Robbins's memory of the debate over the transition from cardinal to ordinal utility. In so doing, we link the debate to the transition from egalitarianism to hierarchy that has been the overarching theme of our book (Peart-Levy 2005a), and to post-Darwinian accounts of variations in the capacity for happiness. We begin by considering the egalitarian utilitarianism of J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer, in which everyone was supposed to count as one. That is their phrase. Second, we compare Spencer's utilitarian goal with Darwin's goal of the "general good." Here, we suggest that Spencer's goal was egalitarian, while Darwin's entailed biological perfection or hierarchy. We then follow Robbins's suggestion and consider Edgeworth's hedonic calculus in which the notion of hierarchy enters economics. For Edgeworth, agents have differential capacities for happiness. …