F. Y. edgeworth’s mathematical ethics

Conclusion

Edgeworth’s utopia was elitist; it might even be called racist, except that he never attempted to state what outward characteristics differentiated the higher from the lower-evolved groups—unlike many of his contemporaries. He was certainly a male chauvinist, having claimed that men have a greater capacity for both pleasure and work than women [see 1881, 78–79]. These pecularities of Edgeworth’s beliefs, however, are either explicit in his assumptions or else they appear as “scholia,” so to speak, which do not enter into his formal argument at all. They need not denigrate the more general thesis of Edgeworth’s book: that mathematics may profitably be applied to that realm of philosophical investigation known in the nineteenth century as the “moral sciences.” For the “economical calculus” Edgeworth made his point; mathematical economics is a flourishing discipline in which some of Edgeworth’s early propositions are still remembered and applied. The mathematical ethics did not fare so well. Perhaps it was because Edgeworth’s own premises were unacceptable to later generations, perhaps because the obscure reasoning employed did not seem to yield any conclusions that were not already obvious from the premises, perhaps because later philosophers conceived the problems of ethics in such a different fashion that Edgeworth’s methodology was useless to them. Whatever the reasons, Edgeworth’s proposal to let mathematics show the way to the solutions of the problems of mankind exemplified the unbounded faith of an age in the power and authority of mathematical reasoning—a faith that has probably not been equalled since.