Course:RUSS412/Dostowiki/Malthusian Ethics

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Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was a founding thinker of the academic discipline of economics (Northrup 595).[1] His anonymously published "Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)" established foundational assumptions and principles in classical economics (Northrup 595; Robbins 1088).[1][2]

This graph illustrates Malthus' argument that human populations tend to increase exponentially whereas food supply tends to increase in a linear fashion.[2]

To summarize the main idea of Malthus' essay in terms of which aspects of it most captured the attention of scholars and intellectuals, he argued that due to a finite supply of resources on Earth, not everyone can have resources when population exceeds available resources (Knapp 65-66).[3] Malthus argued that this situation was inevitable as population often grows faster than food supply (Robbins 1088).[2] Therefore, many people will die without having resources, and their deaths are inevitable (Launay 512).[4] Malthus concluded that in order to decrease overall human suffering, people should not share resources with those who do not have resources (Launay 512).[4] Otherwise, society will become more malnourished and poorer on average (Launay 512).[4]

However, before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), Malthus' argument had a key loophole in that he could not explain or justify why certain people deserved to die more than others (Robbins 1088).[2] Scholars then derived this justification from Darwin's theory of natural selection, which states that species evolve overtime when members that have qualities well-adapted to the environment survive and pass on their traits while those who do not die and therefore do not pass on undesirable traits (Knapp 65-67).[3] This biological reality, when applied to human populations, justified Malthus' policy of allowing the poor to die, as these populations by virtue of their poverty had evidently not adapted to the environment and by dying would allow for greater resources to flow to well-adapted members of society and allow them to survive to pass on their desirable traits (Knapp 66).[3] In this way, the human species would evolve and progress steadily, and, therefore, Malthus' policy had a moral force beneath it (Knapp 66).[3]

In practice, this theoretical logic translated into multiple tangible changes in European societies. For one, Malthus in practice interpreted his theory as implying that people should not practice charity and that the government should not allocate expenditure on poor houses (Robbins 1088).[2] As alluded to above, one example of a social policy influenced by Malthusian thinking was birth control movements, although Malthus himself opposed birth control (Northrup 595; Robbins 1088).[1][2] Malthusian thinking may have even influenced literature by implying that authors should have their characters compete for the novel's limited space, thereby creating the ideas of primary and secondary characters (Knapp 69).[3]

When Malthusian ideas arrived in Russia, the vast majority of Russian intellectuals vehemently opposed Malthusian ethics on moral grounds (Knapp 74-75).[3] The Petrashevsky Circle had made Dostoevsky aware of Malthus' ideas (Knapp 75).[3] Dostoevsky was also probably aware of the fusion between Malthusian logic and Social Darwinism, and he opposed all variants of Malthusian thinking (Knapp 65).[3] Netochka Nezvanova (1849) and The Idiot (1869) are two works in which he made specific references to passages in Malthus' essay and in terms of plot and characters challenged Malthusian ethics (Knapp 71-81).[3] For example, Knapp argues that Dostoevsky actively defied Malthusian-Darwinian ethics by focusing The Idiot on characters that are unfit to survive, such as "the epileptic," "the consumptive," the trauma victim, and "the murderer" (81).[3]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Northrup, Cynthia Clark, et al. “Malthus, Thomas Robert.” Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present, Routledge, 2005, pp. 595. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315704661.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Robbins, Paul. "Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766–1834)." Encyclopedia of Environment and Society, SAGE Publications, Inc., 2007, pp. 1088. SAGE Knowledge. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412953924.n671.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 Knapp, Liza. “Darwin’s Plots, Malthus’s Mighty Feast, Lamennais’s Motherless Fledglings, and Dostoevsky’s Lost Sheep.” Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky, edited by Vladimir Golstein and Svetlana Evdokimova, Academic Studies Press, 2019, pp. 63–82, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781644690291-004.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Launay, Robert. “Malthus, Thomas R.” Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, SAGE Publications, Inc., 2013, pp. 512. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.

Further Reading

  1. Berman, Anna A. “Viper will eat viper”: Dostoevsky, Darwin, and the Possibility of Brotherhood.” Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky, edited by Vladimir Golstein and Svetlana Evdokimova, Academic Studies Press, 2019, pp. 83–95, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781644690291-004.
  2. Harvey, Joy, Almost a Man of Genius: Clémence Royer, feminism and nineteenth-century science. New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1997.
  3. Todes, Daniel, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.
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