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

2025-10-22

AI Summary

How can aggregate hedonic welfare be maximized across perceptible biological populations? Method: Reconstructing Edgeworth’s theoretical project, this paper anchors utilitarianism in psychophysics and evolutionary biology, proposing a “weighted utilitarianism” framework. It assigns differential hedonic weights to individuals based on their phylogenetic position and sociocultural categories (race, gender, class), models hedonic capacity via a quasi-Fechnerian function, and integrates marginal analysis with evolutionary logic to construct utility functions. Contribution/Results: The study reveals how this paradigm systematically encodes biological and social inequalities into distributive principles—transforming hierarchy into a normative metric of moral calculus. Crucially, it demonstrates that subsequent economics, by excising these value-laden premises, dissolved the original framework’s critical tension with entrenched hierarchies, thereby neutralizing its emancipatory potential. This historical reconstruction exposes the epistemic erasure of normativity in mainstream welfare economics and underscores the need for explicit ethical grounding in contemporary welfare theory.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Decision/Utility Theory
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Bias, Fairness & Equity

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

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 extit{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.

Problem

• Reconstructing Edgeworth's mathematical unification of moral sciences
• Modeling utilitarian pleasure maximization through evolutionary hierarchies
• Analyzing how scientific neutrality naturalizes social inequality

Innovation

• Modeled individuals as quasi-Fechnerian functions
• Distributed means based on pleasure capacity
• Grounded utilitarianism in psychophysics and evolution