A revolution in moral and social philosophy every bit as profound as the scientific revolution in cosmology, physics, chemistry, and biology took place over the last five centuries, but it has never had a convenient name. It gave rise to social science and ideological politics, and if it did not also create the hard sciences, it nonetheless assigned them their place and shape in the modern world. Those sciences concerned with matter would henceforth supply the metaphors or parables by which moral philosophy would be reformed. Politics and the new science of economics might be likened to clockwork or a self-balancing system like Newtonian physics: in this view, moral forces no less than physical forces are impersonal and self-arranging, and the task of human intelligence is simply to understand them as they are, then harness them.
Nameless though the revolution in moral philosophy might be, it has a cast of protagonists as familiar as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin in the natural sciences. Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers of the United States are among the lead players, all of whom are discussed in David Wootton's latest book, though not all in as much detail as the reader might wish. Wootton prefers a thematic approach to a personal or chronological one: his chapters bear titles like “Happiness: Words and Concepts,” “Utility: In Place of Virtue,” and “The Market: Poverty and Famines.”
In Wootton's own words, his book is “a series of sketches illuminating this intellectual and cultural revolution,” which can be summed up as “the replacement of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality by a new type of decision making which may be termed instrumental reasoning or cost-benefit analysis.” The three “P's” of Wootton's title are the new outlook's characteristic concerns—power, pleasure, and profit are the goods in light of which individual and society alike are to be understood. They are to be obtained by the application of precise knowledge (not just old-fashioned maxims or rules of thumb) to every aspect of life: there is a technique and an “-ology” for everything. Which is lucky for us, since power, pleasure, and profit are three things of which we can never have enough, and our selfish pursuit of them is actually good for everyone. Competition turns out to be an exalted form of cooperation, and your self-interest is the key to other people's wellbeing.
