To frame our evaluation of pre-modern attitudes towards consumption, our team looked at both historical and modern conceptions of ethics to understand how thinkers of the past might have understood consumption and capitalism and how that perspective might differ from the understanding we have today. By drawing from ethicists such as Bernard Mandeville and Alasdair MacIntyre, our team was able to unpack how various authors tied ethical/unethical consumption to the promotion or degradation of the body politic, and specifically why they viewed the same economic phenomena (e.g. the import of luxury goods or intoxicants such as tobacco) in such drastically different light, with writers disagreeing why and what was truly good for England on the whole.

Bernard Mandeville

Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714) stands out as a piece of economic and ethical philosophy that connected “private vices”, or economic self-interest, to “public benefits”– the promotion of national welfare through political, legal and economic structures. Initially published in 1714 to little fanfare, Mandeville’s essay provides a glimpse into the ethical shifts that were taking place within the time period of our research. Subsequent editions of Fable gained notoriety, however, because of perceptions that Mandeville endorsed commercialism and the consumption of luxury goods, or manifestations of unethical vice. Despite the controversy that surrounds the text, Mandeville’s ideas have left an indelible impact on our understanding of ethics and economics, and his ideas reverberate through the works of his successors including those of Jeremy Bentham (the founder of modern utilitarianism) and Adam Smith (the father of modern laissez-faire economics).

Mandeville’s Project

In his preface to Fable, Mandeville outlined the two goals of his project. The first would be to call attention to the hypocrisy of virtue and the vice that belies seemingly virtuous actions, such that those who “continually find fault with others…[would examine] their own Consciences, be made asham’d of always railing at what they are more or less guilty of themselves”. The second would be to illustrate how “inconveniences”, or vice, was inevitable and necessary to “reap all the Benefits that are the Consequence of a great and flourishing Nation”.

Both of these goals provide important starting point for our research. First, if we take that all human action, including consumption, is rooted in the vice of self-interest and is therefore necessarily vicious (i.e. the impossibility of virtue), then it seems difficult to argue how human actions can ever be virtuous, much less rescue consumption from the charge of immorality. Second, even if we admit the possibility of virtue, Mandeville challenges us to consider if virtue could lead to the economic benefits that mankind is so “fond” of reaping.