Mandevile--Vice Is Useful

 

I have considered that Bernard Mandeville approved of vices as beneficial to society because Christians and medievalists labeled selfishness and worldliness as wicked and vicious when, in fact, they may have just been egoist self-interest at work, and thus amoral or even moral behavior. I supposed that Mandeville like Ayn Rand thought selefishness is virtue and selflessness is vice, and that ethical stance roughly what  I espouse.  I may have over-attributed Randian ethics to Mandeville, as I am reading into his writings as  having Randian moral code implicit within them.

 

It could be that I need to see things at least in part from Phillip Harth’s point of view that Mandeville did not much care if actions were vicious or virtuous as long as they ed to the rise of a powerful, modern rich nations. Look at this quote from Harth on Pages 18 and 19 of his introduction into Mandeville’s book, The Fable Of The Bees: “In defending the necessity of vice both in The Grumbling Hive and in numerous remarks in The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville is concerned exclusively with its importance to one particular kind of nation state. ‘What country soever in the universe is to be understood by the Bee-Hive represented here,’ he explained later, it is evident  . . . that it must be large, rich and warlike Nation’; and in the remarks themselves he repeatedly describes this kind of state in such terms as ‘a populous, rich, wide extended Kingdom’,  ‘a large stirring Nation’; ‘a trading country’. He is concerned , in other words, with the great world powers of his day and with those economic conditions which are ‘requisite to aggrandize and enrich a Nation’.”

 

In light of Harth’s emphasis on Mandeville’s being less a normative egoist, than an imperial ethical pragmatist that leads him to argue that private vices, more than private virtues, make for this powerful, rich trading English nation, I must concede that  Harth is correct at least partially when insisting that Mandeville is, if it so turns out, not a moral ethicist but is an apologist for English supremacy, even if some of its worldly success comes at the expense of being vicious. The private vices thus as regarded as a private vice, public benefit situation where the vicious means justifies a nationalist end.

 

Let us continue Harth’s quote: “He recognizes another kind of state, however, which he describes in such terms as ‘a frugal and honest Society’,’ a small, indigent State or Principality’, a ‘pitiful Commonwealth’. Such countries are exempt from his concern and have no need for the vices he describes. There is considerable just, therefore, to Mandeville’s reiterated assertion that he is not championing vice for its own sake when he insists on its importance to the emerging capitalist economy. If he argues that the economic prosperity of great nations is dependent on the vices of their inhabitants, he avoids expressing any open preference for rich countries over poor ones. He gives the recipe for national greatness without recommending the product.”

 

My response: It could well be that Mandeville was neither pro-virtue or pro-vice, as medievally, altruistically conceived. Rathe he is a nationalist promoting his nation and senses that vices or worldly sins have beneficial consequences for society at large.