CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Philosophy Becomes Culture 317
Desire and Want.” 14 “The utility of a thing to a person . . . is measured by
the extent to which it satisfies his wants. And wants are . . . not reckoned . . .
according to any ethical or prudential standard.” 15 “It is clearly not the part
of economics to appear to take a side in ethical controversy.” 16 In other
words, what is useful is what is wanted, and ethics do not here enter into the
calculation.
Marshall went on to strip away from the idea of usefulness and advantage
any uncertainty as to its appropriate yardstick: “ ‘[M]oney’ or ‘general
purchasing power’ or ‘command over material wealth’ is the centre around
which economic science clusters; . . . not because money or material wealth
is regarded as the main aim of human effort, . . . but because in this world
of ours it is the one convenient means of measuring human motive on a
large scale.” 17
Much of Marshall’s Principles of Economics was taken up with earnest
moralizing and technical footnotes, including a mathematical appendix
on methods of analysis. Commenting on Marshall, F.Y. Edgeworth, an
Oxford don of the time, wrote of the connection between utilitarianism
as a philosophy and utility as a calculation as follows: “To procure the
greatest possible sum of satisfaction for all is right. . . . There is certainly
no logical connection between this principle and the economic art of
measurement; and yet, as it seems to us, there is more than a verbal alliance.
... [Marshall] lends the authority of an accredited science to defend
at least the possibility of Utilitarian Ethics. It is not indeed
demonstrated that the Utilitarian . . . principle is true, but there is created
the conviction that it is not nonsense.” 18
As the twentieth century progressed, Marshall’s ethical protestations
were forgotten in favor of his math: “[T]he Marshallians concentrated their
efforts on what they considered to be a value-free endeavour devoted to a
sharpening of the analytical tools that Marshall forged.” 19 “The precision
and thoroughness of his formal analysis completely obliterated . . . his explicit
policy conclusions. ... [H]is engine of analysis pressed methodically
onward to construct a painstakingly elaborate, logically impregnable,
supremely aesthetic edifice . . .” 20
Tracing a process more than a century long, Cambridge professor Tom
Warke zeros in on what began to transform a philosophy into a science: “By
what process did the utility concept in economics evolve from its Benthamite