When deliberating on the meaning of good and evil in the middle of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin confidently announces that it ‘is not difficult to form a scale of happiness’. His philosophy of social utility is based, as his equally confident account of the abolition of the slave trade makes clear, on the notion of a shared human nature conceived in positive, perfectibilist terms. The scale of happiness Godwin then goes on to image is thus premised on improvement, on the hope of advancing up the scale. Not for him a dangerously simplistic appeal to the ‘rights of man’ which can only ‘reduce all to a naked and savage equality’.

In a series of cameos, Godwin provides a portrait of the hierarchical structure of English society (familiar to readers of his novel Caleb Williams) which incorporates one of the ‘labouring inhabitants of the civilized states of Europe’, one of ‘the men of rank, fortune, and dissipation’, the ‘man of taste and liberal accomplishments’, and, finally, the ‘man of benevolence’. For our purposes, the scale is at its most interesting when it moves to consider ‘the man of taste and liberal accomplishments’. This is the point at which we are given a clear indication of the role of the arts and the aesthetic in Godwin's vision of society: