Jeremy Bentham:

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Do you flip the switch?

Background

At the end of the 1700s life in the UK was changing radically. The industrial revolution meant that many people were moving from the countryside to overpopulated towns and cities for work. As a result, standards of living plummeted. With no sewage works, city streets were full of faeces, both from the horses which were the main form of transport, and from the humans, which were thrown straight out into the street or, if they were feeling posh, into the local rivers.

Unless you are a wealthy white man you had no guarantee that you'd be treated with any dignity. Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1842) dedicated his life to finding ways of correcting that.

The principle of utility

Throughout his life, Bentham advocated for the rights of women, the rights of the poor, the rights of prisoners, and the rights of animals. He called for the abolition of slavery, the end of capital and physical punishment, and for the right of children. In one unpublished essay, he even argued for the decriminalization of homosexual acts.

The difficulty for Bentham was in finding a foundation for these rights. He was not impressed with appeals to nature, religion and God, calling such ideas "nonsense on stilts."

Instead, Bentham built his moral system on what he called, ‘the principle of utility’:

By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness.

—Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Or as he put it more straightforwardly elsewhere:

…it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong

The utility (or felicific) calculus

Bentham’s theory aims to quantify pleasure (i.e. put it into a numerical form) in the felicific calculus. According to Bentham, the Felicific Calculus works like this. You must work out the total amount of pleasure produced (or pain reduced) by adding together:

The intensity of the pleasure
Its duration
How certain it is that it will occur
How near it is
The likelihood that the pleasure will be followed by more pleasure
The number of people that will be affected by it

Bentham hoped to create an approach to morality that was as objective as any science - and in that way create the foundations for the kind and fair society he hoped for. Bentham’s ideas were extremely radical and egalitarian. Notice how for Bentham, value isn’t derived from the status of the being concerned - it doesn’t matter whether you are black, white, rich, poor, man, woman, human or animal - the only thing that matters is whether you feel pleasure and pain.

There are, however, many issues with Bentham’s approach.

Discussion 1: The problem of calculation

The first question is whether or not the Felicific calculus is actually usable. Who should we include in our calculations? For example, if we are concerned about climate change, perhaps it might make sense to include all the future human beings who may or may not be born depending on whether humanity gets its act together now - but how do we calculate their happiness? We can formalise the argument like this:

Bentham’s Felicific Calculus works only if we have a means of measuring the properties of the pleasure produced (intensity, duration, certainty, nearness, fecundity, impurity, and its extent) but we don’t.
We do not even have a practical means of measuring pleasure/pain.
How do we choose who to include in our calculations? A single action can have knock-on effects around the world, so at what point should we stop counting? Should we include the as-yet unborn generations in our calculations? Animals?
∴ Utilitarianism does not work - the felicific calculus is unusable as anything more than a heuristic.

Discussion 2: Is pleasure the only good?

Many Philosophers, including Aristotle and Kant, have argued that it is wrong to see pleasure as the only good or highest goo. Robert Nozick imagined that there was an experience machine that we could choose to be plugged into that gave us unending pleasure. Would you plug yourself into it?

If experiencing as much pleasure as we can is all that matters to us, then if we will experience more pleasure by plugging into an ‘experience machine’ than not, we have no reason not to plug ourselves in.
But we do have reason not to plug into the experience machine.
We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.
- We want to be a certain sort of person.
- Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality (it limits us to what we can make).
∴ Experiencing as much pleasure as we can is not all that matters to us.

Tasks

Explain Bentham’s principle of utility, and how the felicific calculus is meant to work.
Explain two potential objections to Bentham's utilitarianism
Evaluate Bentham’s approach to ethics.

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