Jeremy Bentham · Philosophy
Bentham’s attempt to turn morality into a science: if the good is pleasure and the bad is pain, then in principle we can <em>measure</em> them - by intensity, duration, certainty, nearness, fecundity, purity, and extent - and calculate which action does the most good.
If pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil, Bentham reasoned, then morality is not fundamentally mysterious: it is a problem of measurement. To know whether an action is right, we need only reckon up all the pleasure it will produce and all the pain, for everyone affected, and see which way the balance falls. Bentham took this thought with complete seriousness and tried to specify the actual dimensions along which pleasures and pains vary in value - the variables that would enter such a calculation. The result, later nicknamed the ‘felicific calculus’ (or hedonic calculus), is one of the boldest ideas in the history of ethics: the aspiration to replace moral rhetoric with something like bookkeeping, so that a legislator weighing a law, or a person weighing a choice, could in principle compute its tendency to add to or subtract from the sum of human happiness.
Bentham laid out the full set of dimensions with the precision of an accountant. Four apply to a pleasure or pain considered in itself: intensity, duration, certainty, and propinquity. Two more come into play when we consider a pleasure or pain as the effect of some act, because acts have further consequences: fecundity (the chance that the sensation will be followed by more of the same kind - a pleasure that breeds further pleasures) and purity (the chance that it will not be followed by sensations of the opposite kind - a pleasure not paid for later in pain). And when more than one person is involved, a seventh dimension is decisive: extent, the number of persons affected. To help students remember them, Bentham even wrote a mnemonic verse. The whole of morals and legislation, he half-joked, could be hung on these six or seven pegs.
Bentham’s refusal to rank pleasures by dignity was not philistinism for its own sake; it was of a piece with his radical egalitarianism. If the pleasures of the poor and uneducated count for exactly as much as the refined enjoyments of the leisured elite, then a legislator has no business arranging society for the benefit of ‘higher’ tastes at the expense of the common enjoyments of the many. The calculus is blind to class and cultivation: it asks only how much pleasure, spread over how many people. This made it a tool for challenging every hierarchy that justified itself by claiming to serve nobler ends than mere popular happiness. The person who plays push-pin in the tavern is, in the moral arithmetic, the equal of the connoisseur at the concert - and the state exists to serve them both, counted as one apiece.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Bentham proposed to measure the value of any pleasure or pain by seven circumstances - intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent - and thereby turn moral and legislative questions into a kind of arithmetic. Explain the dimensions of the calculus and the radical claim t…
Leads to David Hume.
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