>>>>Bentham's utilitarianism draws on certain strands of the Enlightenment thought, on the
materialist strands, on the Epicurean strands. He places all the weight in the calculus of
pleasure and pain. And in fact his key text, the "Introduction to the Principles of Morals
and Legislation", so a text that's directly about law and justice. A text that asks, what
is it that makes a law just? And will answer, a law is just that produces the greatest amount
of happiness for the greatest number, begins by saying that human beings are ruled by what
he calls two sovereign masters: pleasure and pain. For Bentham, humans are motivated to
maximize their pleasure and to minimize their pain, and he says all of our actions even
if we say otherwise, tend towards these two, to achieve pleasure and to avoid pain. Bentham's
idea of utilitarianism draws out the tendency of the Enlightenment to focus on happiness
and refocuses it on this word, utility. And it's important to understand what Bentham
means by utility. When we think of utility, we think usefulness. You think of a utility
room-- it's where you have your washer and dryer. Utility means usefulness in our vernacular
language, but in the philosophy of Bentham utility has a very technical, a very specific
meaning, it's a term of art for him. And by utility he means happiness, but he also means
pleasure. He means the good. He means interest, and for Bentham this is the power of utility.
It doesn't mean usefulness as opposed to, say, beauty, or ornament, but this is something
this is a, a misconception that utilitarians come to fight constantly. Utility in this
sense doesn't just mean functional. It means a whole vision of what is good. So for Bentham
utility is everything good: happiness, interests, the good, morality, all dissolves into his
concept of utility. And he says utility is measured purely by the presence of pleasure
and the absence of pain. So Bentham's idea of utility is a specific outgrowth of Enlightenment
debates about happiness, but it transforms them, it encapsulates every possible concept
of what is good and wishes to dissolve it into a calculus of pleasure and pain. And
so, Bentham's concept of utility, this embracing, this holistic concept of what is good, what
is pleasurable, ultimately revolves around the presence of pleasure and the absence of
pain. And for Bentham, the morality of an act, the morality of a law, the morality of
an institution is to be calculated. There's something very mathematical, something very
mechanical, about Bentham both in his personality, in his writing and in his way of thinking
about reality. You could always calculate what it is that makes something moral, and
this calculation is purely about maximizing pleasure. And Bentham says that pleasure has
different aspects, and in fact he's a, a cataloger, he's an organizer in the way that his mind
works. You can read in the very opening passages of his "Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation" that he says that, pleasure has seven circumstances: its intensity,
its certainty, its nearness, so in other words there's these different ways that you can
try and measure how much pleasure something has: its intensity, its duration, its certainty,
its nearness, its extent the number of people that involves. And so for Bentham all morality
is like addition, multiplication, subtraction, and comparison, that the scales of justice
are measures of what it is pleasurable minus what is painful and any act is to be measured
to be calculated on this utilitarian calculus. Now, notice several aspects of this way of
thinking about morality and justice. One, it is highly universalistic. It is, in fact,
a progressive and egalitarian way of thinking about morality. My pleasures are just as important
as your pleasures and there's no one greater person than another in this calculus, and
so Bentham is a great reformer. He's looking English society and English law and trying
to think, how can this society progress? How can this become a fairer, a more just, a more
moral society? Only by maximizing happiness, by maximizing pleasure for the greatest number,
so utilitarianism is universalist in that sense. Moreover notice that its consequentialist.
The utilitarian calculus says that what matters is the result, what matters is the consequence.
There aren't somehow rights or duties that are inherent in the nature of the rules themselves.
What matter are the result, the ends justify the means, and so this is a way of thinking
about morality that vests all of the moral weight in the outcomes, and for Bentham those
outcomes are to be measured by pleasure and pain. Thirdly, it's a materialist philosophy
through and through, and this too it owes to the Enlightenment. It says that all there
is is pleasure and pain. It's an anti-spiritualist, it is an explicitly atheistic philosophy,
although some like Mill would work to at least politically reconcile it with public religion.
Nevertheless, it is through and through a materialist philosophy that says all that
matters is secular, all that matters is the balance of pleasure and pain in this world.
And finally, notice in particular in Bentham's utilitarian calculus that it seems to be aggregative.
That it aggregates all of the pleasures and pains of a decision, of an action, of a rule
and would justify, would say that justice lies in the maximization of pleasure and the
minimization of pain in the aggregate. So it doesn't differentiate strongly between
individuals, and so for instance, utilitarian calculus on the Benthamite model, in the strongly
utilitarian reasoning of Bentham, doesn't distinguish between my individual rights,
but rather places all of the emphasis on the total outcomes. The aggregate outcomes, and
so it could justify the violation, the harm, the pain, that's inflicted on a single individual
if the pleasure that's created in others, in the aggregate, outweighs it. And so that's
the nature of Bentham's political and moral calculus. And this is a thoroughly Enlightenment
philosophy. It says, we can reason about what is good and it is willing, and in fact Bentham,
as a great reformer and political advocate would see his philosophy as a radical and
deeply relevant social philosophy, that if carried to its conclusion, would reform society.
That would sweep away traditions, laws, these concepts of rights, and replace them with
a vision of a government that ruled for the greatest happiness of the greatest number.