Each individual’s happiness is also equally weighted on Bentham’s scales of moral value – the prince is not granted preferential status over the pauper. For his time, this is a notably egalitarian stance to take. Bentham even extended this moral consideration to include (in theory) every sentient being, as the criteria employed is a being’s capacity for suffering rather than their capacity for reasoning. As Bentham writes, ‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ (1789 [2012]).
Bentham also makes no distinction between higher and lower pleasures (unlike John Stuart Mill, as we will explore in the next section). Bentham argues that the result of the pleasure should be our key concern, not the source. If an individual gains the same amount of pleasure from skipping stones in a pond (for example) as they do from attending the most highbrow of opera productions, then there is no reason to prefer one source of pleasure over the other.
The Felicific or Hedonic Calculus
Bentham suggests that we follow a guide, known as his felicific or hedonic calculus, to help us judge the sum total of pleasure and pain. Bentham’s calculus identifies seven criteria we should apply to the assessment of pain or pleasure:
- Its intensity.
- Its duration.
- Its certainty or uncertainty.
- Its propinquity (nearness) or remoteness.
- Its fecundity – does it create new pleasure and pain? If so, how much?
- Its purity.
- Its extent (or the number of people affected).
With each of these qualities in mind, Bentham argues, we will then be able to ‘Sum up all the values of all the pleasures on the one side, and those of all the pains on the other. The balance, if it be on the side of pleasure, will give the good tendency of the act upon the whole’. Importantly, he stresses that we should also ‘Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process with respect to each’ (1789 [2012]).
To summarise Bentham’s utilitarianism, then, a morally good act is that which, on balance, creates more pleasure than pain for all those who are affected by that act. We may be daunted by the difficult process of working out this sum total of pleasure and pain, painstakingly using the felicific calculus and attempting to trace each potential consequence, but Bentham maintains that this should be the moral agent’s goal.
John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was raised to be a utilitarian from childhood, as he was not only a student of Jeremy Bentham himself, but also homeschooled by his father James Mill (Bentham’s friend and follower).
John Stuart Mill even writes in his Autobiography (1873 [2003]) that, after contact with Bentham’s utilitarianism,