Bentham Mine

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A.History.of.Western.Political.Thought.pdf</a> Bentham’s fundamental postulate was that those actions, private and
public, moral and political,which produce the greatest happiness of the greatest
number are good actions So what
made the Benthamite version of the happiness philosophy so different? It was partly
a matter of Bentham’s awareness of the cost of human happiness. Bentham’s
treatment of happiness proceeded along a frank cost-benefit path. What
this meant in practice, and especially in political practice, was that somebody
would have to pay for thehappiness of the others Benthamism is ‘moral arithmetic’. It is about being
able to calculate as accurately as one can the total amount ofhuman happiness
caused by a particular action, and that calculation has to include
theamount of pain which that action also causes. Bentham just accepts as
obvious the factthat actions are seldom ‘pure’, that is produce happiness or pain
only. All public actions in a crowded world are bound to work to the advantage of
some and the disadvantage ofEast India Company, and stayed there until he retired
in 1858. His was one of the very few voices raised in England against the
treatment of the prisoners after the Indian Mutiny was put down. Mill’s
intellectual energy alone is enough to make him an eminent Victorian. All the
cross-currents of the age—romanticism, positivism, political economy, the
suffrage question (including votes for women), birth control, socialism
(Mill had generous things to say about the Communards)—met in Mill’s
mind. He was MP for Westminster from 1865 to 1868. Harriet Taylor died the
year before On Liberty came out in 1859, by which time Mill had established
himself as one of the leading social scientific thinkers of the day, and,
in a happy phrase, he became the schoolmaster of liberalism. He died and was buried
in Avignon in 1873. A history of western political thought 434 others.
Benthamism holds that an action is good if, overall, it produces more
pleasurethan it produces pain Benthamism did not pointits finger at a particular group as
gainers and another group as losers. From theBenthamite point of view, it
was a matter of indifference who gained and who lost,provided only that
the sums came out right and happiness outweighed unhappiness.
 That some hadto pay for the convenience
of others would have been a truth which nobody needed to betaught. Now here was
Bentham reiterating that same truth at the level of moral andpolitical
theory, but with the important proviso that moral and political
theorising wasnecessarily indifferent to the question of whosehappiness was
actually being increased. Societies as theyactually were seemed to be constituted on the
very opposite principle to the greatesthappiness: a small group’s happiness
was attended to the whole time, whereas thehappiness of the vast majority
was consistently neglected. It was this consistent neglect of the happiness
of the vast majority of their subjects which made Benthamism the
enemy of all established governments TheBenthamite assertion that human beings have no
option but to seek pleasure and avoidpain enshrines a version of selfishness
at the heart of utilitarian doctrine. What Benthamcould not stomach was the
fact that societies were organised so that the selfishness of asmall group
permanently thwarted the equally legitimate happiness-seeking of the vast
majority of their fellow men. If the pursuit of happiness was selfish,
and if humanselfishness was a universal principle of human conduct, then
everybody ought to be given a chance to achieve what seemed to be happiness
to them. Benthamite
utilitarianism was, then, no respecter of persons. In principle, George III’s
happiness was no more important than the happiness of the meanest of his subjects.
Thiswas not a thought which was likely to appeal to George III; nor was it likely
to appeal tothose who happened, through the accidents of birth and wealth, to have
collared positionsof influence, prestige or power in the existing order of
things The Church was going to be
just as formidable an enemy to the spread of utilitarianism as the state
 ll religions were for Bentham not
much more thansystems of moral precept. Religion, at bottom, taught men
the difference between goodand evil In Benthamite eyes, most religion was not so much wrong as redundant. It
was perfectly obvious to the Benthamites that the basis of morality was the
injunction to causehappiness and to avoid causing misery. Men had always,
so to speak, been secretBenthamites, because the actions which they had called
good had always been of the typewhich produced the greatest happiness of
the greatest number possible in thecircumstances. The Christian message to love
one’s neighbour amounted to no more than that one should seek to cause him
pleasure and not pain. All the rest of religion wasmumbo-jumbo, so much
windowdressing, so that there was even a danger that the basichappiness-creating
truth of all morality would be lost sight of. The basis of
Benthamitemorality was so simple, and so deeply engrained in the religious
tradition anyway, that ithardly needed to be taught, and it certainly did
not require cumbersome and complexecclesiastical hierarchies to teach
it That this threatened to put
the established Churches out of a job is obvious, but the threat went
deeper than that In simple terms,
Churches everywhere preached selflessness as the motif of a Christian
life; the ultimateaim, eternal bliss, could be as selfish as you like, but the
proper course of a Christian lifewas to deny the gratifications of the self
in order to achieve the final and eternalgratification. Benthamism cut into that perspective. Living in
thehappy expectation of eternal bliss was only one way of increasing the
sum of humanhappiness in this world. It was not exactly irrational to
want to be happy for ever andA history of western political thought
436 ever, but, from the utilitarian point of view, it might not be
sensible. How could youmeasure the uncertain future gift of eternal
happiness against the ordinary humanhappiness which Christianity said would
have to be forborne as a condition for theattainment of the ultimate
happiness? Much better, then, to stick to what was knowableand
measurable, and try to stock up on the happinesses which the world had
to offer. Avoiding what was
ordinarily called human happiness in the unsure and uncertain hopeof
eternal bliss was probably a mistake, a miscalculation of the amount of
happinessactually available. It
was difficult to defend Christianity, or anyother moral position, from
Benthamism because the Benthamite knife was double-edged. On the one hand, the
Benthamites argued that all other moral positions either weremistaken or
obscured the real issue, and on the other hand they argued that, if their
rivalsexamined their own moral positions candidly, they would soon find
out that they hadreally been utilitarians all along. All moral codes were in
fact recipes for the increase ofthe greatest happiness of the greatest
number The fashionable natural
rights philosophy, whichBentham ridiculed, added up to no more than the assertion
that men would be happier ifthey were able to enjoy natural rights. But
natural rights themselves needed no high-flown theological and
philosophical justification because they were not moral ends butsimply one
of the conceivable means towards the greatest happiness of the
greatestnumber. As a happiness-producing means, natural rights had in
principle no claim tosuperiority over the claims of eating a series of
good dinners. The natural rightsphilosophy was only one of the ways in
which the natural desire for human happinesscould be articulated, and as
such it had to be judged according to utility’s own rigorous
standard The Benthamite assertion that all other moralities
were utilitarian at bottom was more than just an intellectual strategy. Like other
moral systems, utilitarianism had to find foritself the basic building-blocks of a
theory, and this it found in the fact of morality itself It might be interesting to speculate about theorigins
of morality, but there was no disputing the fact of its universal
existence. Menalready knew what it was to be good, or to seek the good, or to try
to act well. he moral impulse
could, by and large, be taken asgiven. It was not something which had to be
explained. What had to be explained wasThe limitations of enlightenment
437 why all previous moral systems had singularly failed to produce the greatest
happiness ofthe greatest number. That was easy. In previous epochs, in which the truths
ofutilitarianism had not been clearly seen, men of good will had always
found themselveson different sides of moral and political arguments
because the basic moral positionsfrom which they agreed were either
different, or at best unclear. Lack of clarity aboutwhat is at issue is
the great mystifier of any dispute about questions of right, whethermoral
or political. The Benthamites argued that all men of good will would end up on
thesame side if they recognised clearly that it was always the measurable
happiness-creating or unhappinesspreventing characteristics of possible lines
of moral or political conductwhich were at issue. And a world of
obfuscated and obfuscating moral and politicalargument, where no agreement was
possible about what right conduct was, was the idealstalking ground for men of
no good will at all. The defenders of vested and sinisterinterests could
have a field-day when men of good will could not even agree about
thebasic building-blocks of counter-argument. Benthamism is a moral system for men who are already
moral but who find themselvesin the position of being unable to convince
other men of good will of the truth of theirarguments. Benthamism is a
kind of language of translation for all other moral systemsbesides its
own Utilitarianism does not
promise that there will always be agreement in arguments inwhich the
arguers begin from different moral positions. Different moralities differ
overthe question of what is a legitimate source of human happiness and
what is not, bututilitarianism is on strong ground when it urges arguers at
least to talk the same languageof the greatest happiness principle
 What applied to individuals applied
equally well to institutions. Institutions, in theBenthamite view, are just
as much actors in the world as individuals, the only differencebeing that the
way institutions act affects the happiness possibilities of much
largernumbers of people Bentham
was fond ofmedical analogies, and he compares the legislator to a doctor
curing millions at a time.Benthamite utilitarianism is only interested in
institutions as efficient happiness creators he Benthamites werefrank in their acceptance of
the realities of state power. They were not interested inconstitutional
theory of the kind which was so widespread, especially in Britain andA
history of western political thought 438 America, at the end of the
eighteenth century. All that mechanical juggling withNewtonian analogies seemed
to them to be so much sophisticated cant. Either governinginstitutions had enough
power to act to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatestnumber, or
they hadn’t, in which case they had better find some from somewhere. 
The Benthamite suspicion of constitutional
engineering arose out of a very shrewd estimate of the real power of
government even in impeccably constitutional polities.Paper constitutions
designed to protect the rights and liberties of citizens were really notworth very
much. They might even be pernicious. Unlike his French liberalcontemporaries, who tended to envy
British constitutional liberty, Bentham could nothelp wondering what British
constitutional cant was meant to conceal. He soon found theanswer: British
government under its constitution was as powerful as it chose to be. LikeTom
Paine, Bentham saw British governing institutions as the repository of an
almostlimitless power to delay reform A certain kind of theory of political legitimacy underlay the prevailing
idea of British(and American) constitutional liberty. This was the familiar theory
that the legitimacy ofthe state was an all-or-nothing affair. Either a political order was legitimate or it was
not.There were no halfway houses, because in this view of things it made no sense
to ask apeople to support the existing political order half-heartedly, and it made
no sense at all to ask a people to obey the instructions of the governing
authorities in a half-hearted way. Bentham saw the implications of this kind of
view of political obligation very clearly: ineffect, it meant that only armed
rebellion could challenge the legitimacy of the existingorder. If there was
no rebellion, then the political order was legitimate, and that assertionof a
fundamental and generalised legitimacy could easily be made to slip into
theassertion that there was nothing wrong with things as they stood, and especially
that therewas nothing wrong with existing governing institutions. 
For what constituted good government? To
call ‘legitimate’ government ‘good’ government was simply to evade the question.
What could the fact that government wasconsidered legitimate tell you about what
government was actually like today? What was needed was a standard by which the
acts of government could be judged on a day-to-day, or at least a year-by-year,
basis. That standard could only be the greatest happiness of thegreatest number.
It is only when it is applied to government that the fully radicalThe
limitations of enlightenment 439 implications of the utility principle
become clear. Government was meant
to increase the sum ofhuman happiness, and that was a task which had no
end even in principle, because itwould always make sense for the
citizens of a particular government to want to behappier than they actually
were. The Benthamite theory rested on the assumption thathappiness was
the only human good which was desirable for its own sake, which
wasanother way of saying that happiness was the only thing under the
sun which it alwaysmade sense to want more o he Benthamites had to find a way of making the
self-interest of ruling groups serve the interests of the whole ofsociety,
or at least of its greater part. An entrenched ruling group failed on
both counts:either it served the interests of themselves only or it served the
interests of the class fromwhich it came. How, then, could the perfectly understandable desire of rulers to
increasetheir own happiness, or to continue it by continuing to enjoy the perks of
office, be madealso to lead to the increase of the general happiness of the society
over which they ruled?The answer could only be democracy. Let the people
choose their rulers and dismissthem at the next election if they failed
to increase the greatest happiness of the greatestnumber. This would form a
perfect happiness-creating pac It
is sometimes said that the Philosophical Radicals were reluctant democrats
 Utilitarianism’s hesitations in the
face ofdemocracy come partly from utilitarianism’s own origins in the
Enlightenment and partly from the fact that in principle any form of enlightened,
centralised government could puta reforming utilitarian programme into
practice Utilitarianism’s
dependence on strong and active governmentfor the implementation of its
political programme did not square easily with theconstitutional suspicion
of power which seemed to lie behind representative governmentin America.
 Americans did not forget that
experience whenthey came to write their Constitution. Account had to be taken of
that fear of centralisedgovernment, and it was written into the Constitution by
formally dividing the sovereigntyamong the branches of government 
The case of England was different. Bentham
believed that there were adequate provisions for the forceful exercise of
state sovereignty in British theory and practice.The problem there was that
the great institutions of state, including Parliament, used theirconsiderable
formal powers in the entirely negative cause of keeping reform at bay. Whatwas
needed in England was a way of making the institutions of state work
properly toproduce the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That
could only mean extendingthe right to vote in order to bring as many happiness-
seeking wills as possible to bear on the processes of government. A popular
will to legislate was what was needed to breakthe deadlock in British
governing institutions. At first, it would not even be necessary togive votes to
everybody. It would be wise to enfranchise enlightened middle-class opinion
first. Later, it might be
expedient to widen the franchise further associety itself began to feel the
improving effects of utilitarian legislation. There mighteven come a time
when the general level of social improvement justified the democraticprinciple of
universal suffrage, but that was probably a long time in the future. 
It must be stressed again that democracy was not
a matter of principle for Benthamites. Democracy was a means, not an
end. Benthamism carefully avoided
this kind of rhetoric. Its own argument for the extensionof the franchise was less
spectacular, but it was tighter as an argument because it restedon much more
modest foundations. All that one had to concede, for the
Benthamiteargument for democracy to work, was that electors have a legitimate
interest in their ownhappiness being increased by government and that those who
govern want, on the whole,to stay in power. On the other hand, it was difficult to see the
Benthamiteargument in the same lurid light. Its very modesty seemed to suggest that
it would neverhave a mass appeal. It was more likely to appeal to
thoughtful bourgeois minds used intheir everyday working lives to paying
careful attention to profit and loss. Utilitarianismwas based upon a kind of
social cost accountancy. Every benefit had a cost. Happinesswas not to
be got for nothing, and every legislative attempt to increase the
generalhappiness was attended by risk. After all, there was no absolute
guarantee that anyparticular piece of reforming legislation would have its
expected beneficial effects ostswould also include non-money costs. Any piece of reforming
legislation was bound tocause a measure of unhappiness in a society where reform
was typically directed againstvested interests, and those vested interests
could be expected to fight the most effectivedelaying action of which
they were capable. This would make the process expensive interms of human
energy, and it was possible that in certain cases the expenditure of energyA
history of western political thought 442 was simply not worth the
gains. The Benthamite ‘felicific
calculus’, which was to be used to determine whether theamount of
happiness produced by a piece of legislation exceeded the amount of pain,
wassomething of a blunt instrument. Its bluntness came not as a result
of the difficulties ofcalculation but as a result of what it was that was being
calculated. What exactly was thisthing called happiness which the
felicific calculus was supposed to measure? Benthamism appeared to give a straightforward
answer: happiness was what everybodysaid it was and something which
everybody wanted. Put another way, happiness wassomething which people did
not have to be persuaded to want, they just did. Bentham putthis more formally:
human beings have been put under two soveriegn masters, pleasureand pain,
and have no option but to obey them. Pleasure and pain were susceptible
toarithmetical calculation. All that had to be done was to count the
number of peopleaffected, calculate the intensity and duration of the pleasure,
make a sum, and then do thesame thing for pain. Subtract the pain number
from the pleasure number, and if theremainder is a high plus number,
then the piece of legislation is undoubtedly good; aminus number result means
that the piece of legislation is bad It does not matter tohim what the source of human happiness is, provided
only that it is the kind of happinesswhich is socially useful, and ‘socially
useful’ is defined tautologically as that which produces the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. Yet Bentham must have known thatnot all legitimate forms of
human happiness are the same, and his critics have neverstopped pointing
out that not all forms of human happiness are of equal value. So why does Bentham
insist on treating all legitimate forms of human happiness as ifthey were the
same and therefore of equal value? It is partly a question of the
felicificcalculus itself. The calculus is only useful to the law-maker if
it actually works. Introducing a qualitative element into the calculation would
be to add yet another layer ofcomplication to an already complicated
busines Besides, in principle
utilitarianism was committed to a programme of social,political and legal
reform which could know no boundaries because it was always goingto make sense to
go on trying to increase human happiness. Therefore, no form of humanhappiness
(except illegitimate forms) could be excluded a priorifrom utilitarian
concern. Of course, as a
political movement Philosophical Radicalism had to decide on itspriorities
because everything could not be done at once, but that was easy. Simply do themost
obvious things first. Number
would always be the clinching argument as far as reform priorities went,for the
very simple reason that numbers would always add to the reliability of the
felicificcalculus. The
utilitarians were men in a hurry toreform their own societies, and they could
not afford to waste precious human resourceslike time and energy on footling
debates about single amounts of human happiness. Muchbetter, then, to go for those
reforms which would affect a large number of people becausethe larger the number of
people affected by a reform, the more certain it was that humanhappiness was in
fact being increased And it
must not be forgotten that it was utilitarianism’s concern with the
greatest number which was supposed to turn it into an effective political creed and
whichpushed the doctrine in the direction of democracy. The ‘greatest number’
element in the utilitarian formula was meant to pack the people onto
utilitarianism’s bandwagon There
may also be something insistently liberal about Bentham’s assertion that
the legislator must treat all legitimate forms of human happiness as if they
were the same.Accepting that which people happen to call happiness means accepting
the values whichindividuals living in a society already have. here can be no question of imposing ideasabout what
is good or desirable onto individuals who compose society. The
utilitarianswere always prepared to work with the human material which
they found. A certainamount of rationality was no doubt necessary in a
society if utilitarian reforms weregoing to be acceptable, but the amount
of rationality required did not amount to verymuch. People had to be
able to distinguish between pleasure and pain, and be able toidentify
the source of those pleasures and pains which come from good or
badgovernment, but that was all. Trying to get people to see that they ought to wantsomething
which it had not occurred to them to want before was both extremely difficultand
politically dangerous. It would be tantamount to introducing a set of
values into asociety from the outside, the sort of thing Rousseauism
tried to do. Much better toA history of western political thought
444 continue to call good what was ordinarily called good, and to concentrate on
providing asmuch of it as possible for the greatest number of people in the
circumstances Liberals have always
found the pain-removing function of Benthamite governmentmore to their taste than
the positive side of happiness-creation, for the very simple reason that it is
easier to agree about what causes pain than it is to agree about what
reallyproduces pleasure Only two
things qualified the utilitarian enthusiasm for active government,
Smithianeconomics and Malthusian demography. Classical economics warned the
utilitarians offgovernment interference with trade, and made them queasy
about government measuresto relieve the distress of the labouring poor.
 In one way, Malthusianism fittedin well
with the greatest happiness principle. After all,
the greatest happiness principledid not guarantee happiness but simply
legitimised its pursuit, and the Malthusianprediction of increased future misery
reinforced the utilitarian belief that the business ofhappiness creation,
governmental and private, was going to have to go on for ever. But ifMalthus was
right, the business of happiness creation by governments was going to
beeven tougher than the Philosophical Radicals had originally thought, because
governmentwould have to work against increasingly tough human circumstances,
Malthusianism casta long shadow over the reforming enterprise wherever it was taken
seriously. The effectwas to tone down considerably the hopes for a future
in which happiness would bewidely shared, and to infuse utilitarianism
with a certain hardness in the face of themisery which it was
utilitarianism’s declared intention of alleviating. It may be that utilitarianism thought for a timethat it
was fighting a losing battle against human unhappiness; in the war against
misery,misery might win. Hard-headed Malthusian pessimism tended sometimes to
overshadow the optimistic side of utilitarianism, Benthamism’s emphasis on active government,
its tough-mindedness about the treatment of social problems, and its
straightforwardly instrumental attitude to libertyworried later liberals
like John Stuart Mill. What had begun as a philosophy of humanhappiness,
and the liberty to pursue it, seemed to be in imminent danger of
becoming atight-fisted, Scrooge-like caricature of itself, with the state
doling out pitiful little amounts of human happiness, and being subject
to the law of diminishing returns in anincreasingly tough happiness
market. Happiness just had to
become more expensive asthe natural tendency of human life to misery worked
itself through a society, and so thehappiness dividend on the state’s
investments in the happiness market were bound to diminish. 
What the Benthamites had never worried about was
that, if there was to be noend to human unhappiness, then there could be no end to
active government. What democrats
tended to forget, the utilitarians excepted, was the
tremendouslylegitimising effect that democracy would have on the
state as democracy began to
gainground, modestly enough in Europe to begin with, another process was set in
motion bywhich it became more and more difficult to devise state-limiting arguments
because acts A history of western political thought 446 of state came
increasingly to be seen as acts of all-of-us through our own chosen
representatives, whose acts were the electorate’s acts because they had authorised
them It was difficult in the age
of coming democracy to devise genuinely principled argumentsagainst state
intervention when all arguments against the scope of democratic governmentcould be
pilloried as the special pleading of individuals or groups with special
interestsand privileges to defend. There was an even greater danger.
Suppose representativedemocracy were to work in a literal sense. Suppose that
representatives really did see it astheir job either to share or to pretend to
share the opinions and interests of the people whoelected them. What then?
There was the very distinct possibility that unenlightenedopinion would
come to outweigh enlightened opinion in the highest councils of
thenation What made it worse was
the possibility that that common opinionwould be able through democratic
mechanisms to give itself the force of law. If thedemocratic slogan that
‘the will of the people shall have the force of law’ meant anything, it meant that
ordinary opinion should be government’s guiding light. This was a perspective which caught the Philosophical
Radicals off their guard. They had been arguing for the best part of
half a century that government ought to beresponsive to opinion, but
what they had really meant was theiropinions. dominant and bigotedpublic opinion could exercise a
double tyranny. It could give itself the force of law, and,perhaps more sinister,
it could so dominate a society that the dissenting voice could onlybe heard, if
at all, at the risk of the dissenter’s being cast out from society to
lead a pariah’s life. Behind this lay the more generalised fear that the people
would come to feelthe state’s power as theirpower. There was then no
telling what might happen. Hence later liberalism’s concern, seen most
clearly in John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, with the limits of collective
action. Benthamite theory did not
try to do too much. In sticking to what it knew, and towhat it thought it could
measure, Benthamism gained more in clarity than it lost
inprofundity. Benthamism is
nothing if not systematic, but there has probably been no politicaltheory
before or since (the possible exception is Machiavellianism) which
required sofew assumptions for it to work Bentham had a very exact insight into what
madepolitical theories vulnerable. Political theories, like any other
theories, rest onfundamental assumptions. Some assumptions are more
reasonable than others, but allassumptions are what they are, assumptions, not
provable truths. The best kind of theoryis therefore the one which asks us to
assume the least and builds on that Bentham simply asks us to believe, onthe evidence of human life, that it
is a safe bet that human beings will seek pleasure andavoid pain, now and in the
future, and that when people use words like ‘happier’ and ‘less happy’ the words
have some sensible quantitative meaning There would, however, be no inconsistency in rejecting Benthamism
as a personal ethic while still wishing the public authorities to act
upon Benthamite principles. Themore one agonised over one’s personal ethic
the more one might want governing decisions to embody the clarity of the
Benthamite scheme. Individuals
can allowthemselves the luxury of self-doubt about ethical fundamentals and can
allow themselves a lot of time to decide how those fundamentals apply in
particular cases, but this is nothow one would necessarily want the
public authorities to act In
thissense Benthamism was marvellously attuned to its own time. Reform had been put
off forso long in England, and the new world of industrial capitalism put so many
new problemson the political agenda, that it is possible to regard English
government as being facedwith an emergency for the best part of the
nineteenth century. Problems ‘cried out’ so loudly for governmental action
that only the wilfully obtuse could turn a deaf ear. This isjust another way of
saying that Benthamism works best when the problems are obvious </body>

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