Utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham
 Who is Jeremy Bentham
• Jeremy Bentham was born on 15 February 1748 and
died on 6 June 1832 in London
• Bentham’s later interest in educational reform was
stimulated by his unhappy experiences at
Westminster School and Queen’s College, Oxford
• He viewed the Oxbridge colleges as seats of
privilege, prejudice and idleness, and his Oxford
experience left him with a deep distrust of oaths and
sparked a general antipathy toward the Anglican
establishment
 Philosophical foundations
• Influenced by the empiricism of Bacon and Locke,
Bentham held that all knowledge is derived from
sensation: the intellect has no material to work with
apart from that obtained by the senses
• Bentham carried over into moral science He argued that
legal science ought to be built on the same immovable
basis of sensation and experience as that of medicine,
declaring “what the physician is to the natural body, the
legislator is to the political: legislation is the art of
medicine exercised upon a grand scale”
 Turning point in his philosophy
• Bentham himself his primary interest was in
forming the British system .
• His starting from the Hedonist basis, which says
“pleasure is a good and therefore pain is the bad”. In
this sense it is like a form of Consequentialism,
meaning that it looks ultimately on what sort of
consequences are produced. In that case if it more
pleasure than pain overall, that’s good, if it’s more
pain than pleasure overall that is produced, it is bad.
• man is motivated by two main drives: to seek
pleasure and avoid pain
• Focuses on the word utility and Happiness
• utility, he means happiness, but he also means
pleasure. He means the good. He means the
interest, and for Bentham this is the power of
utility. It doesn’t mean as usefulness as opposed
to, this is a misconception that utilitarians come
to fight.
• for Bentham utility is everything good:
happiness, interest, the good, morality all
dissolves into his concept of utility. Utility is
measured by the presence of pleasure and the
absence of pain.
• for Bentham, the morality of an act, the
morality of a law, the morality of an
institution is to be calculated
• Bentham, says that pleasure has different
aspects. (Morals and Legislation)
• How can this become a fairer, a more just, a
more moral society?
• notice that its consequentialist, the utilitarian
calculus says that what matters is the result,
what matters is the consequence, the end
justify the means, 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
• it’s a materialist philosophy which means,
there is only pleasure and pain. It’s an anti-
spiritualist, its an explicitly atheistic
philosophy. Through and through a
materialist philosophy says that all that
matters is secular, all that matters is balance
and pain in this world
• Finally, in his Utilitarian calculus it seems to
be aggregative. Bentham means that it
aggregates all of the pleasure and pains of a
decision, an action, or a rule. Justice lies in the
maximization of pleasure and the
minimization of pain in the aggregate.
 “The greatest good for the greatest number”

Government act on the basis of three premises:

• Every man is the best judge of his interest
• Every man’s capacity for happiness is the same
• Society’s interest is the sum of interests of the
members of society.