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Western Political Thought

Notes eighteenth-century philosophers. He was convinced that every reasonable person would accept
the principle of the greatest happiness as a basis of society. He also expected that each individual
would pursue his own happiness rather than something else. To tell the individual to behave
differently, contrary to one’s disposition; would be futile.
Bentham realized that a self-interested person would perform his duties, as his main concern was
in discerning factors influencing particular behaviour. He refused to be judgemental about human
behaviour and action per se. He hoped to provide the legislator with an exhaustive list of pleasures
and pains, motives and sanctions, and factors that influenced human conduct and behaviour, with
the purpose of changing social arrangements and individual actions. Bentham emphasized the
fact that the individual either pursued his happiness without hurting anyone, or pursued actions
that were actually conducive to the happiness of others. The legislator on his part, through rewards
and punishment, could secure such behaviour, so as to ensure that the stock of happiness in the
community did not diminish.
Bentham was sanguine that an adult individual was the best judge of his own happiness, fully
capable of pursuing it without harming the happiness of others. He saw an integral link between
the happiness of an individual and that of the community, and offered the principle of utility as
a yardstick to a legislator to frame laws in order to obtain the overall happiness and welfare of the
community. He repeatedly stressed that a person’s actions and policies had to be judged by his
intention to promote the happiness of the community. The end and the goal of legislation was to
follow the rule, “each is to count for one and no one for more than one”, suggesting that in spite
of his repeated emphasis on the community, his was essentially an individualistic philosophy, for
he understood social community as a fictitious body of individuals. He was concerned with the
distribution of happiness as much as the amount of it.
Bentham distinguished pleasures quantitatively rather than qualitatively, regarding pushpin as
good as poetry. He did not differentiate between pleasures, and in that sense he was not an elitist.
He did not assign any inherent grading to activities and treated them at par in terms of their
contribution to individual happiness. Interestingly, Rawls, though a critic of Benthamite
Utilitarianism, retained Bentham’s outlook in judging human contentment and excellence by
asserting that even an individual who enjoyed counting the blades of grass was essentially fulfilling
his moral nature.
In his desire to emulate Newton Bentham laid down principles in morals and legislation. By doing
so, he disproved Burke’s assertion that a “science of politics did not and could not exist” (Doyle
1963: 231). He was convinced that pleasures and pains could be measured mathematically by
taking into consideration factors like intensity, duration, certainty and propinquity or remoteness.
Such a formula was called the “felicific calculus”. Bentham conceived the principle of utility as
having the same status in the moral world, as axioms in geometry have in the world of mathematics.
This was because Arithmetic, as noted by Hobsbawn, was the fundamental tool of the Industrial
Revolution and for Bentham and his followers happiness was the object of policy. Every man’s
pleasure could be expressed (at least in theory) as a quantity and so could his pain. Deduct the
pain from the pleasure and the net result was his happiness. Add the happiness of all men and
deduct the unhappiness, and the government which secured the greatest happiness of the greatest
number was the best. The accountancy of humanity would produce its debit and credit balance,
like that of business” (Hobsbawn 1968: 79).
He taught men to govern by the simple rule of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”
which, in practice, could be discovered by a “felicific calculus”. Thus, he sought to establish an
external standard, mathematically calculable, whereby to measure the legislator’s accomplishment.
His contention was that he had made legislative reform a matter not of “caprice” or of unenlightened
benevolence, but of logic (Bronowski and Mazlish 1960: 431).

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