Chapter 4: Pleasure as the End

1. Jeremy Bentham

The doctrine that pleasure is the sole ultimate good, and pain the sole evil, is at least as old as Epicurus (341-270 B.C.). But the doctrine, from the beginning, has been denounced as heretical by the bulk of orthodox or ascetic moralists -- so much so, that it almost disappeared until it was revived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The writer who then stated it in its most uncompromising, elaborate, and systematic form was Jeremy Bentham. (1)

If we may judge by the number of references to him and his doctrines in the literature of the subject, even though most of them are critical, angry, or derisive, Bentham has been the most discussed and influential moralist of modern times. It seems profitable, therefore, to begin with an analysis of the hedonistic doctrine as he states it.

His best known (as well as his most authentic) (2) statement is in his Principles of Morals and Legislation. The paragraphs with which he opens that book are bold and sweeping.

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other hand the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light."

It will be noticed that in the second sentence of this paragraph Bentham draws no distinction whatever between what has since come to be known as the doctrine of psychological hedonism (the doctrine that we always do take the action which we think will give us the greatest pleasure) and the doctrine that has come to be known as ethical hedonism (the doctrine that we ought to take the action which will result in the greatest pleasure or happiness). But we may leave the disentanglement of this knotty problem to a later chapter.

Bentham goes on to explain that:

"The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work. By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question .... I say of every action whatsoever; and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government."

By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing), or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that Individual. (3)

Bentham later modified his ideas, or at least their expression. He acknowledged his debt for the "principle of utility" to Hume, but came to find the principle too vague. Utility for what end? Bentham took over from an essay on Government by Priestley in 1768 the phrase "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" but later substituted both for this and for "utility" the Greatest Happiness Principle. Increasingly, too (as revealed in the Deontology) he substituted "happiness" and "greatest happiness" for "pleasure," and in the Deontology he arrived at the definition: "Morality is the art of maximizing happiness: it gives the code of laws by which that conduct is suggested whose result will, the whole of human existence being taken into account, leave the greatest quantity of felicity." (4)

2. The Charge of Sensuality

It is against the statement of his theory in the form found in his Morals and Legislation, however (and against popular misconceptions of what he believed or continued to believe), that the great storm of criticism has been directed.

As the primary purpose of these early chapters will be to lay the foundation for a positive theory of morals, I shall here discuss only a few of the respects in which that criticism was either valid or unjustified; and I shall discuss them, not so much as they apply to the specific doctrines of Bentham, but to hedonistic or eudaemonic doctrines in general.

The most frequent objection to hedonism or utilitarianism on the part of anti-hedonist and anti-utilitarian writers is that the "pleasure" which it makes the goal of action refers to a purely physical or sensual pleasure. Thus Schumpeter calls it "the shallowest of all conceivable philosophies of life," and insists that the "pleasure" it talks of is merely the pleasure epitomized in eating beefsteaks. (5) And moralists like Carlyle have not hesitated to call it a "pig philosophy." This criticism is immemorial. "Epicurean" has become a synonym for a sensualist, and the followers of Epicurus have been condemned as the "swine" of Epicurus.

Closely allied to this criticism, and sharing almost equal prominence with it, is the accusation that hedonism and utilitarianism preach essentially the philosophy of sensuality and self-indulgence, the philosophy of the voluptuary and the libertine.

Now while it is true that there are people who both practice and preach the philosophy of sensuality, it receives very little support from Bentham -- or, for that matter, from any of the leading utilitarians.

So far as the charge of sensuality is concerned, no one who has ever read Bentham can have any excuse for making it. (6) For in his elaborate enumeration and classification of "pleasures," he lists not only the pleasures of sense, in which he includes the pleasure of health, and the pleasures of wealth and power, including those both of acquisition and of possession, but the pleasures of memory and imagination, or association and expectation, and the pleasures of amity, of a good name, of piety, and of benevolence or good will. (He is also realistic and candid enough to list the pleasures of malevolence or ill will.)

And when he comes to the question of how a pleasure should be measured, valued, or compared, he lists seven criteria or "circumstances":

1. Its intensity.
2. Its duration.
3. Its certainty or uncertainty.
4. Its propinquity or remoteness.
5. Its fecundity (or the chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind).
6. Its purity (or the chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind).
7. Its extent (that is, the number of persons to whom it extends) . (7)

The foregoing quotations do, I think, point to some of the real shortcomings in Bentham's analysis. These include his failure to construct a convincing "hedonistic calculus" (though his elaborate effort to do so was itself highly instructive). They include his tendency to treat "pleasure" or "pain" as something that can be abstracted and isolated from specific pleasures or pains and treated like a physical or chemical residue, or like a homogeneous juice that can be quantitatively measured.

I will return to these points later. Here I wish to point out that Bentham and the utilitarians generally cannot be justly accused of assigning to "pleasure" a purely sensual meaning. Nor does their emphasis on promoting pleasure and avoiding pain necessarily lead to a philosophy of self-indulgence. The critics of hedonism or utilitarianism constantly talk as if its votaries measured all pleasures merely in terms of their intensity. But the key words in Bentham's comparisons are duration, fecundity, and purity. And the greatest of these is duration. In discussing the virtue of "self-regarding prudence," Bentham constantly emphasizes the importance of not sacrificing the future to the present, the importance of giving "preference to the greater future over the less present pleasure. (8) "Is not temperance a virtue? Aye, assuredly is it. But wherefore? Because by restraining enjoyment for a time, it afterwards elevates it to that very pitch which leaves, on the whole, the largest addition to the stock of happiness." (9)

3. Of the Greatest Number

Bentham's views have been misunderstood in another important respect-though this is in large part his own fault. One of the phrases he is thought to have originated-which was once most often quoted with approval by his disciples but is now the most frequent target for his critics-is "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." But first, as we have seen, this was not Bentham's original phrase, but taken by him from Priestley (who was in turn anticipated both by Hutcheson and Beccaria); and secondly, Bentham himself later abandoned it. When he did reject it he did so with a clearer and more powerful argument (so far as it goes) than any I have seen by any critic. It is quoted by Bowring in the final pages of the first volume of the posthumous Deontology, from which I paraphrase it:

"The principle of the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number is questionable because it can be interpreted as ignoring the feelings or fate of the minority. And this questionableness becomes greater the greater we conceive the ratio to be of the minority to the majority."

Let us suppose a community of 4001 persons of which the "majority" numbers 2001 and the minority 2000. Suppose that, to begin with, each of the 4001 possesses an equal portion of happiness. If, now, we take his share of happiness from every one of the 2000 and divide it among the 2001, the result would be, not an augmentation, but a vast diminution of happiness. The feelings of the minority being, according to the "greatest number" principle, left out of account, the vacuum thus left, instead of remaining a vacuum, may be filled with the greatest unhappiness and suffering. The net result for a whole community would not be a gain in happiness but a great loss.

Or assume, again, that your 4001 persons are at the outset in a state of perfect equality with respect to the means to happiness, including power and opulence, with every one possessing not only equal wealth, but equal liberty and independence. Now take your 2000, or no matter how much smaller a minority, reduce them to a state of slavery, and divide them and their former property among the 2001. How many in the community will actually have their happiness increased? What would be the result for the happiness of the whole community? The questions answer themselves.

To make the application more specific, Bentham then went on to ask what would happen if, in Great Britain, the whole body of the Roman Catholics were made slaves and divided among the whole body of Protestants, or if, in Ireland, the whole body of Protestants were divided, in like manner, among the whole body of Roman Catholics.

So Bentham fell back on the Greatest Happiness Principle, and spoke of the goal of ethics as that of maximizing the happiness of the community as a whole.

4. "Pleasure" vs. "Happiness"

This statement of the ultimate criterion of moral rules leaves many troublesome questions unanswered. We may postpone consideration of some of these to a later point, but we can hardly escape dealing with a few of them now, if our answer is to be even provisionally satisfactory. Some of these questions are perhaps purely semantic or linguistic; others are psychological or philosophical; and in some cases it is difficult to determine whether we are in fact dealing with a verbal or a psychological or a moral problem.

This applies especially to the use of the terms pleasure and pain. Bentham himself, as we have seen, who originally made the systematic use of these terms basic to his ethical system, later tended to abandon the term pleasure more and more for the term happiness. But he insisted to the end that: "Happiness is the aggregate of which pleasures are the component parts. . . . Let not the mind be led astray by any distinctions drawn between pleasures and happiness .... Happiness without pleasures is a chimera and a contradiction; it is a million without any units, a square yard in which there shall be no inches, a bag of guineas without an atom of gold." (10)

The conception of happiness as a mere arithmetical summation of units of pleasure and pain, however, finds little acceptance today, either by moral philosophers, psychologists, or the man in the street. And persistent difficulties are presented by the words pleasure and pain. It is in vain that some moral philosophers have warned that they should be used and understood only in a purely formal sense. The popular association of these words with merely sensual and carnal pleasure is so strong that such a warning is certain to be forgotten. Meanwhile antihedonists consciously or unconsciously make full use of this association to deride and discredit the utilitarian writers who use the words.

It seems the part of practical wisdom, and the best way to minimize misunderstanding, to use the terms "pleasure" and "pain" very sparingly, if not to abandon them almost altogether in ethical discussion.
(11)

Notes

1. Bentham's ethical theories are presented chiefly in A Fragment on Government (1776), An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed in 1780 but not published until 1789), and the posthumous Deontology, edited from manuscripts by Bowring in 1834. For a full exposition and critique of Bentham's ethical writings, as well as a history of his reputation, see David Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today (Princeton University Press, 1952).

2. In the posthumous Deontology, which Bowring claims to have "put together" from "disjointed fragments, written on small scraps of paper, on the spur of the moment, at times remote from one another, and delivered into my hands without order or arrangement of any sort" it is difficult to tell what is Bentham's from what is Bowring's.

3. Morals and Legislation, p. 2.

4. Deontology,II, 31.

5. Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 131 et al.

6. John Hospers has shown that the charge is unjust even as directed against the actual doctrines of Epicurus. See "Epicureanism," Human Conduct (Harcourt, Brace, 1961), pp. 49-59.

7. Morals and Legislation, p. 30.

8. Deontology, II, 82.

9. Deontology, II, 89.

10. Deontology, II, 16.

11. See Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 14-15, and Theory and History (Yale, 1957), pp. 12-13n. Also Ludwig Feuerbach, Eudamonismus, in "Sammtliche Werke," ed. Bolin and Jodl (Stuttgart, 1907, 10, 230-93. Further sources of confusion are pointed out by John Hospers in Human Conduct, esp. pp. 111-116. These include the confusion of "pleasure" in the sense of a source of pleasure, such as a pleasurable sensation, with pleasure in the sense of a pleasant state of consciousness. It is the opposite of the first only that can properly be described as "pain," whereas the true opposite of the second is displeasure. The failure to make this distinction was a major source of confusion in Bentham and Mill.

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