Chapter 2. Jeremy Bentham, The Utilitarian as Big Brother
1. From Laissez-Faire to Statism
Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832, began as a devoted Smithian, but more consistently attached to laissez-faire.
During his relatively brief span of interest in economics, he became more and more statist.
His intensified statism was merely one aspect of his major and highly unfortunate contribution to economics, his consistent philosophical utilitarianism.
This contribution, which opens a broad sluice gate for state despotism, still remains as Bentham's legacy to contemporary neoclassical economics.
Bentham was born in London, the son of a wealthy lawyer,
wild away his youth at Oxford and was admitted to the bar in 1772.
But it soon became clear that Bentham was not interested in a career as an attorney.
Rather, he settled down for life with his inherited wealth to become a cloistered philosopher,
philosopher, legal theorist and projector or crank, eternally grinding out schemes for
legal and political reform which he urged upon the great and powerful.
Bentham's first and enduring interest was in utilitarianism, which we shall examine further
below, and which he launched with his first published work at the age of 28, The Fragment
on Government, 1776.
Most of his life, Bentham functioned as the great man, scribbling chaotically on endless
and prolix manuscripts, elaborating on his projected reforms and law codes.
Most of the manuscripts remained unpublished until long after his death.
The affluent Bentham lived in a capacious house, surrounded by flunkies and disciples,
who copied revision after revision of his eligible prose to get ready for eventual publication.
He conversed with his disciples in the same made-up jargon with which he peppered his
writings.
While a cheery conversationalist, Bentham brooked no argument from his aides and disciples.
As his precocious young disciple, John Stuart Mill, later recalled with kindly understatement,
Bentham failed in deriving light from other minds.
Because of this trait, Bentham was surrounded not by alert and knowledgeable disciples,
but by largely uncomprehending aides, who, in the perceptive words of Professor William
Thomas, looked on his work with a certain resigned skepticism as if its faults were
the result of eccentricities beyond the reach of criticism or remonstrance.
As Thomas continues, the idea that he was surrounded by a band of eager disciples who drew from
his system a searching critique of every aspect of contemporary society, which they were later
to apply to various institutions in need of reform, is the product of later liberal myth-making.
So far as I know, Bentham's circle is quite unlike that of any other great political thinker.
It consisted not so much of men who found in his work a compelling explanation of the
social world around them, and gathered about him to learn more of his thoughts, as of men
caught in a sort of expectant bafflement at the progress of a work which they would have
liked to help on to completion, but which remained maddeningly elusive and obscure.
What Bentham needed desperately were sympathetic and candid editors of his work, but his relationship
with his followers precluded that from happening.
For this reason, adds Thomas, the steadily accumulating mass of manuscripts remained
largely a terra incognita even to the intimate members of our circle.
As a result, for example, such a major work in manuscript, of laws in general, astonishingly
They remained unedited, let alone unpublished, until our own day.
If anyone could have played this role, it was Bentham's outstanding follower, James
Mill, whom we will deal with more fully below, chapter 3.
In many ways, Mill had the capacity and personality to perform the task.
But there were two fatal problems.
First, Mill refused to abandon his own intellectual work in order to subordinate himself exclusively
to aiding the master.
As Thomas writes, sooner or later all Bentham's disciples faced the choice of absorption or
independence.
Though he was a devoted follower of Benthamite utilitarianism, Mill's personality was such
that absorption for him was out of the question.
Second, the slipshod and volatile Bentham desperately needed shaping up, and the brisk,
systematic, didactic and hectoring James Mill was just the man to do the shaping.
But unsurprisingly, Bentham, the great man, was not about to be shaped up by anyone.
The personality clash was too great for their relationship to be anything but arm's length,
at the height of Mill's discipleship before Mill achieved economic independence from his
wealthy patron.
Thus, in exasperation, Mill wrote to a close mutual friend about Bentham, the pain he seems
to feel at the very thought of being called upon to give his mind to the subject you can
have but little conception of.
At the same time, Bentham, even long afterwards, confided his lingering resentment of Mill
to his last disciple, John Boehring.
He will never willingly enter into discourse with me.
When he differs, he is silent.
He expects to subdue everybody by his domineering tone, to convince everybody by his positiveness.
His manner of speaking is oppressive and overbearing.
There is no better way to summarize the personality clash between them.
Bentham's first published work, The Fragment on Government, 1776, gained young Bentham
an entrée into leading political circles, particularly the friends of Lord Shelburne.
These included Whig politicians like Lord Camden and William Pitt the Younger, and two
men who were quickly to become Bentham's close friends and earliest disciples, the
and even Etienne Dumont and Sir Samuel Romilly.
Dumont was to be the main carrier of Benthamite doctrine to the continent of Europe.
While utilitarian political and legal reform continued to be his main interest throughout
his life, Bentham read and absorbed the wealth of nations in the late 1770s or early 1780s,
quickly becoming a devoted disciple.
Although Bentham praised practically no other author, he habitually referred to Adam Smith
as the father of political economy, a great master, and a writer of consummate genius.
In the early 1780s, Bentham's brother Samuel, a wealthy engineer, was engaged by the Empress
Catherine the Great to organize various industrial projects. Samuel invited Jeremy to stay with
with him in Russia, which he did from the mid-1780s to the end of 1787, with a view
to presenting an all-comprehensive legal code to enable that despot to govern her realm
more efficiently. Bentham characteristically never completed the code for Catherine, but
while in Russia he learned, falsely as it turned out, that William Pitt, now Prime Minister,
is preparing to urge a reduction in the legal maximum rate of interest from 5 to 4 percent.
Agitated, Bentham wrote and soon published in 1787 his first and only well-known work
on economics, the scintillating and hard-hitting defense of usury.
Trying to bring more consistency into Smithian laissez-faire, Bentham argued against all usury
laws whatever.
He grounded his views squarely on the concept of freedom of contract, declaring that no
man of ripe ears and of sound mind, acting freely and with his eyes open, ought to be
hindered from making such a bargain in the way of obtaining money as he thinks fit.
The presumption in any situation is for freedom of contract.
You who fetter contracts, you who lay restraints on the liberty of man, it is for you to assume
How can usury be a crime when it is exchanged by mutual consent of lender and borrower?
Usury, Bentham concludes, if it must be an offense, is an offense committed with consent,
that is, with the consent of the party supposed to be injured, cannot merit a place in the
catalog of offenses, unless the consent were either unfairly obtained or unfreely.
In the first case it coincides with defraudment, in the other with extortion.
In his appendix to the defense of usury, Bentham restates and sharpens the Torgot-Smith defense
of savings.
Savings results in capital accumulation.
Whatever saves money, as the phrase is, adds proportionately to the general mass of capital.
The world can augment its capital in only one way, that is, by parsimony.
This insight leads to the principle that capital limits trade, that the extent of trade or
production is limited by the amount of capital that has been accumulated.
In short, the trade of every nation is limited by the quantity of capital.
The laissez-faire implication, as Bentham saw, is that government action or spending cannot
increase the total amount of capital in society.
It can only divert capital from free market to less productive uses.
As a result, no regulations nor any efforts whatsoever, either on the part of subjects or governors, can raise the quantity of wealth produced during a given period to an amount beyond what the productive powers of the quantity of capital in hand are capable of producing.
Defense of usury had a great impact in Britain and elsewhere. Dr. Thomas Reid, the distinguished Scottish common-sense philosopher who succeeded Adam Smith to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, strongly endorsed the book.
Book, the great Comte de Mirabeau, the leading force in the early stages of the French Revolution,
had the work translated into French.
And in the United States, the tract went into several editions, and it inspired several
states to repeal their laws against usury.
In the course of the defense, there are hints of valuable analysis.
Banking is defined as exchanging present money for future, and other intimations of the time
preference or waiting as a key to saving include such phrases as the saver having the resolution
to sacrifice the present to the future.
Bentham also intimates that part of interest charged includes a risk premium, a kind of
insurance premium for the risk of loss incurred by the lender.
During the 1780s, Bentham was also writing his Essay on Reward, published only a half
century later as The Rationale of Reward.
In it, Bentham expounded enthusiastically on competition as rewards and hailed the advantages
resulting from the most unlimited freedom of competition.
It was on this principle of free competition and opposition to governmental monopolies
that the father of political economy had, in Bentham's overenthusiastic words, created
a new science.
In his next economic work, the unpublished Manual of Political Economy, 1795, Bentham
continued the laissez-faire theme of no more trade than capital.
The government, he emphasized, can only divert investment funds from the private sector.
cannot raise the total level of investment. Whatever is given to any one branch is so
much taken from the rest. Every statesman who thinks by regulation to increase the sum
of trade is the child whose eye is bigger than his belly. Towards the end of the same
work, however, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appeared that would eventually take charge
of Bentham's Economic Analysis.
For Bentham began his rapid slide down the inflationist chute.
In a kind of appendix to the work, he states that government paper money could increase
capital if resources were not fully employed.
There is no analysis, as of course there never is in the inflationist canon, of why these
resources were unemployed in the first place.
That is, why their owners withheld them from use.
The answer must be because the resource owner demanded an excessively high price or wage.
Inflation is therefore a means of fooling resource owners into lowering their real demands.
It did not take long for Jeremy Bentham to slide down the slippery slope from Adam Smith
and what would be Say's law, back to mercantilism and inflationism.
Shortly afterwards, in an unpublished proposal for the circulation of a new species of paper
currency, 1796, Bentham happily wedded his projecting and constructivist spirit to his
newfound inflationism.
Instead of floating bonds and paying interest on them, the government, he proposed, should
would simply monopolize all issue of paper notes in the kingdom.
It could then issue the notes, preferably non-interest bearing ad libitum, and save itself
the interest.
Bentham was scarcely at his best answering the question of what limit there might be
to this government paper issue.
The limit, he answered, would obviously be the amount of paper currency in the country.
Bentham's modern editor is properly scornful of this patent claptrap.
It is like saying, the sky's the limit, when we do not know how high the sky may be.
In his later writings on the subject, Bentham searched for some limits to paper issue, if
unsuccessfully, but his commitment to a broadly inflationist course deepened further.
In his unfinished Circulating Annuities, 1800, he developed his government paper scheme further
and hailed the serviceability of inflation in wartime.
Indeed, Bentham makes an all-out assault on the Turgot-Smith-Say insights and actually
declares that employment of labor is directly proportional to the quantity of money.
No addition is ever made to the quantity of labor in any place, but by an addition made
to the quantity of money in that place.
In this point of view, then, money, it should seem, is the cause, and the cause sine qua
non, of labor and general wealth.
Quantity of money is all.
So much for Smithian doctrine.
In fact, Bentham went further in circulating annuities, heaping scorn on his alleged mentor
for denouncing the mercantilist preoccupation with the states piling up of gold and silver
and with a favorable balance of trade.
There is no absurdity, averred Bentham, in the exaltation testified by public men at
observing how great a degree of what is called the balance of trade is in favor of this country.
Seduced by the pride of discovery, Adam Smith, by taking his words from the kitchen, has
attempted to throw an ill-grounded ridicule on the preference given to gold and silver.
After once again calling for the elimination of bank paper for the benefit of a government
monopoly of paper issue in the fragmentary Paper Mischief Exposed, 1801, Bentham reached
The Acme of Inflationism in his The True Alarm, 1801.
In this unpublished work, Bentham not only continued the full employment motif, but also
grumbled about the allegedly dire effects of hoarding, of money saved from consumption
that went into hoards instead of investment.
In that case, disaster, a fall in prices, profits and production.
Nowhere does Bentham recognize that hoarding and a general fall in prices also means a
fall in costs, and no necessary reduction in investment or production. Indeed, Bentham
worked around to the Mandeville fallacy about the beneficial and uniquely energizing effects
of luxurious spending. In the mercantilist and proto-Keynesian manner, saving is evil
Capital hoarding, while luxury consumption animates production.
How capital can be maintained, much less increased, without saving, is not explained in this bizarre
model.
James Mill and David Ricardo have been considered loyal Benthamites, and this they were in utilitarian
philosophy and in a belief in political democracy.
In economics, however, it was a far different story, and Mill and Ricardo, sound as a rock
on Say's law and the Turgot-Smith analysis, were firm in successfully discouraging the
publication of the true alarm.
Ricardo scoffed at almost all of later Benthamite economics, and in the case of money and production,
asked the proper questions.
Why should the mere increase of money have any other effect than to lower its value?
How would it cause any increase in the production of commodities?
Money cannot call forth goods, but goods can call forth money.
Bentham's major theme, that money is the cause of riches, Ricardo rejected firmly and flatly.
In his penultimate work of importance on economics, Jeremy Bentham came full circle. He had launched
the economic part of his career with a hard-hitting attack on usury laws. He ended it by defending
maximum price control on bread. Why? Because the mass of the public would favor cheap bread,
assuredly so, and so there would then be a rational and determinate standard for the
The Good and Moral Price of Bread, a standard which, apparently, free contract and free
markets cannot set.
What would such a standard be?
Showing that for Bentham, his ad hoc utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis had totally driven
any sound economics out of his purview, he answered that it would have to be empirical
and ad hoc.
Directing economic logic to the wins, Bentham maintained that the authorities should set
a moderate maximum price, which would weigh the costs and benefits, the advantages and
disadvantages of each possible price.
And Bentham assured his readers of his moderation.
He did not mean it, his proposal, as a whip or scorpion for the punishment of the growers
or vendors of corn.
But that would be the inevitable result.
Ad hoc empiricism was now rampant in Bentham.
Admitting that all previous attempts at maximum price control were disasters, like any later
institutionalist or historicist, Bentham denied any relevance, since the circumstances of
each particular time and place are necessarily different.
In short, Bentham denied economics altogether, that is, denied the possibility of laws abstracting
from particular circumstances and applying to all exchanges or actions everywhere.
In arguing against the opponents of price control, Bentham often used reasoning that
was tortuous and even absurd.
For example, to the charge that maximum price control would lead to attempted consumption
exceeding supply, one of the greatest problems with price control, Bentham insisted that
this could not happen in Britain, where the Poor Law ensured welfare payment to the poor
with an increase in the price of bread. The opinion that, at some time or other, the demand
The curve can be vertical and not falling is in every century the hallmark of an economic
ignoramus, and Bentham now passed that test.
For centuries, writers and theorists knew that demand increased as price fell, and Bentham
was now writing as if economics had never existed and could never exist.
Since consistency was the realm of despised deductive logic, Bentham denied that his opposition
to usury laws had any relation to his defense of price control on bread.
But while he still maintained that his earlier analysis had been correct, he now offered
a crucial revision.
He had overlooked that a notable advantage of a usury law is that the government can
and then borrow more cheaply, at the expense, of course, of squeezing out marginal private borrowers.
And he went on to admit that he now found this advantage decisive, so that now he would
place usury laws on the governmental agenda.
I should expect to find the advantages of it in this respect predominant over its disadvantages
in all others.
In short, Bentham, the alleged individualist and exponent of laissez-faire, finds that
advantage to government outweighs all private disadvantage.
Again treating his earlier views on usury, Bentham denied that he had ever believed in
any self-adjusting and equilibrating tendencies of the market, or that interest rates properly
adjust saving and investment.
He went on in a revealing diatribe against laissez-faire and natural rights to demonstrate
to one and all the incompatibility between utilitarianism on the one hand and laissez-faire
or property rights on the other.
I have not, I never had nor shall have, any horror, sentimental or anarchical of the hand
of government.
I leave it to Adam Smith and the champions of the rights of man to talk of invasions
of natural liberty and to give as a special argument against this or that law an argument
the effect of which would be to put a negative upon all laws.
The interference of government, as often as in my jumbled view of the matter the smallest
balance on the side of advantage is the result, is an event I witness with altogether as much
One wonders by what mystical standard the scientific Bentham managed to weigh the advantages
and disadvantages of every particular law.
Three years later, in 1804, Jeremy Bentham lost interest in economics, a fact for which
we must be forever grateful.
It is only unfortunate that this waning of zeal had not occurred a half decade before.
The case of Jeremy Bentham, however, should be instructive to that host of economists that
attempt to weld utilitarian philosophy with free market economics.
One would think that the master of utilitarianism would have contributed to utility analysis
in Economics.
But oddly enough, Bentham proved to be interested only in the macro-realms of economic thought.
The only exception came in the largely unfortunate True Alarm, 1801, in which Bentham not only
declared that all value is founded on utility, but also enters into a cogent critique of
Adam Smith's alleged value paradox.
Water, Bentham noted, can and does have economic value, while diamonds do have value in use as a foundation of their economic value.
Continuing on, Bentham approaches the marginalist refutation of the value paradox.
The reason why water is not found to have any value with a view to exchange is that it is equally devoid of value with a view to use.
If the whole quantity required is available, the surplus has no kind of value.
It would be the same in the case of wine, grain and everything else.
Water, furnished as it is by nature without any human exertion, is more likely to be found
in that abundance which renders it superfluous.
But there are many circumstances in which it has a value in exchange superior to that
of Wine 2. Personal Utilitarianism
As we have seen, Jeremy Bentham's strictly economic views, especially when he slid back
to mercantilism, had no impact on economic thought, even upon his own philosophic disciples
such as James Mill and Ricardo. But his philosophic views, introduced into economics by these
by these same disciples left an unfortunate and permanent impact on economic thought.
They provided economics with its underlying and dominant social philosophy,
and that dominance would be no less powerful for being generally implicit and unexamined.
Utilitarianism provided economists with the ability to square the circle,
to allow them to make pronouncements and take firm positions on public policy,
History, while still pretending to be hard-headed, scientific and therefore value-free.
As the nineteenth century proceeded and economics began to become a separate profession, a guild
with its own code and practices, it became possessed of an overwhelming desire to ape
the success and the prestige of the hard physical sciences.
But scientists are supposed to be objective, disinterested, unbiased in their scientific
work.
It was therefore assumed that for economists to espouse moral principles or political philosophy
was somehow introducing the virus of bias, prejudice and an unscientific attitude into
the discipline of economics.
This attitude of crude imitation of the physical sciences ignored the fact that people and
inanimate objects are crucially different.
Stones or atoms don't have values or make choices, whereas people inherently evaluate
and choose.
Still, it would be perfectly possible for economists to confine themselves to analyzing
and the consequences of such values and choices, provided they took no stand on public policy.
But economists burn to take such stands.
In fact, interest in policy is generally the main motivation for embarking on a study of
economics in the first place.
And advocating policy, saying that the government should or should not do A, B or C, is ipso
So facto, taking a value position and an implicitly ethical one to boot.
There is no way of getting around this fact, and the best that can be done is to make such
ethics a rational inquiry of what is best for man in accordance with his nature.
But the pursuit of value-free science precluded that path, and so economists, by adopting utilitarianism,
were able to pretend or to delude themselves that they were being strictly scientific while
smuggling unanalyzed and shaky ethical notions into economics.
In that way, economics embraced the worst of both worlds, implicitly smuggling in fallacy
and bias in the name of hard-nosed value freedom.
The Benthamite infection of economics with the bacillus of utilitarianism has never been
have been cured, and remains as rampant and as predominant as ever.
Utilitarianism consists in two fundamental parts, personal utilitarianism and social utilitarianism,
the latter being built upon the former.
Each is fallacious and pernicious, but social utilitarianism, which we are more interested in here,
adds many fallacies and would be unsound even if personal utilitarianism were to be upheld.
Personal utilitarianism, as launched by David Hume in the mid-18th century,
assumes that each individual is governed only by the desire to satisfy his emotions, his passions,
and that these emotions of happiness or unhappiness are primary and unanalyzable
The only function of man's reason is use as a means to show someone how to arrive at his
goals. There is no function for reason in setting man's goals themselves. Reason, for Hume and for
later utilitarians, is only a handmaiden, a slave to the passions. There is no room then for natural
law to establish any ethic for mankind.
But what then is to be done about the fact that most people decide about their ends by
ethical principles, which cannot be considered reducible to an original personal emotion?
Still more embarrassing for utilitarianism is the obvious fact that emotion is often
a handmaiden of such principles, and is patently not an ultimate given, but rather determined
by what happens to such principles.
Thus, someone who fervently adopts a certain ethical or political philosophy will feel
happy whenever such philosophy succeeds in the world, and unhappy when it meets a setback.
are then a handmaiden to principles instead of the other way round.
In grappling with such anomalies, utilitarianism, priding itself on being anti-mystical and
scientific, has to go against the facts and introduce mystification of its own.
For it then has to say either that people only think they have adopted governing ethical
Principles, and or that they should abandon such principles and cleave only to unanalyzed
feelings.
In short, utilitarianism has either to fly in the face of facts obvious to everyone,
a methodology that is surely blatantly unscientific, and or to adopt an unanalyzed ethical view
of its own in denunciation of all other ethical views.
But this is mystical, value-laden and self-refuting of its own anti-ethical doctrine, or rather
of any ethical doctrine that is not a slave to unanalyzed passions.
In either case, utilitarianism is self-refuting in violating its own axiom of not going beyond
given emotions and valuations.
Furthermore, it is common human experience, once again, that subjective desires are not
absolute, given, and unchanging.
They are not hermetically sealed off from persuasion, whether rational or otherwise.
One's own experience and the arguments of others can and do persuade people to change
their values.
But how could that be if all individual desires and valuations are pure givens, and therefore
not subject to alteration by the intersubjective persuasion of others?
But if these desires are not givens, and are changeable by the persuasion of moral argument,
it would then follow that, contrary to the assumptions of utilitarianism, supra-subjective
ethical principles do exist that can be argued and can have an impact on others and on their
valuations and goals.
Jeremy Bentham added a further fallacy to the utilitarianism that had grown fashionable
in Great Britain since the days of David Hume.
More brutally, Bentham sought to reduce all human desires and values from the qualitative
to the quantitative.
All goals are to be reduced to quantity, and all seemingly different values, for example
push-pin and poetry, are to be reduced to mere differences of quantity and degree.
The drive to reduce quality drastically to quantity again appealed to the scientistic
passion among economists.
Quantity is uniformly the object of investigation in the hard physical sciences.
So doesn't concern for quality in the study of human action connote mysticism and a sloppy
unscientific attitude?
But once again, economists forgot that quantity is precisely the proper concept for dealing
with stones or atoms, for these entities do not possess consciousness, do not value and
do not choose, therefore their movements can be and should be charted with quantitative
precision.
But individual human beings, on the contrary, are conscious and do adopt values and act
on them.
People are not unmotivated objects always describing a quantitative path.
People are qualitative, that is, they respond to qualitative differences and they value
You and Choose on that basis.
To reduce quality to quantity, therefore, gravely distorts the actual nature of human
beings and of human action, and by distorting reality, proves to be the reverse of the truly
scientific.
Jeremy Bentham's dubious contribution to personal utilitarian doctrine, in addition
to being its best known propagator and popularizer, was to quantify and crudely reduce it still
further.
Trying to make the doctrine still more scientific, Bentham attempted to provide a scientific
standard for such emotions as happiness and unhappiness, quantities of pleasure and pain.
All vague notions of happiness and desire for Bentham could be reduced to quantities
of pleasure and pain.
Pleasure good, pain bad.
Man therefore simply attempts to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
In that case, the individual and the scientist observing him can engage in a replicable calculus
Analysis of Pleasure and Pain, what Bentham termed the philosophic calculus, that can
be churned out to yield the proper result in counseling action or non-action in any
given situation.
Every man, then, can engage in what neo-Benthamite economists nowadays call a cost-benefit analysis.
In whatever situation, he can gauge the benefits, units of pleasure, weigh it against the costs,
units of pain, and see which outweighs the other.
In a discussion which Professor John Plaminatz aptly says parodies reason, Bentham tries
to give objective dimensions to pleasure and pain, so as to establish the scientific soundness
of his philosophic calculus.
These dimensions, Bentham asserts, are sevenfold—intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity,
purity and extent.
Bentham claims that, at least conceptually, all these qualities can be measured and then
multiplied together to yield the net resultant of pain or pleasure from any action.
The theory to state Bentham's theory of seven dimensions should be enough to demonstrate
its sheer folly.
These emotions or sensations are qualitative and not quantitative, and none of these dimensions
can be multiplied or weighted together.
Again, Bentham raised an unfortunate scientistic analogy with physical objects.
A three-dimensional object is one where each object is linear, and therefore where all
these linear units can be multiplied together to yield units of volume.
In human valuation, even with pleasure and pain, there is no unit common to each of their
dimensions, and therefore there is no way to multiply such units.
As Professor Plamenatz trenchantly points out, the truth is that even an omniscient
god could not make such calculations, for the very notion of them is impossible.
The intensity of a pleasure cannot be measured against its duration, nor its duration against
its certainty or uncertainty, nor this latter property against its propinquity or remoteness.
Claminatz adds that it is true, as Bentham states, that people often compare courses
of action and choose those they find most desirable.
But this simply means that they decide between alternatives and not that they engage in quantitative
calculations of units of pleasure and pain.
But one thing can be said for Bentham's grotesque doctrine.
At least Bentham attempted, no matter how fallaciously, to ground his cost-benefit analysis on an
objective standard of benefit and cost.
Later utilitarian theorists, along with the body of economics, eventually abandoned the
pleasure-paying calculus.
But in doing so, they also abandoned any attempt to provide a standard to ground ad hoc costs
and Benefits on some sort of intelligible basis. Since then, the appeal to cost and
benefit, even on a personal level, has necessarily been vague, unsupported and arbitrary.
Moreover, John Wilde eloquently contrasts utilitarian personal ethics with the ethics
of natural law. Utilitarian ethics makes no clear distinction between raw appetite or
for Interest, and that deliberate or voluntary desire which is fused with practical reason.
Value or pleasure or satisfaction is the object of any interest, no matter how incidental
or distorted it may be.
Qualitative distinctions are simply ignored, and the good is conceived in a purely quantitative
manner as the maximum of pleasure or satisfaction.
Reason has nothing to do with the eliciting of sound appetite.
One desire is no more legitimate than another.
Reason is the slave of passion.
Its whole function is exhausted in working out schemes for the maximizing of such interests
as happen to arise through chance or other irrational causes.
As against this, the theory of natural law maintains that there is a sharp distinction
between raw appetites and deliberate desires elicited with the cooperation of practical
reason.
The good cannot be adequately conceived in a purely quantitative manner.
Random interests which obstruct the full realization of essential common tendencies are condemned
as anti-natural.
When reason becomes the slave of passion, human freedom is lost, and human nature thwarted.
The ethics of natural law sharply separates essential needs and rights from incidental
rights.
The good is not adequately understood as a mere maximizing of qualitatively indifferent
purposes, but a maximizing of those tendencies which qualitatively conform to the nature
of Man, and which arise through rational deliberation and free choice.
There is a stable universal standard resting on something firmer than the shifting sands
of appetite to which an appeal can be made even from the maximal agreements of a corrupt
society.
This standard is the law of nature which persists as long as man persists, which is therefore
incorruptible and inalienable, and which justifies the right to revolution against
a corrupt and tyrannical social order.
Finally, in addition to the problems of the pleasure-pain calculus, personal utilitarianism
counsels that actions be judged not on their nature, but on their consequences.
In the non-Benthamite mere cost benefit rather than objective pleasure pain analysis, how
is anyone to gauge the consequences of any action?
And why is it considered easier, let alone more scientific, to judge consequences than
to judge an act itself by its nature?
Furthermore, it is often very difficult to figure out what the consequences of any contemplated
Action will be. How are we to find the secondary, tertiary, etc. consequences, let alone the
more immediate ones? We suspect that Herbert Spencer in his critique of utilitarianism
was correct. It is often easier to know what is right than what is expedient.