Utilitarianism: background, statement, merits, limitations, and Bentham and J. S. Mill

1. Background

• Earlier sources. Epicurus (pleasure as the good), Hobbes and Locke (human beings seek pleasure and avoid pain), Hume (utility as the basis of justice), Priestley and Beccaria (who used the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”).
• Reaction against natural rights and social contract. Bentham dismissed natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts” and the social contract as a fiction. Government had to be justified by its results.
• Need for legal reform in England. The law of the late eighteenth century was confused, harsh (capital punishment for minor theft) and run for the benefit of a few. Utilitarianism gave reformers a test: does this law increase happiness?
• Industrial and democratic change. The rising middle class wanted rational, efficient government. The Reform Act of 1832, poor-law and prison reforms owe much to the utilitarian “philosophical radicals”.

2. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)

Main works: A Fragment on Government (1776) and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).

(a) The principle of utility

The Introduction opens: “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.” An action is right if it tends to increase happiness and wrong if it tends to diminish it. For a government, the test is “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”.

(b) Quantitative hedonism and the felicific calculus

Bentham held that pleasures differ only in quantity, not quality: “prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry”. Pleasures and pains can be measured by seven dimensions:

1. Intensity
2. Duration
3. Certainty or uncertainty
4. Propinquity or remoteness (how soon)
5. Fecundity (chance of being followed by more pleasure)
6. Purity (chance of not being followed by pain)
7. Extent (number of persons affected)

A legislator adds up the pleasures and pains a law will produce and chooses the course with the largest balance of pleasure. “Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one” (attributed to Bentham by Mill) supplies the democratic element.

(c) The four sanctions

Pleasure and pain enforce conduct through four sanctions: physical (natural consequences), political or legal (punishment by the State), moral or popular (public opinion) and religious (fear of divine punishment). The legislator works mainly through the political sanction.

(d) Bentham on the State, law and punishment

• The State is a human contrivance for promoting happiness; people obey because obedience brings more pleasure (security, order) than disobedience. That is the utilitarian ground of political obligation: obey while the probable mischiefs of obedience are less than the probable mischiefs of resistance.
• Law is the command of the sovereign (developed by his follower Austin); every law is an evil because it restricts liberty, justified only if it prevents a greater evil.
• Punishment is itself a pain, justified only if it prevents more pain through deterrence; it must not be groundless, inefficacious, unprofitable or needless.
• He supported representative democracy, universal suffrage, secret ballot and annual parliaments as the means to make rulers’ interests coincide with the people’s; he proposed codification of law and the Panopticon prison.

3. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

Main works: On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1861, as a book 1863), The Subjection of Women (1869). Mill was raised as a Benthamite; after a mental crisis in his twenties he revised the theory.

Mill’s changes

1. Qualitative distinction. Pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity. Intellectual and moral pleasures are higher than bodily ones. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The judge of quality is the person who has experienced both.
2. Moral motive. Mill accepted that people can act from conscience and sympathy, not only self-interest; he added an internal sanction (conscience) to Bentham’s external ones.
3. Liberty. The harm principle: society may interfere with individual liberty only to prevent harm to others. Freedom of thought and discussion is essential to the discovery of truth and the development of individuality.
4. Representative government. He supported it as the best form, with proportional representation (to protect minorities) and plural votes for the educated, and warned against the “tyranny of the majority”.
5. Women’s rights. He argued for votes for women in Parliament and for legal equality of the sexes.
6. Social reform. In later life he accepted State action in education, factory regulation and land reform: a bridge from individualism to the welfare State.

4. Merits

• Practical reform. It led to reform of criminal law, prisons, poor law, public health and the franchise in nineteenth-century England.
• Rejection of fiction. It replaced the social contract and divine right with a testable standard.
• Democratic. Everybody counts for one; government must serve the many, not the few.
• Welfare orientation. The test of public happiness supports social legislation.
• Simple and secular. It gives legislators a clear, non-religious test of good law.

5. Limitations

1. Happiness cannot be measured. The felicific calculus is impossible in practice: pleasures of different people cannot be added on one scale.
2. Neglect of minorities. The greatest happiness of the greatest number can justify sacrificing the few. Rights act as limits that utility alone does not supply.
3. Pleasure is not the only motive. People act from duty, love, honour and principle (Carlyle called it a “pig philosophy”).
4. Mill’s revision is inconsistent. Once quality is admitted, pleasure is no longer the sole standard; something else decides which pleasure is higher.
5. Individualistic. It treats society as a sum of individuals and ignores the common good.
6. Weak ground of obligation. If each person calculates whether obedience pays, the duty to obey becomes uncertain.

How this is examined

January 2026 (100 marks) Q.6: “Explain the theory of utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. What are its merits and demerits?”; January 2026 (80 marks) Q.3(a): “Explain Jeremy Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism”; February 2025 Q.3(b): merits of utilitarianism or “J. S. Mill’s contribution”; August 2024: “Describe utilitarianism” and a note on Bentham. The Bentham–Mill table makes a strong close to any of these.