The Return

After a long hiatus, I am returning to learning and mental exploration. My quest is opposed by a new video game, but reading this afternoon felt great, so hopefully productivity wins out.

I return where I left off to Bentham, and am also beginning to learn Italian. I needed a change of pace, and Italian just might be it. I am also trying to be more vigilant with my educational podcasts, and even add a couple new ones if I find anything. I have little to do for the next two months, so I might as well make them count.

Bentham and Utilitarianism 3

In Chapter Five, Bentham enumerates the types of simple pleasure and pains, roughly 15 types of each. I like his list, which for example, includes the pleasures of piety and of benevolence, and the pains of malevolence. However, the omission of pleasures of the intellect, and pleasures of character are jarring. Pleasures of the intellect, I take to mean, include learning more about the world and how it operates; being able to accurately identify things external to us, which is, in a sense, exploration. Pleasures of character would include the cultivation of virtue and personal ethics. For that matter, morality and ethics were nowhere to be found in Bentham's list. There is no indication that they were subsumed under pleasures/pains of religion (piety), either.

Chapter Six is a list of the various extenuating circumstances that alter a person's sensitivity to the causes of pleasure and pain. I realize that Bentham disclaimed the chapter in an endnote, declaring that to undertake such a pursuit in its entirety would take too much time and effort. But what he does write does not even approach the truth. For instance, he declares that poor health and physical deformities make a person less sensitive to the causes of pleasure, and more sensitive to the causes of pain. In my experience, this is completely opposite the truth. A man in a hospital will often be made happy by causes that would ordinarily be lost on him. And further pains often have little effect on such a man - perhaps his tolerance for pain is 'saturated'. I do not claim to have undertaken similar study on the matter, but Bentham makes a number of disagreeable assertions in what I have read so far of this chapter.

Bentham and Utilitarianism 2

In Chapter Two, Bentham states that the only two groups that oppose the principle of utility are the religionists and the philosophers. By religionists he, I assume, mainly signifies observant Christians, though any religious person would fall under this label. Devout people put service to a deity above bodily pleasure, and hence do not subscribe to Bentham's dichotomous principle of utility. The philosophers that Bentham opposes are the 'ascetics', under which he claims fall the Stoics.

Well, this is another fault of Bentham's limited principle of utility. Stoics pursue virtue, not pleasure. By simply redrawing the lines of the principle of the utility, Stoics are as utilitarian as can be. Well, maybe not as mathematical in their reasoning, but it fits the general mold. This goes the show my early argument, in the last post, that the principle of utility devolves into a tautology if Bentham allows it to encompass any possible criticism. If criticisms are allowed, well then, the principle is wrong. Surely as it is written by him, and also as is written by J.S. Mill. Some things, as Christians and Stoics believe, can not be boiled down to fit a mathematical argument.

This is a perplexing discrepancy in Bentham's reasoning. Modern American and, even moreso, Western European societies are all but secular. A modern moralist could be forgiven for ignoring the influence of religion on the decisions made by individuals, at least on the macro scale. But in Victorian England, or even before, at the time of the American Revolution, religion was as important as ever. I cannot fathom how Bentham could have dared to assume British subjects so secular as to adopt his principle of utilitarian calculus, based on pleasure and pain.

Bentham and Utilitarianism 1

After a short hiatus, philosophical reflections are back. Though they will be interrupted again soon as I travel to Nicaragua on vacation.

I have begun reading An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation by Jeremy Bentham. I just finished Mill's On Liberty, so I suppose this is necessary required reading. The first question arises in the introduction, not even written by Bentham. Bentham is summarized as arguing that all humans live to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Well, I object, though perhaps only on the ground of semantics. To be honest, I don't yet know what Bentham truly means by this. If he means that humans want only pleasure in the modern sense of the word, and do not care for the greater part of what forms eudaimonia, then of course I object. Ask any parent - who would willingly take on so much grief and pain and toil if it were not for a much greater, higher happiness. A happiness that I'm not sure you can call pleasure, but that is certainly desirable. I hope this is not what Bentham truly intends to say, and that it is just a foible on the part of the introduction's author.

The preface is written in the third person, but rather awkwardly and with the constant knowledge that the subject is also the other. This makes the preface fairly annoying to read, constantly jolting the reader from his rhythm to confusion. Still more readable than Hobbes though.

Chapter One kicks off with a few definitions. Sadly, Bentham does restrict his principle of utility to pure pleasure and pain, as I objected to above. It seems he added to his principle in an endnote after the work was written to align his utilitarianism more with what would become John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism - taking into account virtue, future benefit, and self-fulfillment. I am not sure, however, it will be as easy as adding endnotes to reconcile the rest of his work with this new viewpoint. My beliefs, of course, do not agree with Bentham's primitive view of utility. Maximizing good, or pleasure, is only good in the sense that we do everything we can to pamper our pets. Most people require governments to protect their pursuit of liberty and happiness so they can lead uncomplicated lives and make incremental progress towards the Ubermensch. But ask Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, and he will tell you that virtue does require a just bed to sleep in.

The second disagreeable portion of Bentham first chapter is his preemptive defense against any argument. He claims that any criticism of his principle of utility merely alters the original parameters - what is right and what is not - but does not address the form of the argument. I think this ends up making his argument pedantic and redundant. He posits that the action which brings about the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest amount of people is the right action. If he qualifies that view, with protections for the minority or restricting certain actions, then his argument becomes no better than 'the action which is right, is the right action'. I was dismayed to see this nonsensical argument appear towards the end of the chapter.