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.