Utility, Principle of

The principle of utility, also known as the greatest happiness principle, is associated with Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the first of the great 19th-century utilitarians. As Bentham and later John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) expounded it, the principle approves or disapproves of actions based on whether they increase or decrease the happiness of everyone affected by the action. The principle of utility constitutes the standard of right and wrong, in terms of which human conduct is to be assessed.

Bentham identified happiness and unhappiness with pleasure and pain, affirming the hedonistic doctrine that pleasure is the only thing that is good in itself. He cataloged different pleasures and pains and described their various sources and the factors influencing our experience of them. The value of any given pleasure or pain is a function of its intensity, duration, certainty, and “propinquity” (or nearness). We must also consider the likelihood that the pleasure (or pain) will be followed by other pleasures (or pains) of the same kind (its “fecundity”) and not followed by sensations of the opposite kind (its “purity”). In this way, we can estimate, first, the goodness or badness of an action for any given individual and, then, by taking into account all individuals affected by the action, its overall goodness or badness.

Critics of Bentham have long characterized his theory as crude and lampooned the whole idea of a hedonic calculus by means of which the pleasures and pains of individuals are to be weighed and summed. Bentham, however, was concerned not only with sensory or bodily pleasures and pains, but also with various other forms of satisfaction, enjoyment, and fulfillment—for example, the pleasures of memory or religion and the pain of a bad reputation or of knowing that another is suffering. Still, Bentham held that all pleasures are intrinsically equal, famously remarking that if the amount of pleasure is the same, then the game of “pushpin” is of equal value with poetry. Bentham certainly thought that pleasures involving intellect, imagination, and deep human emotion are, as a rule, superior to simple physical pleasures. But this is because higher pleasures tend to be more pleasurable than lower ones.

Like Bentham, Mill associated happiness with pleasure, but he thought that one could compare and rank pleasures, not just quantitatively but also qualitatively. In other words, some kinds of pleasure are better than others, not because they are more pleasurable, but because they represent pleasures of a higher or more valuable kind. Thus, even though two activities involve equal amounts of pleasure as measured by Bentham, one of the pleasures might be qualitatively [Page 2171]superior to the other. We know that one pleasure is qualitatively higher than another, Mill thought, if, putting aside the issue of intensity and duration, those who have experienced both judge the one to be preferable in kind to the other.