Jeremy Bentham and the Dumbing Down of Happiness
Cover art by Diana Mariño
TL;DR: The first of four posts on happiness. Or rather, two philosophers’ takes on the subject: Jeremy Bentham’s “utilitarianism,” which sought the greatest happiness for the greatest number; and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, which saw happiness as a “virtuous activity of the soul.”
Humans and Happiness
When the 18th century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham chose “happiness” as the guide light for his famous doctrine of “utilitarianism,” he waded into a vital stream. For just as we are born drawing breath, so too are we drawn inexorably to happiness, as each of us defines it.
While our common sense is enough to makes this clear, the primacy of happiness is equally apparent in perusing our literary and religious patrimony.
Our oldest recorded love story, that between Innana, the Sumerian goddess of love, and her husband, the shepherd Dumuzdi, along with other cuneiform tablet writing from Sumer and Babylonia, inscribed around the third millennia BCE, contain hymns of love and happiness. These ancient themes also dance joyfully throughout our sacred texts, and just as obviously remain essential to our modernity.
“May you be a reign which brings forth happy days! May you be a feast which brightens the countenance! May you be a shining mirror! "
A Song of Inana and Dumuzid, Sumerian Hymn
“He made glad their hearts, he made happy their mood.” Babylonian Psalm to Nineb.
“Shine this felicity on us, O Agni; may we attain to perfect understanding. All happiness be theirs who sing and praise thee.”
Hinduism, Rig-Veda, 7th Book, Hymn III.10.
“From joy are born all creatures. By joy they grow and to joy they return.”
Hinduism, Taittiriya Upanishad, III6.1
“Just as the great cloud
Moistens all the withered trees.
I cause everyone to be rid of suffering
And attain ease of heart,
Worldly happiness, and the joy of nirvana.”
Buddhism, Lotus Sutra, Chapter V “Herbs.”
The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives you the victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing, as on a day of festival.”
Judaism & Christianity, Zephania 3:17
“Clap your hands all peoples! Shout to God with loud songs of joy!”
Judaism & Christianity, Psalm 47:1
But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.”
Christianity, Luke 2:10
“The Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number”
Bentham’s contribution to this delightful lineage took the form of “utilitarianism,” a philosophy which advocates for “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” He published the idea in 1781 in a dryly-named book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. The book exhorts lawmakers to pass laws which conform to this principal of utilitarianism.
At that time, Jeremy Bentham obviously could have had no idea that his Principles of Morals and Legislation would come to have an enormous influence, just under a century later, on a method of microeconomic analysis called “marginalism.”
Surely, however, he must have known that parts his book were no more than thinly whittled versions of another of humanity’s touchstone books on the subject of happiness: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.
So in this post and the next three, we will tackle two tasks. First, we’ll take a side-by-side look at Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. We shall see that both works lie on the same tree of knowledge, in that they both give primacy to human happiness and agree that there is a central role to be played by pleasure and pain in its attainment.
But while Aristotle placed his philosophy of happiness in the context of a vivid human vitality, we’ll see that Bentham trimmed the old master’s philosophical wisdom down to mere slogans. So while Bentham’s utilitarianism can clearly trace its deeper roots back to Aristotle’s intricate system of ethics (as well as to other Enlightenment era ideas we’ll take a look at later), it also ignores much of this elite DNA.
Utilitarianism thus emerged into the world as a shorn idea. If a bird, it would have been born with clipped wings; if royalty, its blue blood would have gone unacknowledged.
In the second task, a bit further on, we’ll tell how Bentham’s shorn ethical construct was the one that three pioneers of modern microeconomic theory -- the Englishman William Stanley Jevons, the Frenchman Leon Walras, and the Austrian Carl Menger, collectively known as “the Marginalists,” for their development of marginal utility theory in the 1870s -- hungrily adopted and worked into their economic models.
That they did so has had fateful consequences ever since. For if Bentham’s utilitarian proposal was a reductive act to begin with, then the way utilitarianism was subsequently integrated into microeconomic theory is an example of ”slash and burn,” versus its origins in Aristotelian ethics, as subsequent generations of economists, using the carving knife of mathematics, hatcheted down Aristotle’s foundational ideas about ethics even further, a redwood become a splinter.
Bentham and Aristotle on the Centrality of Happiness
Let’s begin then with several quotes from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics on happiness.1
“…what is the highest of all practical goods?.... ‘It is happiness…’.” (Arist. EN I.4, 1095a18, trans: Thomson); Happiness is “the final end,” “the supreme good,” (EN I.7, 1097a28); “something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.” (EN I.7, 1097b20-22); “Happiness is the best, the finest, the most pleasurable thing of all,” (EN I.8, 1099a24); “…happiness is one of those things that are precious and perfect…..It is a first principle, since everything else that any of us do, we do for its sake. (EN I.8, 1102a3)”
And here is Jeremy Bentham on the same theme. The objective of the principle of utility, he says is:
“…to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law“ ; “…to augment….the happiness of the party in question.”; “…to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good or happiness.”
When applied to the collective, Bentham writes, an action conforms to the principle of utility when “it has the tendency….to augment the happiness of the community.”
Similarly, both Aristotle and Bentham consider that the obtainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are intertwined with happiness. Recall that Bentham opened his book with one of the most famous lines in social science: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two Sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”
He repeats this assessment throughout his Principles of Morals and Legislation:
“A thing is said to be of the interest of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures or…to diminish the sum total of his pains.”; “What happiness consists of we have already seen: enjoyment of pleasures, security from pains.”
In taking this view, Bentham to some degree aligned himself with his intellectual benefactor, Aristotle: “Pleasure,” the master Aristotle writes, “is very closely bound up with human nature;…..pleasure and pain permeate the whole of life, and have a powerful influence upon….the happy life.” (EN X.1, 1172a20-25).
But where they separate radically is in their consideration of more contemplative questions: What is the deeper meaning of happiness? And what is the role of pleasure and pain in achieving that depth?
On these deeper matters Bentham was essentially silent.
Aristotle, in contrast, contemplated them with relish.
We’ll dig deeper in our next three posts.
Further Reading:
Jeremy Bentham’s, An Introduction to the Principles of Moral and Legislation,” is widely available on open sources, such as at the Internet Archive.
Ask we explained in an earlier post, we’ve decided to quote Aristotle throughout Awakened Economics using “Bekker numbers.” August Immanuel Bekker was a German philologist who edited the Prussian Academy of Sciences edition of the Corpus Aristotelicum in the 1830s, and lent his name to the numbering system he established for its eleven volumes. “EN” refers to the Latin name of the work being cited (Ēthika Nikomacheia in this case), followed by the book and chapter, and then line numbers. Finally, the author of the translation used; in our case JAK Thomson’s.