II.

Work of Paley and Bentham

Utilitarianism was enunciated in its most characteristic form by the British theologian William Paley in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and by the British jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). In Paley’s work, utilitarianism is combined with both individualistic hedonism and theological authoritarianism, as illustrated in his definition of virtue as the “doing [of] good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness”. Bentham clarified the utilitarian theory and used it as the foundation, not merely of a moral system, but also of legal and political reforms. He maintained the necessity of sacrificing smaller interests to greater interests, and so posited as the ethical goal of human society the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Bentham sought to illustrate the doctrine of utilitarianism by comparing it to the doctrine of asceticism on the one hand and to the theory of sympathy and antipathy on the other. Asceticism he defined as the principle that pleasure should be forfeited, and pain incurred, without expectation of any recompense. The theory of sympathy and antipathy he held to be based on the “principle which approves or disapproves of certain actions, not on account of their tending to augment the happiness, nor yet on account of their tending to diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question, but merely because a man finds himself disposed to approve or disapprove of them: holding up that approbation or disapprobation as a sufficient reason for itself, and disclaiming the necessity of looking out for any extrinsic ground”. In his exposition of the theory of utilitarianism, Bentham sought to devise a scale of pleasures and pains, rating them in terms of their intensity, purity, duration, propinquity or remoteness, certainty, fruitfulness, and the extent to which pleasure and pain are shared among fewer or more people.