Bentham's felicific calculus

Abstract

Social science continues to grapple with the “intellectualist fallacy”—the assumption that human behavior is fundamentally governed by rational calculation. Jeremy Bentham provides the most rigorous exposition of this delusion through his attempt to establish a “felicific calculus” modeled on Newtonian mechanics. Unlike his contemporaries, Bentham sought to quantify utility by measuring pleasures and pains across seven dimensions, including intensity, duration, and certainty. This methodology necessitates several significant postulates: that the happiness of different individuals is addible, that subjective intensity is numerically representable, and that money can serve as a common denominator for qualitatively diverse sensations. These assumptions face inherent contradictions, particularly regarding the diminishing marginal utility of wealth and the subjective nature of sensibility. Underpinning this calculus is a functional psychology that views human nature as hedonistic, essentially passive, and purely responsive to environmental pleasure-pain associations. Within this framework, social conflict and “bad” motives are redefined as defects of understanding, making education and the legislative engineering of an artificial identity of interests the primary drivers of reform. Ultimately, the Benthamic system functioned as a framework for classification rather than precise calculation, yet it replaced vague normative assertions with a structured method for evaluating the social consequences of institutional arrangements. – AI-generated abstract.