How economists bastardized Benthamite utilitarianism

Abstract

A. BENTHAMITE UTILITARIANISM Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an English philosopher, entered Oxford University at the ripe age 12 and graduated from there at age 15. He was, like, the perfect geek, probably never once engaging in binge-drinking or stuff like that. He and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) are widely regarded as the founders of the controversial philosophical school called Consequentialists. Consequentialists hold that the merits or demerits of human acts – business decisions, legislation, crime and punishment – should be judged strictly by the pleasure or pain, or both, that these acts visit on human beings (or animals), rather than by some other intrinsic merit or demerit of those acts (e.g., some religious stricture). Bentham called the attempt to value the total consequences of pleasure and pain of an act as the felicific calculus. You have had occasion to engage in felicific calculus on some your homework assignments, and some day you will hire economists who will perform it for you. You used it in what we have called " welfare analysis, " when we added up triangles under demand curves and above supply curves to calculate what we have called " social surplus. " In fashioning their normative dicta, economists seek to maximize this mysterious something called " social surplus. " Jeremy Bentham