ABSTRACT
CHAPTER IV BENTHAM'S THEORY OF UTILITY
"This fundamental axiom, it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong."1
A Fragment on Government
BENTHAM'S THEORY OF UTILITY
Happiness is the sun around which Bentham's other ideas, like planets, travel. "Happiness," he states, in an early, unpublished, manuscript (unearthed here for the first time), "is the end of every human action, of every human thought. How can it, or why ought it to be otherwise? This is for those to say, who sometime seem to struggle to dispute it."2In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, he writes (famously):
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pa in and p le a su r e . It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do....They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.3
