The Pursuit of Happiness: Jeremy Bentham, David Cameron and the Principle of Utility
Bentham w
Bentham's focus was Utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that revolves around the proposition that we all seek pleasure, and therefore pleasure is the commonly agreed good that we all seek; therefore we can distinguish moral acts from non-moral acts by the amount which they maximise pleasure. Or more simply, the good is that which produces the most pleasure.
Why is this relevant
His answer was what he called the Hedonic Calculus: a series of considerations that would enable us to quantify and thereby compare pleasure, despite its apparent intrinsically relative nature. The ins and outs of the calculus are beyond the remit of my trivial output, but in summary he asked us to consider the pleasure's intensity, duration, remoteness, fecundity (my favourite, incidentally) and other factors, in order to establish how we should esteem it.
It sounds great, and paying him his dues, it was a massive step in ethics; but the sticking point remains- how do we quantify what will always be an essentially interior experience? If I give 'eating a toffee apple' a 3 out of 10 on my pleasure scale, how does that compare to your three out of ten (which, for all I know, might involve launching a fire extinguisher off the top of Millbank Tower)? It may be easy to compare massively dissimilar pleasures - I can say that winning the lottery is 'greater' than eating an ice cream- but beyond that, we are back in the realms of licking our fingers, holding them into the wind, and saying 'About that much'.
I understand that several million pounds are to be invested in DavCam's 'Happy-o-meter' (sorry, Wellbeing Index). And I think we can all congratulate him on money well spent in these times when a man can barely employ a retinue of photographers and stylists at public expense without enduring the brickbats of an ungrateful electorate which just doesn't understand how important it is for a millionaire to have the right width of pinstripe when he meets the Japanese Ambassador.
It's not that I don't applaud any attempt to dislocate the contemporary dogma that money and happiness are inextricably, necessarily connected- Siddharta Gottama had that much right- but this predictably Pound stretcher way of sticking a pin into how we're all feeling so that we can then graph, track, crunch and pontificate the 'results' is so philosophically flawed as to produce little ripples of nausea in my duodenum just thinking about it. What kind of data does this scheme seek to produce? What correlation can be drawn between patterns (or lack thereof) that might ensue? If numbers fall, does that suggest that we're all less happy? How can an electorate be relied upon to remember how happy they were feeling five years previously, or will they be forced to rely on an imagined perception of how happy they were? Of course they will. Of course they will.
'On a scale of one to ten, how deep is your love?' Or perhaps even better, 'On a scale of one to ten, how much sunlight can be extracted from a cucumber?'
On a scale of one to ten, my visit to Transcribe Bentham was a 7; piling into Waterstone's basement Costa afterwards and hiding from the cold with a Hot Chocolate drove that up to a 7.5. David Cameron's latest agenda grabbing piece of attention whoring?
Well, I'll give that a 2. Your thoughts, Cheryl?
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