Essay About British Thinker Jeremy Bentham And Human Actions

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1. Philosophical ethics
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that explores the nature of moral
virtue and evaluates human actions. Philosophical ethics differs
from legal, religious, cultural and personal approaches to ethics by
seeking to conduct the study of morality through a rational, secular
outlook that is grounded in notions of human happiness or
well-being. A major advantage of a philosophical approach to ethics
is that it avoids the authoritarian basis of law and religion as
well as the subjectivity, arbitrariness and irrationality that may
characterize cultural or totally personal moral views. (Although
some thinkers differentiate between “ethics,” “morals,” “ethical”
and “moral,” this discussion will use them synonymously.)
Generally speaking, there are two traditions in modern philosophical
ethics regarding how to determine the ethical character of actions.
One argues that actions have no intrinsic ethical character but
acquire their moral status from the consequences that flow from
them. The other tradition claims that actions are inherently right
or wrong, e.g, lying, cheating, stealing. The former is called a
teleological approach to ethics, the latter, deontological.
2. Teleological (results oriented) ethics
A teleological outlook is particularly appealing because it takes a
pragmatic, common-sense, even unphilosophical approach to ethics.
Simply put, teleological thinkers claim that the moral character of
actions depends on the simple, practical matter of the extent to
which actions actually help or hurt people. Actions that produce
more benefits than harm are “right”; those that dont are “wrong.”
This outlook is best represented by Utilitarianism, a school of
thought originated by the British thinker Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
and refined by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).
a. Jeremy Bentham: quantifying pleasure
Strongly influenced by the empiricism of David Hume, Jeremy Bentham
aimed at developing a “moral science” that was more rational,
objective and quantitative than other ways of separating right from
wrong. Bentham particularly argued against the ascetic religious
traditions of eighteenth-century England that held up suffering and
sacrifice as models of virtue.
Bentham begins with what he takes as the self-evident observations
that 1) pleasure and pain govern our lives, and 2) the former makes
life happier, while the latter makes it worse. These two concepts
anchor Benthams ethical outlook. “Nature has placed mankind,” he
writes in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation, “under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain
and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do,
as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the
standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and
effects, are fastened to their throne.”
From this insight about pleasure and pain, Bentham develops as his
ethical touchstone the notion of “utility”: “that property in any
object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure,
good or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same
thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the
happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose
interest is considered: if that party be the community in general,
then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual,
then the happiness of that individual.” Utilitarianism therefore
contends that something is morally good to the extent that it
produces a greater balance of pleasure over pain for the largest
number of people involved, or, as it is popularly described, “the
greatest good of the greatest number.” Pleasure is Benthams
ultimate standard of morality because “the greatest happiness of all