‘Sum up all the values of all the pleasures on the one side,’ Bentham advised, ‘and those of all the pains on the other. These ‘dimensions of value’ as Bentham calls them, are significant only because they indicate Bentham’s conviction that we are able to fix these dimensions quantitatively, add up the quantities, balance the totals against each other with more or less mathematical precision, and select the greater. In directing our conduct, we seek that pleasure which is most intent, of longest duration, most certain, nearer, and so forth. In a comment on the hedonistic calculus as conceived by Bentham Girvetz writes:Ī pleasure or pain varies in (1) intensity, (2) duration, (3) certainty, (4) propinquity when we take into account the other pleasures or pains that might result from the act or event which produced it, it varies in (5) fecundity and (6) purity and, when we take other persons into account, it varies in (7) extent. It has also infected our moral sense in a big way. Now, the hedonistic calculus has far-reaching significance for capitalist social relations, our conception of the nature of society as consisting solely of market relations, liberalism and certainly for economics.
It seems that the English were quite concerned with their hedonism and the notion that they should be individually in charge of it. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) came up with the bones of the same idea much earlier and others followed, e.g.
He’s the guy who formalized the calculus, also called the felicific calculus, but he wasn’t the first one to think along those lines.
0 kommentar(er)
