In Chapter IV, pain and pleasure are put into measure. While this might sound absurd, everyone does try to justify their actions to some extent. Of course, morality hasn’t entered the debate because in utilitarianism morals are ground up into this: what’s moral for you to feel pleasure is moral. In other cases, it’s just what you want to do, because, at the end of the day pleasure makes you feel good. In some cases, it’s debating whether the pain we might cause others outweighs the pleasure we might get from doing something. Possible, but one does have to acknowledge that pleasure and/or the absence of pain is a driving factor in every decision we make. If every action’s driving factor was pleasure and/or the absence of pain, surely the world would not be a world made up of societies but rather of uniform selfish individualists and nothing good would come of it. If we are to take that statement at face value, it sounds absurd. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.’ It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do.… By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. ![]() ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. The first thing that you’ll see when you read Bentham’s work is a principle of utility that states – ![]() To summarize, it values utility as its premium currency. ![]() People in power’s way of thinking deems that what’s good for two (or more) of you is good, even if it means it’s not that good for the individual. Individual thinking deems that what’s good for you is good. Or, when social, economic, and political decisions were made they were not done to better reputation or the status of a country but rather done to better society s a whole. Suppose everything everybody did was done in an attempt to maximize their happiness. “It is truly a whimsical supposition that, if mankind were agreed in considering utility to be the test of morality, they would remain without any agreement as to what is useful and would take no measures for having their notions on the subject taught to the young, and enforced by law and opinion… to consider the rules of morality as improvable, is one thing to pass over the intermediate generalizations entirely, and endeavor to test singular actions directly by the first principle, is another.”
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