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The felicific calculus is an algorithm formulated by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) for calculating the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to induce. Bentham, an ethical hedonist , believed the moral rightness or wrongness of an action to be a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it ...
The Introduction also contains Bentham's famous discussion of the "felicific (or hedonic) calculus"—his proposed method for determining which future course of action would produce the greatest net amount of pleasure over pain. According to Bentham, seven factors should be considered in weighing the value of a pleasure or pain: its intensity ...
Bentham's utilitarianism is a hedonistic theory and starts with the premise that people are in their very nature hedonistic. This means that he believed people would actively seek out pleasure and avoid pain, if given the opportunity. Critics sometimes cite such prohibitions on leisure activities as a problem for act utilitarianism.
He introduced the idea of the hedonic calculus to assess the value of an action based on the pleasurable and painful experiences it causes, relying on factors such as intensity and duration. [85] His student John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) [ 86 ] feared that Bentham's quantitative focus on intensity and duration would lead to an overemphasis on ...
As the hedonic calculus shows "expectation utilities" to be much higher than natural ones, it follows that Bentham does not favour the sacrifice of a few to the benefit of the many. Law professor Alan Dershowitz has quoted Bentham to argue that torture should sometimes be permitted.
The following articles contain lists of problems: List of philosophical problems; List of undecidable problems; Lists of unsolved problems; List of NP-complete problems;
Epicurus (341–270 BCE), in his philosophy of Epicureanism, posits an ethics of pleasure based on the study of nature, and teaches that we should carry out our choices and rejections based on hedonic calculus. Epicureanism also teaches a curriculum of control of desires based on the hierarchy of desires: natural and necessary desires are top ...
For functions in certain classes, the problem of determining: whether two functions are equal, known as the zero-equivalence problem (see Richardson's theorem); [5] the zeroes of a function; whether the indefinite integral of a function is also in the class. [6] Of course, some subclasses of these problems are decidable.
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