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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 best action is the one that procures the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers, and the worst is the one that causes the most misery. In the first three editions of the book, Hutcheson included various mathematical algorithms "to compute the Morality of any Actions." In doing so, he echoed the later-proposed hedonic calculus of Bentham.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is a book by the English philosopher and legal theorist Jeremy Bentham "originally printed in 1780, and first published in 1789." [1] Bentham's "most important theoretical work," [2] it is where Bentham develops his theory of utilitarianism and is the first major book on the topic.
A formal philosophy of ethical calculus is a development in the study of ethics, combining elements of natural selection, self-organizing systems, emergence, and algorithm theory. According to ethical calculus, the most ethical course of action in a situation is an absolute, but rather than being based on a static ethical code, the ethical code ...
Act utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics that states that a person's act is morally right if and only if it produces the best possible results in that specific situation. Classical utilitarians, including Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, define happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain. [1]
Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham discussed some of the ways moral investigations are a science. [9] He criticized deontological ethics for failing to recognize that it needed to make the same presumptions as his science of morality to really work – whilst pursuing rules that were to be obeyed in every situation (something that worried Bentham).
Since happiness is the only intrinsic good, and since more happiness is preferable to less, the goal of the ethical life is to maximize happiness. This is what Bentham and Mill call "the principle of utility" or "the greatest-happiness principle." Both Bentham and Mill thus endorse "classical" or "hedonistic" forms of utilitarianism. [4]
The Collected Works is intended to supersede the 11-volume The Works of Jeremy Bentham (1838–1843), edited by Bentham's friend and literary executor, John Bowring, which is now considered to be flawed in many points of detail, and which omits Bentham's writings on religion; and also the 3-volume Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings (1952–54) edited by Werner Stark, which has likewise been ...