Bentham Quote on the Greatest Number: The Foundation of Utility

Quote

"It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." — Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (1776)

Author

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was the founder of utilitarianism, the English philosopher and reformer who made the greatest happiness the measure of the right. The formula is the founding principle of the theory.

Source

The quotation is from the Preface of Bentham's A Fragment on Government (1776). It is the first statement of the formula that became the slogan of the utilitarian movement.

Context

The formula belongs to the founding of utilitarianism. Bentham held that "nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure," and that the rightness of the action is measured by its tendency to produce happiness. The formula — the greatest happiness of the greatest number — states the measure: the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of those affected. The formula is the ancestor of the felicific calculus — the calculation of the pleasures and the pains, measured by their intensity, duration, certainty, and extent — and it is the foundation of the modern utilitarianism that Mill developed and defended.

Meaning

The quotation states the foundation of utilitarianism with complete economy. "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number" — the standard: the happiness counted is the happiness of all those affected, and the greatest number is the measure — the happiness of the many outweighs the happiness of the few. "That is the measure of right and wrong" — the application: the measure is the criterion of the moral quality — the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness, and the wrong action is the one that produces the less. The formula is the modern form of the consequentialism: the moral quality of the action is determined by its consequences, and the consequences are measured by the happiness. The formula grounds the whole of the utilitarian tradition — the reform of the law, the economics, the applied ethics — and it remains the most influential standard in the history of the ethics of the consequences.

Related Wisdom

The quotation belongs to the utilitarian ethics of happiness and the philosophy of consequentialism. Its formula of the greatest number connects to the application of utilitarianism and to the wider wisdom tradition's teaching on the measure of the action by its consequences for all.