… and the Pursuit of Happiness - Institute of Economic Affairs

… and the pursuit of happiness
happiness is not within the government’s remit
The first doubt posed by these words, indeed by the very title
of Bentham’s essay, is the implied pole-vault from natural inclinations
to moral obligation. If men necessarily act at the behest of
nature, as prompted by their feelings of pain and pleasure, what
is the point of writing pages and pages to tell them what their
duties are? Preaching would seem to be unnecessary if men obey
their sovereign masters, come what may. If, on the other hand,
the interests of individual men and women are not in natural
harmony, why should it be the duty of anybody to refrain from
uncooperative behaviour or stop others from so behaving? Publicspirited
utilitarianism would, at first sight, be a contradiction in
terms.
All would be well if the spontaneous working of the market
naturally brought about a harmony of interests. But Bentham did
not believe the market would of itself bring about this harmony. 2
Public intervention was indispensable. Hence he was led to frame
a rule to divide good public policy from bad. ‘The interest of the
community then is, what? – the sum of the interests of the several
members who compose it.’
Bentham chose summing over individuals each counting
for one, for he discounted the greater sensitivity of different
individuals to pain or pleasure. Hence: ‘[a] measure of government
(which is but a particular kind of action, performed by a
par ticular person or persons) may be said to be conformable
to or dictated by the principle of utility, when … the tendency
which it has to augment the happiness of the community is
2 ‘I have not, I never had, nor ever shall have, any horror, sentimental or anarchical,
of the hand of government. I leave it to Adam Smith, and the champions of
the rights of man … to talk of invasions of natural liberty, and to give as a special
argument against this or that law, an argument the effect of which would be to
put a negative upon all laws’ (Bentham, 1954: 257–8).
greater than any which it has to diminish it’. 3
This really was no help in answering the question: why
should anyone sacrifice her or his interest for the sake of the
common weal? Why indeed should people in power care for the
interest of the public rather than their own? Why should the
losers in the social welfare calculus be reconciled to the need
to attain social harmony at their cost? There could only be one
answer – to wit, that on the basis of rational long-term calculation
such a sacrifice of short-term interests could be shown to
be for the good of all. But this would have to be on condition
that other people would also be rational in this manner – or be
made to behave rationally. An enlightened despot was needed
to enforce ‘rational’ behaviour on recalcitrants or, if there was
no despot of this kind, a body of citizens organised by a democratic
constitution. 4
The point here is that the general acquiescence to the rule
of an enlightened utilitarian despot or the agreement on a utilitarian
constitution implies that a society can be organised around
the single overarching principle of the maximisation of the sum
of happiness. The logical difficulty of moving from is to ought
disappears when there are no ‘oughts’ to choose from, only one
3 By this, of course, he meant the sum of pleasure or happiness net of pain. There
could be other public rules starting from the same pain–pleasure psychology of
individuals, such as Rawls’s second principle of Justice which favours the poor.
4 Bentham’s first efforts were indeed directed at convincing the powerful, e.g.
Catherine of Russia. It was only around 1809, when he was in his sixties, that
Bentham began to see that as a practical theory his utilitarianism was incomplete
unless embedded in radical democracy. He thus started a fruitful line of research
that culminated in his unfinished Constitutional Code (1830). He there drew up interesting
institutional devices to align the interests of governors and governed, a
clear anticipation of public choice theory and the law and economics movement:
Dinwiddy (2003 [1975]).
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