The Principle of Utility

Nature, Bentham declares, has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters — pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. Utility is the property of any object whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness — or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness — to the party whose interest is considered.

The community is a fictitious body composed of its individual members. The interest of the community is the sum of the interests of its members. A measure of government conforms to the principle of utility when its tendency to augment the happiness of the community is greater than its tendency to diminish it. There is no appeal beyond this calculation: custom, piety, and tradition possess no independent moral weight.

The principle of utility exposes every alternative moral foundation — natural law, moral sense, the law of reason — as either reducible to utility or devoid of determinate meaning. When legislators invoke vague appeals to nature or right reason, they dress up personal sentiment in borrowed authority. The principle of utility strips away this disguise and demands that every claim to moral authority justify itself by its actual effects on human welfare.

The principle of utility is set out in Chapters I–IV of the Introduction; the critical survey of rival moral principles occupies Chapter II.