Veritas et Sapientia-The Consequences of The Enlightenments, Darkening Ideas

Mandeville, LA – Traditional morality was on his [Bentham’s] view pervaded by superstition; it was not until we under- stood that the only motives for human action are attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain that we can state the principles of an enlightened morality, for which the prospect of the maximum pleasure and absence of pain pro- vides a telos. ‘Pleasure’ Bentham took to be the name of a type of sensation, just as ‘pain’ is; and sensations of both types vary only in number, intensity and duration. It is worth taking note of this false view of pleasure if only because Bentham’s immediate utilitarian successors were so apt to see this as the major source of the difficulties that arise for utilitarianism. They therefore did not always attend adequately to the way in which he makes the transition from his psychological thesis that mankind has two and only two motives to his moral thesis that out of the alternative actions or pol- icies between which we have to choose at any given moment we ought always to perform that action or implement that policy which will produce as its consequences the greatest happiness-that is, the greatest possible quantity of pleasure with the smallest possible quantity of pain-of the greatest number. It is of course on Bentham’s view the enlightened, edu- cated mind and it alone which will recognize that the pursuit of my hap- piness as dictated by my pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding psychology and the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number do in point of fact coincide. But it is the aim of the social reformer to reconstruct the social order so that even the unenlightened pursuit of happiness will produce the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number; from this aim spring Bentham’s numerous proposed legal and penal re- forms. Note that the social reformer could not himself find a motive for setting himself to those particular tasks rather than others, were it not the case that an enlightened regard for one’s own happiness here and now even in as unreformed a legal and social order as late-eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century England will lead inexorably to the pursuit of the great- est happiness. This is an empirical claim. Is it true?

It took a nervous breakdown by John Stuart Mill, at once the first Benthamite child and clearly the most distinguished mind and character ever to embrace Benthamism, to make it clear to Mill himself at least that it is not. – Alisdair Macintyre-After Virtue

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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