Bentham and the Implausibility of Assigning Cardinal Values to Psychological States

A brief analysis

Photo by Alex Chambers on Unsplash

Utilitarianism is a moral theory which posits that an action is morally right only if it produces the most utility (i.e. pleasure or happiness) for the greatest number of individuals. Unlike other utilitarians at the time, Jeremy Bentham strove to devise an exact method to calculate utility and turn economics, legislation and ethics into genuine sciences. He believed that the morally right act is the one act among all those the individual can choose from, which will, or is likely to, lead to the greatest amount of pleasure overall in the world. Here, pleasure and pain are the foundation of the standard of right and wrong.

So the well-being of a community can simply be considered the sum of the pleasures of all the individuals who make up said community. The main issue here is the calculation of the interpersonal utility comparison by means of cardinal values rather than ordinal measurements. Bentham’s approach meant adding up all the potential pleasures that may result from an action and then subtracting the potential pains from the total score. Bentham assumed that intensity would vary from zero to infinity although psychological data indicates that there is an upper threshold of pleasure, so we generally use an ordinal relation from 0 to 10.

Specifically, Bentham used six variable for what is known as his felicific calculus, namely:

• Intensity (How intense is the pleasure or pain?)
• Duration (How long does the pleasure or pain last?)
• Certainty (How likely is it that the pleasure or pain will occur?)
• Propinquity (How far off in the future is the pleasure or pain?)
• Fecundity (How likely is it that the pleasure will lead to other pleasures?)
• Purity (How likely is it that the pain will lead to other pains?)
• Extent (How many people are affected by the pleasure?)

Cardinal numbers do indicate how much of an item or property are present, but they do not indicate any order of preference as ordinal numbers would do. So Bentham’s approach is somewhat like comparing apples with pears because simply assigning a cardinal value to a choice doesn’t make clear which possible choice we prefer, just how much we like each one on its own. Consequently, this doesn’t necessarily help us make decision.

Further, we need to consider not only ordinal properties but the relationship between them. To do this, we need objective grounds for the comparisons of different choices. Naturally, this needs to involve our personal preferences and circumstances. For example, if we have a choice of eating Mexican, Italian or Chinese food for dinner, it is not sufficient to say we assign Mexican food a pleasure score of 5, Italian one of 3 and Chinese one of 9, because this still does not tell us which one we should choose. The scores alone are almost meaningless when not in relation to one another, on one hand, and considered in consideration of our preferences at the time of making the choice, on the other.

Although I generally might prefer Chinese food to Mexian food, today I might want to order Chinese because I might have only eaten Chinese yesterday and don’t want it again, or I might have a visitor who prefers Mexican, so the option with the maximal utility today and for this group of individuals as a whole would be choosing Chinese.

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash

Bentham’s use of ordinal numbers to calculate pleasure is also problematic when the choices we are faced with involve completely different things that cannot usually be compared, i.e. going out for dinner with a sibling or visiting a friend in hospital. Both choices involve psychological states that are very difficult to quantify in terms of cardinal numbers. We have no practical way of determining exactly what the amount of enjoyment is that someone would get from a given act, and there’s no way to determine how much enjoyment another individual would get, nor is there a practical, foolproof way to compare these two amounts.

Over time, we have therefore seen a transition from cardinal to ordinal utility and today both are considered complementary rather than substitutes, successive rather than alternative.

Sources:
Archie, L. (n.d.). Philosophy 302: Ethics. The Hedonistic Calculus. 
Baujard, A. (2010) Collective interest versus individual interest in Bentham’s felicific calculus. Questioning welfarism and fairness. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 17(4), 607–634.
Driver, J. (2014). The History of Utilitarianism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 
Klocksiem, J.A. (2009). On the Measurability of Pleasure and Pain [Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst].
Peart, S., & Levy, D. (2005). From Cardinal to Ordinal Utility Theory: Darwin and Differential Capacity for Happiness. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 64(3), 851–879.
Mitchell, W.C. (1918). Bentham’s Felicific Calculu. Political Science Quarterly, 33(2, 161–183.