Utilitarianism is a fundamentally conservative philosophy and

epistemic foundation, and will always lead to the conclusion that

the status quo is ideal (whatever the status quo may be)" -To what
extent do you agree with this statement? Base your answer on our
discussions of the conservative utilitarian thinkers Bentham, Say
and Senior, as well as of the radical utilitarian thinker William
Thompson.

The most influential and decidedly conservative utilitarian thinkers like

Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Baptiste Say and Nassau Senior all presented a
common theme that utilitarianism provides the philosophical foundation for
the neoclassical utility theory of value and that the latter theory supports a
general view of the harmony of all interests. This intellectual tradition
represents the most elaborate and profound defense for, or ideology in
support of, the status quo of market capitalism.

Notably one of the five aspects of human behavior and self-perception under
capitalism is egoistic utilitarianism which basically refers to the assertion
that all human motives as stemming from the desire to achieve pleasure and
avoid pain. This formed the philosophical basis of the utility theory of value
and modern neoclassical economics. Utilitarianism received its most
distinctive classical formulation in the writings of Jeremy Bentham, an
English utilitarian philosopher and radical social reformer. In his Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) he formulated the principle
of utility which is all human activity springing from the desire to maximize
pleasure. To work out the overall tendency of an action, Bentham sketched
a felicific calculus, which takes into account the intensity, duration,
likelihood, extent, etc of pleasure and pains.

By reducing all human motives to a single principle, Bentham believed he

had found the key to the construction of a science of human welfare that
could be stated mathematically and might someday be worked out with
numerical exactitude one day.

Each of Benthams ideas led to him being an important precursor of the later
utility theorists. He also came very close to developing a theory of the
relationship between marginal utility and price. Bentham stated that the
exchange value of a commodity is determined by its marginal utility and
according to utility theory perspective; an increase in utility increases a
commoditys value and hence increases its owners wealth.
The development of his ideas also foreshadowed an important split in the
orthodox utility approach to economics. In the late 18th century, he was an
ardent spokesman for a laissez-faire policy believing that a free market
would allocate resources and commodities in the most socially beneficial
manner possible. However by 1801 his opinions about government
intervention in the economy had undergone a change. The change of opinion
was prompted by two principal concerns, the first one being that saving
might not be matched by new investment. He asserted that saving could
lead to decreased prices and production; profit would decline and so would
investment. In such a case if the government increased the amount of
money in circulation then the money introduced.becomes a source of
increasing wealth. The second reason for government intervention was to
lessen the socially harmful effects of great inequalities of wealth and income.
Bentham believed that a persons capacity to get enjoyment from money
declined as he got more money. In modern utility terminology he believed in
a diminishing marginal utility of money. Therefore, all other things being
equal, a government measure that redistributed money from the rich to the
poor would increase the total societys aggregate utility.

Bentham was not entirely an advocate of complete equality. If redistributions

of wealth and income were made, he believed, a point would be reached
where their beneficial effects would be more offset by harmful effects. The
ideal degree of inequality he believed should be that in which slave-holding
has no place.

However, a gaping inadequacy can be seen in Benthams reformist phase. If

the government carries out reforms that increase the general welfare by
redistributing wealth and income from the rich to the poor, then its
necessary for the government to have no narrow or special interests of its
own. But the inherent difficulty in Benthams belief in beneficial social reform
becomes obvious as the government is made up of ordinary persons who, in
accordance with general human nature were egoistic and interested in
maximizing their own pleasure.

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) was another conservative utilitarian and an

economist who is mostly identified with Says Law which states that supply
creates its own demand. He believed that a free market would always
automatically adjust to an equilibrium in which all resources, including labor,
were fully utilized, that is, to equilibrium with full employment of both labor
and industrial capacity. He was also the best known expositor of Adam
Smiths views in Europe and America. In his introduction to his Trait
d'conomie politique Say asserted that the price or exchange value of any commodity depends
entirely on its use value or utility. For Say, the foundation of value is utility or the capacity of a
good or service to satisfy some human desire. Those desires and preferences, expectations,
and customs that lie behind them must be taken as given from the analyst. The task is to reason
from those data. In rejecting the notion that labor was the source of value and insisting that only
utility created values, Say not only sharply departed from the ideas of Smith and Ricardo. He
also placed the utility approach in the context of methodological approach and a social
philosophy that show him to be, along with Nassau Senior, the most important forerunners of
the neoclassical tradition that came to dominate economics in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Say was one of the first economists to have the insight that the value of a good derives from its
utility to the user and not from the labor spent in producing it.

Within his utility framework, he totally obliterated the distinction between the incomes of the
different social classes. Instead of seeing production process as a series of human exertions
applied to transform natural raw materials into usable goods, Say asserted the existence of
different productive agencies that combined together to produce goods. What these productive
agencies were ultimately producing was utility and each agency was coequally responsible for
the production of the utility. Therefore, there was no qualitative difference in the creation of utility
between the exertion of human labor on the one hand and the ownership of capital, land and
property on the other.

Within his utility approach to value and distribution theory, all notions of class conflict
disappeared. A central purpose of Says Treatise was to demonstrate that social harmony and
not class conflict was the natural result of a capitalist economy.

Nassau Senior (1790-1864) like Bentham and Say was an important precursor of modern
neoclassical economics. Like Say, he carefully selected certain ideas of prior classical
economists, modified some of them and added ideas of his own to develop a consistent
theoretical jurisdiction of the status quo of the 19th century capitalism.

In 1836 he published his great work An Outline of the Science of Political Economy. In this
book, he criticized the Ricardian economic system while making his main original contributions
in the area of economic method and the theory of value and cost. He advocated a utility theory
of value. Relative utility correlates with relative scarcity. The more scarce the good is, the more
valuable it is. For Senior, value is that quality which fits goods to be given and received in
exchange. He argues that utility is not intrinsic but merely expresses a things relation to pains
and pleasures of mankind. Value then is essentially subjective from the point of view of the
people appropriating goods to satisfy their ends. Not surprisingly, Senior was critical of Ricardos
cost of production theory of value.

Senior shared some similar views with Bentham on utility maximization. They both believed that
all economic behavior was calculating and rationalistic, and this behavior is ultimately reducible
to the maximizing of utility. Senior differed with Bentham, however, on the basic
assumption whereby the latter argued for his egalitarian reform. Bentham, it
will be recalled, believed that
as wealth or income increased, the utility of each successive, or marginal,
increment declined.
The diminishing marginal utility of wealth was the basis of Bentham's
argument that wealth taken from the richest people and given to the poorest
people in a society would increase social utility. Two premises seem to
underlie Bentham 's belief-first, that people can acquire so much wealth that
they become satiated, and thus a slight increment or decrement to their
wealth has
very little, if any, effect on the total utility that they derive from their wealth ;
and second, that the utilities that any two people derive from their wealth
can be compared. Later utility theorists were generally much more
conservative than Bentham, so it was necessary for them to deny these two
egalitarian premises. Senior explicitly denied both of them. Senior asserted
that no matter how unequally wealth might be distributed, "no person feels
his whole wants to be adequately supplied; . . . every person has some
unsatisfied desires which he believes that additional wealth would gratify."
Furthermore, "the nature and urgency of each individuals wants are a s
various a s the differences in individual character. "Therefore, we cannot
make comparisons among individuals as to the amount of utility that they
would receive or lose from an increment or a decrement in their wealth.

While on another note, the doctrine that classes were naturally antagonistic
and that the working class might benefit from actions that harmed the
interests of landlords and capitalists was labeled by Senior as "the political
economy of the poor. " Such ideas were believed only by those "whose
reasoning faculties are either uncultivated, or perverted by their feelings or
their imagination. "The correct doctrine was that all interests were in
harmony and were promoted by a free market and the accumulation of
capital. As previously mentioned, a similar view about social harmony and
the free market had been reinforced the works of both Bentham and Say.

In contrast, William Thompson as a more radical thinker advocated reforms

that were much more radical than Benthams. Though being an avowed
disciple of Bentham, Thompson introduced social theories that were
incompatible with Benthams utilitarianism.

Thompson believed that if all members of society were treated equally they
would have equal capacities to experience pleasure and pain which
resonates strongly with Benthams ideas.

Bentham talked about the distribution of wealth and income in England that
was significantly more unequal than was necessary. He (Bentham)
nevertheless believed that the existing capitalist economy was quite
compatible as a just distribution of wealth and income. Thompson strongly
refused this point by saying that, capital can never be a symbol of security,
in which each person had the fruits of his labor secured for him. Thompson
urged that capitalism was inevitably a system of exploitation, degradation,
instability, suffering and grotesque extremes of wealth and income. He also
believed that utilitarianism would always lead a thoughtful inquirer to the
same conclusions. Thompson ironically accepted nearly all of the utilitarian
arguments that have been used to morally justify competitive free market
capitalism. Thompson concluded that in a fair, competitive exchange society,
all the products of labor ought to be secured to the producers of them. He
suggested two very stringent conditions that would work for free exchange
to harmoniously benefit all exchangers. Firstly, workers would have to pass
their own capital necessary for production in order to produce freely rather
than under coercion. Secondly, if competition was to be universally beneficial
then all restrictions on free market would have to be eliminated. According to
Thompson, any consistent utilitarian should also arrive at similar conclusions.

Utilitarianism can be viewed altogether as a psychological theory of how

people behave and an ethical theory of how they ought to behave. William
Thompson accepted both elements of utilitarianism. It provided support to
his egalitarian sentiments. It can also be deemed as a democratic philosophy
because it stated that one should not count only the pleasures of an
aristocracy in forming a moral judgment but the pleasures of all people- the
economically least advantaged and most oppressed .

The problem is that in utilitarianism, individuals ' pleasures and pains are the
only moral criteria of good and bad. Pleasures and pains, however, are
subjectively felt sensations. The immediate experience of pleasure or pain is
by its very nature private to the individual. Although an individual might be
able to compare or rank his own subjective pleasures, there is no direct
means of comparing the intensity of one individual's pleasures with those of
another individual. Moreover, the private, subjective, relative ranking of any
individuals pleasures is likely to differ substantially from the rankings of
other individuals. Because individual pleasures are the ultimate moral
criteria in utilitarianism, there is no way one can make moral judgments
between the pleasures of two individuals. Bentham recognized this when he
wrote "quantity
of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry." Therefore,
utilitarianism will not furnish any argument in favor of egalitarian market
socialism over capitalism. It offers no criterion higher than personal
preferences by which one can judge among different preferences which is
best.
As the status quo of capitalism is one of great inequality, utilitarianism turns
out to be a highly conservative philosophy that justifies such inequality as
actually exists. This is because within utilitarianism our inability to
quantitatively compare different persons ' subjective states renders us
unable to judge morally between any two situations where disagreement or
conflict exists. Utilitarianism can thus be seen as an extraordinarily
restrictive or narrow philosophy that permits judgments only where
unanimity exists.

Utilitarianism can be viewed altogether as a psychological theory of how

people behave and an ethical theory of how they ought to behave. William
Thompson, a radical utilitarian thinker accepted both elements of
utilitarianism. It provided support to his egalitarian sentiments. It can also be
deemed as a democratic philosophy because it stated that one should not
count only the pleasures of an aristocracy in forming a moral judgment but
the pleasures of all people- the economically least advantaged and most
oppressed