Utility and psychological hedonism: is pleasure and pain the whole of human motivation and the only measure of right?

Jeremy Bentham, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Pleasure and pain are the two sovereign masters under whose governance nature has placed mankind. They alone point out what we ought to do and determine what we shall do. Good is pleasure or exemption from pain; evil is pain or the loss of pleasure; and these terms, examined, will yield no other meaning.¹ Psychological hedonism is not a dogma but a fact of human nature: there is nothing by which a man can ultimately be moved but the prospect of pleasure or of pain.

Motives I divide into the self-regarding, the sympathetic, and the dissocial or antipathetic; sympathy is real, but the benevolent man feels another's relief as his own pleasure, and that it passes through his own sensibility does not make it counterfeit. The standard of right is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.²³⁴

Sources

1. Antipathy or resentment requires always to be regulated, to prevent its doing mischief: to be regulated by what? always by the principle of utility. The principle of utility neither requires nor admits of any other regulator than itself. OF THE FOUR SANCTIONS OR SOURCES OF PAIN AND PLEASURE Connexion 1.

   An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, p. 34

2. They flourish not in the same soil with sentiment. They grow among thorns; and are not to be plucked, like daisies, by infants as they run. Labour, the inevitable lot of humanity, is in no track more inevitable than here. In vain would an Alexander bespeak a peculiar road for royal vanity, or a Ptolemy, a smoother one, for royal indolence.

   An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, p. 11

3. First principles enumerated Say in other words, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In speaking of this end of government, call it the right and proper end of government. In general terms the proof of this position may be referred to particular experience, as brought to view by the history of all nations.

   First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, pp. 232–233

4. Unless some end in view considered in the character of a standard of reference be taken into account, the epithets good and bad will be designative of nothing but the state of human affections in relation to the subject matter to which these qualities are respectively attributed: namely of the affections of him by whom these same epithets are employed.

   First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, pp. 244–245

Where the argument is made

• An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Chapters I-V
• A Table of the Springs of Action (1817)
• Deontology (the posthumous manuscripts edited by Bowring, now Goldworth)

How the argument was received

The founding doctrine of modern utilitarianism. Mill softened it with the partition of higher and lower pleasures; the egoism charge is perennial; Nozick's experience machine and Finnis's basic goods are the standing contemporary objections. The preference-utilitarian tradition (Hare, Singer) keeps the ethical doctrine while detaching it from Bentham's psychology.