That action is best, which procures
the greatest happiness
for the greatest number;
and that is worst,
which, in like manner,
occasions misery.
Name | Francis Hutcheson | Life | 1694 - 1746 | Country | Ireland | Category | Wisdom | Wikipedia | >> |
Amongst philosophers the will to gain monotheistic power is also a sickness. The Enlightenment of the 18th century is, to a large extent, an exercise of this desire to find one big rule for all human activity, one universal solution to all our woes.
Mirandola's belief in "reason's" ability to moderate human emotions had taken hold of the so-called intellectuals. They were the first group of government "consultants", trying to sell their own big rational rule to kings and emperors.
One such rule was formulated by a then famous, now almost forgotten, moral philosopher and great teacher, Francis Hutcheson. His most famous pupil was Adam Smith, author of the Bible of the believers in the market religion.
The one big rule that should guide all your actions, said Hutcheson, is that it should create "the greatest happiness for the greatest number".
This is the idea of "utilitarianism", later worked out by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill and today an academic industry.
Even in the excellent catalogue of the most influential books in the Western world, Printing and the Mind of Man, it is written that "only Bentham could have summed it up in the succinct aphorism 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'".
Well, not only Bentham, for he only copied Hutcheson!
History is evolutionary competition, sorting winners and losers. By necessity this means that what gives "happiness" to one person often gives misery to his fiend or competitor. One rule rarely applies to both. Irrational emotions still rule.
Besides, what is happiness? Isn't it true that when stomachs are filled, men can kill each other because of different definitions of that word?
In spite of this, utilitarianism, the idea that we should maximize utility or pleasure, as it can to lead to happiness, has been the basic philosophy of the Western world for some 200 years. In the capitalist parts of the world, the stress has been on "the greatest amount", in parts of the world that have been socialist, on "for the greatest number". But behind both, we find the questionable idea that wealth gives happiness.
Mankind has discussed similar ideas since the Greek "sophrosyne". But has all this talk had any positive effects whatsoever? Remember the monozygotic twin study that was mentioned in the context of Cicero, on page 00.
Certainly, we are now infinitely richer from a material point of view than 200 years ago.
But are we infinitely more happy, or more happy at all? |