painful sensation. In both scenarios I am trying to see if the original pleasurable sensation will be followed by another pleasurable sensation. Thirdly, the problem of again rises about value. In the first case, the value for interests went unspecified, now in this case it is the value of pleasure and plain. Throughout Bentham's explaining of how to calculate how an act affects a community's interest, he once again fails to give some kind of value for pleasure and pain. We are instructed to take every pleasure and every pain into account and them sum up all the values in order to get a balance, but there is no value. Bentham also repeats the mistake of treating abstract concepts as concrete concepts. Just like individual interests, pleasure and pain are relative. The ways that pleasure and pain affect people vary and what is pleasurable for one person may not be pleasurable for another. Another problem with this method has to do with the end product of the account process. Bentham says that after all of the values of pleasure and pain are summed up, if the balance is on the side of pleasure the act as a whole has a good tendency, as the same for pain. But what if there is no side that the balance lay on? Hypothetically speaking, if there were a community of 200 people and after all of the values of pleasure and pain were added up and the results were split down the middle, what tendency would the act have? In order to even start to answer this there would have to be some sort of value for the pleasure and pain. The values would also have to differ in order to get a definite end result, certain pains and pleasures would have to weigh more than others, but that's "Qualitative Utilitarianism". As for Bentham and "Quantitative Utilitarianism" this is all I have to say, it's all that I could muster. In conclusion, Bentham's essay does read well. He is very precise in keeping his argument consistent. If there were some kind of way to give th...
