wo sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do”(p. 225)#. He believed that one situation is better than another if it involves a greater amount of pleasure than pain, or a lesser amount of pain than pleasure. The more pleasure there is in the world, the better, and Bentham did not care how this pleasure is produced. He notoriously said that ‘pushpin’, a simple pub game, was as valuable as poetry as long as they provide equal amounts of pleasure. Along with this idea of pleasure and pain as sovereign masters Bentham introduced what he called the principle of utility. This principle is based on the fact that "every action should be judged right or wrong according to how far it tends to promote or damage the happiness of the community" (p. 29)#. Basically, the morally right action should be determined by judging which will maximise total happiness - the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Bentham suggested that legislators and individuals involved in government should weigh the pleasure that certain actions would bring to all affected by them before making a decision. He had six criteria for evaluating the pleasure-pain relationships of an action in a method termed the ‘felicific’ or ‘hedonic’ calculus: intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity and purity. He believed that each individual pursues his own happiness and that it is the purpose of the legislator to “produce harmony between public and private interests”#. Bertrand Russell gives a good example of what this means in practical terms: “It is to the interest of the public that I should abstain from theft, but it is not to my interest except where there is an effective criminal law. Thus the criminal law is a method of making the interests of the individual coincide with that of the community; that is its justificati...
