Bentham, Mill, and Aristotle

Bentham, Mill, and Aristotle: What constitutes a good life?

Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Aristotle, while different philosophers from different time periods, all attempt to answer the same question: What constitutes a good life? This essay will examine theories of each of these philosophers individually, while exploring their similarities and differences.

Jeremy Bentham is often referred to as the “father of Utilitarianism”. Bentham’s Utilitarian theory, in the simplest terms, is based on maximizing pleasure, of both the individual and collective and avoiding pain. To Bentham, the only thing intrinsically good is pleasure, and the only thing intrinsically bad is pain (Nussbaum 2). Bentham’s self-described “fundamental axiom”, the Greatest Happiness Principle, asserts: “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” (Nussbaum 2). As noted in the following passage, Bentham equates happiness to pleasure and good.

By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage pleasure, good or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest in considered (Nussbaum 2).

Bentham's moral theory was founded on the assumption that the consequences in human action count in evaluating their merit and that the kind of consequence that matters for human happiness is simply the achievement of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Bentham asserts that pleasure is a single homogeneous sensation containing no qualitative differences, only quantitative differences (Nussbaum 3). With this statement, Bentham is suggesting that pleasure or pain can only vary in intensity or duration, but not in quality. Unlike Aristotle, whom will be examined later in this essay, activity has no particular role in Bentham’s system. The goal of...