A return to Bentham's felicific calculus: From moral welfarism to technical non-welfarism

Antoinette Baujard

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2009, vol. 16, issue 3, 431-453

Abstract: This paper is a study of Bentham's felicific calculus. Challenging a view that contrasts 'cardinal' to 'ordinal' calculus, we show that these two forms of calculus constitute instead different phases of a single approach. Bentham sometimes has to rely upon proxy variables because of operational constraints, and consequently upon factors other than utility. As a utilitarian, Bentham is de facto welfarist from an ethical point of view. Surprisingly however, this study shows that Bentham resorts to non-welfare information in the actual application of his calculus. His approach reconciles non-welfarism from the technical standpoint with welfarism as a fundamental moral principle.

Keywords: Bentham; individual utility; utility calculus; utilitarianism; welfarism; social welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09672560903101294 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: A return to Bentham's felicific calculus: From moral welfarism to technical non-welfarism (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:16:y:2009:i:3:p:431-453

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672560903101294

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().