EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Individual utility in a context of asymmetric sensitivity to pleasure and pain: an interpretation of Bentham's felicific calculus

André Lapidus and Nathalie Sigot ()

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2000, vol. 7, issue 1, 45-78

Abstract: This paper aims at exploring, in a formal way, Bentham's statement that 'the pleasure of gaining is not equal to the evil of losing', which belongs to those aspects of the principle of utility left aside by Jevons' reconstruction. Consequently, the agent's preference order will be viewed as depending on his initial situation, and on asymmetric sensitivity to gains and losses, relative to this situation. This leads 1) to discuss the coexistence of multiple preference orders, illustrated by Bentham's analysis of the optimal labour contract; and 2) to introduce true deliberation as a consequence of the gap between positive choice and rival assessments of utility.

Keywords: Bentham Endogeneous Preferences Individual Utility Pain And Pleasure Preference Reversal Utilitarianism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096725600361852 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Individual Utility in a Context of Asymetric Sensitivity to Pleasure and Pain: An Interpretation of Bentham's Felicific Calculus (2000) Downloads
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:7:y:2000:i:1:p:45-78

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

DOI: 10.1080/096725600361852

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:7:y:2000:i:1:p:45-78