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

Antoinette Baujard

Post-Print from HAL

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; utilité individuelle; calcul d'utilité; utilitarisme; welfarisme; non-welfarisme; bien-être social (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published in European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2009, 16 (3), pp.431-453

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
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:hal:journl:halshs-00413416

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().