Weigh actions by summing the intensity, duration, certainty, and extent of the pleasure and pain they produce.
Bentham's 1789 attempt to make morality calculable. Its failure is instructive — the dimensions cannot be commensurated in practice — and cost-benefit analysis inherits both the ambition and the problem.
In practice
- A regulator scores a policy on lives saved, years of life, and distress avoided, and cannot state the exchange rate between them.
- A hospital allocating one theatre between a painful condition and a shortening one is doing this arithmetic and cannot show its working.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Razors, rules and the tools of careful thought