Ongaro Alessia

CLASSE: 5ALS

OF THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY

Identify from the text:

• THE DEFINITION OF UTILITY

          By utility is meant the property of any object to produce benefit, pleasure, good or happiness, or to prevent pain or unhappiness.

• THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH IT IS BASED

           Utility is based on the principle of pain and pleasure (right and wrong/causes and effects).

• THE WAY IN WHICH UTILITY CAN AFFECT POLICIES

          Utility affects policies when a measure of government has the tendency to augment the happiness of the community more than any which it has to diminish it.

The extract is taken from the first chapter of “Of principle of utility” by Jeremy Bentham who was the main theorist of the doctrine of Utilitarianism. In the extract taken in consideration Bentham presents some of the most significant elements in his doctrine. Utilitarianism is in line with Puritanism and so with the ideology of the middle class which was the main protagonists of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed the idea of utility is based on the principle of pain and pleasure.

Bentham makes the reader understand what he means for utility: the property of any object to produce benefit, pleasure, good or happiness, or to prevent pain or unhappiness. And the intelligent reader can also understand why Utilitarianism on the social-economic side and Puritanism on the religious one where taken in consideration by the emergent middle class during the 18^th century, in particular during the industrial revolution