Can happiness be measured?
On the axis: The highest good · wellbeing
Can pleasures and pains be summed and compared, as the felicific calculus would have it, or is there in wellbeing something that escapes any common measure?
Justification
Bentham starts from what he takes to be a fact of nature: pleasure and pain are the only two things we actually seek and shun as ends. Good and evil then have no separate content: to call a thing "good" says no more than that it tends to produce pleasure or ward off pain. Hence a at once psychological and moral, welding fact to norm through the same two sovereign masters and leaving no room for a flourishing or perfection distinct from the agreeable, against the objective goods of the Aristotelian tradition.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1
Justification
Against the old objection that brands a doctrine fit for swine, Mill replies that it errs not about pleasure but about man: our higher faculties demand a happiness of another kind. Hence his break with 's purely quantitative calculus: pleasures differ in quality as well, and those of the intellect, the feelings and the imagination intrinsically prevail, because whoever knows both would not consent for anything to sink to the lower. At the heart of the argument lies a sense of dignity that an existence confined to bodily satisfactions would wound, which tilts Mill's hedonism toward a flourishing close to .
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.Utilitarianism, ch. 2
Utilitarianism, ch. 2 (quality versus quantity of pleasures) · Utilitarianism, ch. 4 (happiness, the only thing desirable as an end)