Happiness & Public Policy

. . . I trust the friends of the proposed constitution will never concur with its enemies in questioning that fundamental principle of republican government, which admits the right of the people to alter or abolish the established constitution whenever they find it inconsistent with their happiness. . .

- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 78

Hamilton here echoes the language of the Declaration. Again, happiness here seems to mean something quite broad like “good fortune” or “well-being,” not a feeling of pleasure of satisfaction. That may be on reason why the two following passages bear only a superficial resemblance in content:

By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.

- Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

And

We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.

- John Adams, “Thoughts on Government”

A further reason why Adams is not expressing a Benthamite sentiment (his son, by the way, was a big fan of Bentham) is contained in the paragraphs directly preceding:

the divine science of politics is the science of social happiness, and the blessings of society depend entirely on the constitutions of government, which are generally institutions that last for many generations, there can be no employment more agreeable to a benevolent mind than a research after the best.

Pope flattered tyrants too much when he said,

“For forms of government let fools contest,
That which is best administered is best.”

Nothing can be more fallacious than this. But poets read history to collect flowers, not fruits; they attend to fanciful images, not the effects of social institutions. Nothing is more certain, from the history of nations and nature of man, than that some forms of government are better fitted for being well administered than others.

That, in a nutshell, is Bentham’s bind. Adams is looking for a general, structural solution to the problem of securing ease, comfort, and security, and isn’t going to just assume rational administration by benevolent experts. Bentham’s constitutional writings don’t assume this, either, but he often slips into it. For instance, in an article about Bentham’s ideas in poverty relief policy, Michael Quinn writes:

Bentham does appear to glory in the scope which detention in a Poor Panopticon gives its governor to break down and recast entire personalities. He can plausibly be presented as anticipating Skinner’s box, and filling it with, to use his own expression, ‘that part of the national livestock which has no feathers to it and walks on two legs’, instead of rats. Ought we not then to suspect that, in Bahmueller’s words, ‘if the truth were known, we would soon suspect that it was not only the indigent that Bentham wanted to control, but us too, all of us. That is, we might suspect that Panopticon was a version of Benthamite society writ small.’ Indeed, is Bahmueller further correct to view the emerging apprentices of the Poor Panopticon, liberated after an entire lifetime of indoctrination, as the stormtroopers of a Benthamic blitzkrieg, as ‘foot soldiers in a surreptitious guerilla war he hoped to wage against the entrenched mores of an unutilitarian society’? When Bentham describes his poor house as a ‘utopia’, is the correct implication that drawn by both Bahmueller and Himmelfarb, that he believes that everyone would be much better off for a course in utilitarian conditioning?

It’s not obvious that he does think this. But I think it is a clear temptation in any aggregative or maximizing theory.