A Fragment On Government Scholars Choice Edition PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ... Beccaria's formula. The formula of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which we have seen adopted by Beccaria', was again employed by Priestley, in his Essay on Government, to describe the proper object of all political institutions. This pamphlet appeared in the year 1768. Bentham, who came up to Oxford in that year, to give his vote in the election of a member for the University, got a copy from a little circulating library attached to Harper's coffee-house, close by Queen's College. It made a lasting impression upon him. 'It was by that pamphlet and this phrase in it that my principles on the subject of morality public and private were determined. It was from that pamphlet and that page of it that I drew the phrase, the words and import of which have been so widely diffused over the civilized world. At the sight of it, I cried out as it were in an inward ecstasy, like Archimedes on the discovery of the fundamental principle of hydrostatics, Evprlxa. Little did I think of the corrections which within a few years on a closer scrutiny I found myself under the necessity of applying to it V Bentham described his principle sometimes as the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and sometimes as the principle of the greatest happiness simply. He ended by preferring the latter formula. But he seems to have been guided in this preference rather by the desire of clearness in expression, than by any change in his first principles. Regarding happiness as the supreme good, he regarded the greatest amount of happiness as the true object of law and morality. That the greatest amount of happiness might take the form of an intense happiness enjoyed by a smaller as opposed to a diffused happiness enjoyed by a greater...