The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 18
Skaldur, in desperation, produced a pistol and shot Peregrine twice in the back. That the bullets did not kill Peregrine outright was not only a miracle but also an act of fate that preserved Peregrine for further punishment. The bullets did stagger him, and he dropped Cesare Furore. Peregrine went to his knees. The guards dragged Cesare Furore’s body away from Peregrine. Peregrine would not go down and, lunging forward, crawled toward Cesare Furore on that shattered knee, screaming oaths so mad and dark I shall not repeat them. The guards encircled Peregrine, momentarily disoriented by his macabre perseverance. Peregrine’s bloody face was said to have radiated an aura of demonic lust. That is nonsense.
Charity Bentham fell upon Cesare Furore. Peregrine screamed at her, “You’re mine!” At that, fearing he would attack the woman, the guards pummeled him flat. Peregrine lay broken and alive, not an arm’s length but a lifetime of defeat from his beloved Charity Bentham. And Charity Bentham lay insensate atop her second husband’s corpse. She was alive also but—and this I say because I swear by it—eternally undone by her own proud, ambitious, duplicitous heart, that had loved two men, and betrayed two men, and cursed two men.
Brave New Benthamism
IN hiding in Vexbeggar for nearly five years, I had abundant time, and more abundant persuasion, to study Charity Bentham. I was embarrassed that I had not understood her prodigious learning. I felt that if I could puzzle all of her out, perhaps I could also understand why Peregrine lay alone in isolation on the King’s prison island near Stockholm. Back then, I am not sure that I did more than further confuse myself as to the way of the modern world where, according to what Israel said, “if you step out-of-bounds just once, you can’t get back in.” Now I can tell this about that woman’s mind, because I truly believe it has meant everything for what has happened to me and mine, for where I am today, here, alone, less angry than argumentative about what I have learned.
Charity Bentham was a utilitarian. She advocated the principle of utility, or goodness. She maintained that only Good is Good, that only Good is desirable, that the correct action among many possibilities is the one that produces the greatest amount of Good, and that one can recognize what is Good by the fact that Good causes happiness, while that which is not Good causes unhappiness. She further maintained that common morality, common decency, and common sense are intrinsically utilitarian concepts. Rational men and women are said to know that only by doing Good can one be happy and make others happy.
I caution those who find, on first glance, that utilitarianism seems trivial. It is not that. It seemed to me, at first, very clever and above all else a practical way to live. For crucial example, ethics is a profoundly important kind of philosophy; the business of ethics is to recognize good and to do good, a most desirable endeavor. According to utilitarians, only utilitarianism provides ethics with a rigorous method both to recognize Good and to do Good. Utilitarians opine that utilitarianism comforts one while at the same time it guides, advises, assesses—providing a rich tradition with which one may resist and overcome the enemies of reason and reasonable men. These enemies are said to be habit, prejudice, custom, ritual, instinct, feelings, or any other characterization of nonintellectual ethics, which are collectively called “deontological ethics.” (Deontology is the study of moral obligation and is regarded as stuff and nonsense by utilitarians, who are exceedingly sensible people.)
In sum, utilitarianism is said to confirm the enlightened man as the superior man and, more importantly, as the right man.
How does it work? With simple arithmetic, and also with what Jeremy Bentham (the eighteenth-century founder of utilitarianism, and Charity Bentham’s ancestor) called the “hedonic calculus.” Jeremy Bentham proposed that experiencing Good could be measured in units of pleasure, each assigned a positive 1, and that experiencing what was not good could be measured in units of pain, each assigned a negative 1. Jeremy Bentham declared that neither a unit of pleasure or a unit of pain can be analyzed, but that both can be easily recognized.
When one is confronted with a decision, one need consider how many units of pleasure (positive) and pain (negative) each possible alternative action will engender; and then one need only compare the sum for each action, choosing the action that produces the largest sum, the greater or greatest Good.
It might seem that assigning units of pleasure and pain to one’s conduct is arbitrary and silly; however, it is just because the hedonic calculus requires discretion, awareness of limits, and a temperate worldliness that, say the utilitarians, utilitarianism appeals to men and women who have nothing in common with each other but their utilitarianism. Utilitarianism might seem sloppy, piecemeal, even timid; it is still argued to be more useful than any other sort of ethics in coping with modern experience. More, utilitarianism in its many aspects—act, rule, universal, ideal, et cetera hair-splittings—is said to be best not as a descriptive ethics (what must be done, what should have been done) but as a normative ethics (what ought to be done, what might have been done). It whispers before the fact. It reigns after the fact. It is fueled by caution, dispassion, endless reconsideration, wordy