The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 19
With utilitarianism, everything is in the example. So I offer, for example: Charity Bentham married Peregrine Ide, which I assign two units of pleasure; Peregrine abandoned Charity, which I assign two units of pain. The sum is zero. Charity Bentham then married Cesare Furore and gave birth to Cleopatra, which I assign three units of pleasure; in order to do so, Charity had to unmarry Peregrine, which I assign two units of pain. The sum is positive 1.
A utilitarian, comparing Charity’s historical action to her choices, would say that she acted correctly, with utility.
There are two objections here. The first might come from the deontological ethicists. These people, who argue that an act is right or wrong in itself, regardless of consequences (e.g., divorce is always wrong), would say that Charity’s marriage to Peregrine was fine and that her happiness afterward was not significant, that her unmarrying Peregrine was wrong (or “cruel,” as Israel said), and that her subsequent marriage to Cesare compounded her wrong, as did everything consequent of her second marriage—love, birth, fame.
Utilitarians would answer deontological criticism thus: Charity’s marriage to Peregrine was meaningless, since it produced no Good. In correcting her miscalculation, Charity produced Good, and produced more Good than not correcting it would have produced. Therefore, Charity was right, under the circumstances, though perhaps not as praiseworthy as she might have been if she had married Cesare initially. However, praise and blame do not signify.
The second objection might come from what I call the sentimentalists, those who consider the heart before they regard the intellect. They might say that Charity was a dear fool to marry Peregrine the very day of his flight, that she was more right than wrong in unmarrying Peregrine afterward (especially since she was probably deeply hurt by the news that Peregrine had a son), that she was blessed in making such a good marriage to Cesare, and that she should have anticipated that, though her conduct was proper and understandable, there were aspects of the affair that made her appear less than kind and virtuous.
Utilitarians would answer sentimentalists thus: stuff and nonsense. Folly, pridefulness, fortune, kindness, and virtue do not signify.
Charity Bentham did not win her Nobel Prize because she married Peregrine, or because she bore Cleopatra. She was famous because she applied her utilitarianism and intelligence to what she called “Brave New Benthamism.”
“The New Benthamite holds,” wrote Charity Bentham in the preface to her New Benthamite Reader, “that the State desires Good. The State conducts itself correctly when it engages in activity that produces Good, and produces more Good than if it had not engaged in this activity, and produces the greatest Good to be gained from this activity.”
Charity Bentham followed this to its logical conclusion, and innovatively beyond, taking her lead from Jeremy Bentham’s thesis that the basis of the State was the principle of utility. Jeremy Bentham had opined that the State was a construction resulting from the fact that its citizenry sought, with the hedonic calculus, happiness for themselves and their fellow citizens.
Significantly, Jeremy Bentham argued that the State was no superbeing, no Leviathan, with a mind and motives of its own. Rather, he wrote, the State was the sum total of its citizens’ pursuit of Good, was what a later follower of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy, or Benthamite, would describe poetically as “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Men and women ceded authority to the State, Jeremy Bentham concluded, not because they feared the State, but because in so doing they increased the Good resulting from the exercise of the authority of the State. And the amount of Good was always in proportion to the number of citizens supporting the State: democracy produces more good for a citizenry than benevolent despotism; tyranny produces more good for a citizenry than anarchy.
It was clear to me why Jeremy Bentham had wielded profound political influence in the eighteenth century on both the early American Republic and the fledgling French Republic. More, I understood why Jeremy Bentham and the Benthamites (especially the English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who renamed the movement utilitarianism) became the philosophical heroes of the liberal democracies of the nineteenth century, particularly for the United States of America and for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, both of whom exported their utilitarian forms of government to their colonial empires. The historical development (either by evolution or revolution) of sophisticated capitalist and communist states, so far from detouring from the principle of utility, tended to institutionalize it in suggestively prosaic manners, hence the abundance of people’s republics, democratic republics, unions of socialist republics, and parliamentary monarchies. Utilitarianism seems the basis for the twentieth-century State.
Charity Bentham seized on this result and, with scholarship and what could be considered some philosophical sleight of hand, developed it for her own purposes, that is, New Benthamism.
She acknowledged that the State was not a Leviathan. But then she proposed that there was wisdom in inquiring why it was that a State’s citizens preferred to anthropomorphize their government, such as the Americans’ Uncle Sam, the Britons’ John Bull, the Russians’ Bear (or Party). This was romantic fantasy, Charity Bentham admitted; yet it was so persistent an aspect of international politics since the Enlightenment that it must be regarded as a popular expression of yearning toward a way of thinking of the world. Given mankind’s penchant for (perhaps utter dependence upon) analogy, Charity Bentham argued that a State’s citizenry thought of their State with reference to other States as one extraordinarily large person amid other extraordinarily large persons.