Utilitarianism has often been identified as what it claimed to be: a calculation of pleasures and pains. But it has rarely been asked what we should understand by calculation in the work of Bentham, who does not go beyond the requisites, even if he reproaches his adversaries for being unable to carry out such a calculation. Is it a matter of using differential and integral calculus to add, subtract, multiply, and divide pleasures and pains? Or of evaluating them using a calculus of probability? Bentham seems to have provided, in terms more literary than mathematical, a schematism constitutive of the common ways to designate pleasures and pains that sciences such as economics, psychophysics and psychophysiology, and game theory began to use in the nineteenth century, and would do so again later.
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