Utilitarian Perspective

Justice as the greatest net balance of satisfaction or happiness

Jeremy Bentham—Happiness as Justice: Epicureans, during the Greek periods, had denied any moral and ideal content to justice that Plato advocated and were of the view that the state was not founded on something like justice of which Plato spoke. For them, justice was nothing in itself but ‘a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.’¹⁶ For Epicureans, it was pleasure, and not justice, that was the central pursuit in the state. In the ninteenth century again, Bentham took up utility as an organizing criteria in the State. The principle of happiness, i.e., the greatest happiness of the greatest number, based on each counted as one, provides the basis of justice in Utilitarian perspective.

Traditionally, justice as a normative concept has an implied moral aspect. Bentham, however, would not accept role of morality in defining justice. Regarding relationship between morals and legislation he says, ‘Legislation and morals have the same centre but not the same circumference.’¹⁷ Utilitarian perspective requires that both morality and law should produce happiness. To this extent, they have the same centre, i.e., production of happiness. However, while law is command of a supreme authority in a sovereign state, morality concerns with what Mill would say, self-regarding actions and is ‘beyond the province of law’. Thus, law and morality have different circumferences. If this is the case, morality cannot be the basis of justice for Bentham. In any case, utility or happiness, not justice, is the end that Bentham’s state seeks. Justice lies in treating each as one in calculating the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The Utilitarian perspective assumes that justice is the greatest net balance of satisfaction. We will discuss below Rawls’s contract-based conception of justice as an alternative to the Utilitarian conception of justice. Rawls, in his book, A Theory of Justice (1971) criticized the Utilitarian concept of justice and set out a contractarian concept of justice.