Combining Philosophers

Ideas for Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Nietzsche and Juan Comesaa

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     choose another area for these philosophers

display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers


6 ideas

23. Ethics / E. Utilitarianism / 1. Utilitarianism
In Homer it is the contemptible person, not the harmful person, who is bad [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: In Homer, both the Trojan and the Greek are good. Not the man who inflicts harm on us, but the man who is contemptible, is bad.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human [1878], 045)
Talk of 'utility' presupposes that what is useful to people has been defined [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: All this chat about 'utility' already presupposes that what is useful to people has been defined: in other words, useful for what! i.e. the people's purposes are already taken for granted.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 7[030])
     A reaction: When they stopped talking about utility they talked instead about 'benefit', but the same objection applies. This is the problem of paternalism in Utilitarianism, which leads to Preference Utilitarianism, which probably doesn't help.
23. Ethics / E. Utilitarianism / 2. Ideal of Pleasure
Bentham thinks happiness is feeling good, but why use morality to achieve that? [Annas on Bentham]
     Full Idea: It is easy to fall into Bentham's mindless assumption that happiness must be a specific state of feeling good about something, but it is mysterious why anyone would think morality a good strategy for achieving this.
     From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 2.7
The value of pleasures and pains is their force [Bentham]
     Full Idea: It behoves the legislator to understand the force of pleasures and pains, which is their value.
     From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], IV.1)
23. Ethics / E. Utilitarianism / 3. Motivation for Altruism
The morality of slaves is the morality of utility [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Slave morality is essentially the morality of utility.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil [1886], §261)
Utilitarianism criticises the origins of morality, but still believes in it as much as Christians [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Utilitarianism (socialism, democracy) criticises the origins of moral evaluations, but it believes them just as much as the Christian does.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power (notebooks) [1888], §253)
     A reaction: It is a critique of both utilitarianism and Kantian deontology that they seem to rest on unquestioned assumptions about what has value (pleasure, happiness, reason). I think Aristotle offers a better answer to this problem than 'divine' authority.