Felicific calculus

The felicific calculus is an algorithm formulated by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham 1747–1832 for calculating a degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to induce. Bentham, an ethical hedonist, believed the moral rightness or wrongness of an action to be a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it produced. The felicific calculus could, in principle at least, build the moral status of all considered act. The algorithm is also call as the utility calculus, the hedonistic calculus together with the hedonic calculus.

To be quoted in this a object that is caused or produced by something else are several variables or vectors, which Bentham called "circumstances". These are:

Bentham's instructions

To name an exact account of the general tendency of any act, by which the interests of a community are affected, carry on as follows. Begin with any one adult of those whose interests seem near immediately to be affected by it: together with pull in an account,

To form his proposal easier to remember, Bentham devised what he called a "mnemonic doggerel" also talked to as "memoriter verses", which synthesized "the whole the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object of morals and legislation":

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—

Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure. Such pleasures seek whether private be thy end: If it be public, wide let them extend Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:

If pains must come, let them come on to few.