Introduction

Edmund Wilson: Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism are the big ethical response in the English speaking world to the commerce and luxury debate. What's radical about Bentham is that he's just saying that pleasure is what's good and that pain is what's bad, so we can make public policy on this basis. The conservative element of this is that if we are describing is good whatever people happen to find pleasurable and bad whatever people happened to find painful, then we're defining what's good in terms of naturally observable phenomenon. So there's still an empirical emphasis here.