The idea that humans are motivated simply by pain and pleasure is, as the English philosopher Roger Scruton has put it, not so much a distinctive theory of human nature as an ‘attempt to describe the whole of morals and politics without one’.19 It squeezes the rich complexity of human emotions and needs into an accountant’s grid. Contemporary critics were wont to dismiss Bentham’s utilitarianism as ‘pig philosophy’, as Thomas Carlyle dubbed it in his Latter-day Pamphlets.
