For Bentham, happiness was a mathematical proposition, and he spent years fine-tuning his “felicific calculus,” a wonderfully disarming term. I, for one, never associated calculus with felicity. It’s simple math, though. Add up the pleasurable aspects of your life, then subtract the unpleasant ones. The result is your overall happiness. The same calculations, Bentham believed, could apply to an entire nation. Every action a government took, every law it passed, should be viewed through the “greatest happiness” prism. Bentham, for instance, reasoned that giving ten dollars to a poor man counted
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