Pleasure is a device for steering the organism in the right direction -- not a goal. Attaining pleasure is "sponsored by their genes, whose primary goal is to make us prolific, not lastingly happy". Pleasure is addictive. We are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there (Freud, 1930).
Strongly influenced by the empiricism of David Hume, Jeremy Bentham aimed at developing a "moral science" that was more rational, objective and quantitative than other ways of separating right from wrong. Bentham particularly argued against the ascetic religious traditions of eighteenth-century England that held up suffering and sacrifice as models of virtue (Higgins, 1997).
Bentham begins with what he takes as the self-evident observations that
1) Pleasure and pain govern our lives, and
2) The former makes life happier, while the latter makes it worse.
These two concepts anchor Bentham's ethical outlook. "Nature has placed mankind," he writes in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, "under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne."
From this insight about pleasure and pain, Bentham develops as his ethical touchstone the notion of "utility": "that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party....
