Engels Essay
1000 WordsUtopias are envisioned societies where human beings live a best possible life. Utopias are here distinguished from dystopias.INSTRUCTIONSIn this assignment you are to construct an Engels-Inspired Utopia.Such a utopia will have 3 main characteristics:
- A highly developed technologically driven global society.
- Completely devoid of capitalism.
- With minimal if any government.
PREPARING FOR THE ASSIGNMENTConsider trends in our present-day society that suggest ways that technology is making the need for capitalism obsolete. This should give you a general sense of how to construct an Engels Utopia.Next, you should consider some currently important areas of society (such as those listed below) that you might find most feasible to extrapolate as elements of this futuristic Utopia.WRITING THE ASSIGNMENTAfter choosing two of the possible areas below, write a 1000 word essay describing what that area might be like in an Engels non-capitalist technologically driven future.
- ART AND/OR ENTERTAINMENT
- GOODS: DURABLE & PERISHABLE
- TRANSPORTATION
- FOOD SERVICES
- MEDIUMS OF EXCHANGE
- SAFETY/LAWS
- COMMUNICATION
****USING UTILITARIAN THEORY
This assignment requires you to make direct reference to the relevant readings in the course and at least one outside source that is relevant to your Engels utopian vision. On formatting your paper: I will accept both APA or MLA styles, however do not include a cover sheet. Please be sure to include a bibliography or works cited for all relevant information.
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation
Jeremy Bentham
Chapter 1
Of the Principle of Utility
I. Nature has placed mankind 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.
They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can
make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In
words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain.
subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and
assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the
fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to
question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in
darkness instead of light.
But enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral
science is to be improved.
II. The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work: it will be proper
therefore at the outset to give an explicit and determinate account of what is
meant by it. By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or
disapproves of every action whatsoever. according to the tendency it appears to
have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in
question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that
happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every
action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.
III. By utility is meant 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 be the community in general, then the happiness of the
community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual.
IV. The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can
occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost.
When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of
the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members.
The interest of the community then is, what is it?—the sum of the interests of the
several members who compose it.
V. It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what
is the interest of the individual. A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be for
the interest, of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his
pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the sum total of his
pains.
VI. An action then may be said to be conformable to then principle of utility, or,
for shortness sake, to utility, (meaning with respect to the community at large)
when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater
than any it has to diminish it.
VII. A measure of government (which is but a particular kind of action, performed
by a particular person or persons) may be said to be conformable to or dictated
by the principle of utility, when in like manner the tendency which it has to
augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to
diminish it.
VIII. When an action, or in particular a measure of government, is supposed by a
man to be conformable to the principle of utility, it may be convenient, for the
purposes of discourse, to imagine a kind of law or dictate, called a law or dictate
of utility: and to speak of the action in question, as being conformable to such law
or dictate.
IX. A man may be said to be a partizan of the principle of utility, when the
approbation or disapprobation he annexes to any action, or to any measure, is
determined by and proportioned to the tendency which he conceives it to have to
augment or to diminish the happiness of the community: or in other words, to its
conformity or unconformity to the laws or dictates of utility.
X. Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility one may always say
either that it is one that ought to be done, or at least that it is not one that ought
not to be done. One may say also, that it is right it should be done; at least that it
is not wrong it should be done: that it is a right action; at least that it is not a
wrong action. When thus interpreted, the words ought, and right and wrong and
others of that stamp, have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.
XI. Has the rectitude of this principle been ever formally contested? It should
seem that it had, by those who have not known what they have been meaning. Is
it susceptible of any direct proof? it should seem not: for that which is used to
prove every thing else, cannot itself be proved: a chain of proofs must have their
commencement somewhere. To give such proof is as impossible as it is
needless.
XII. Not that there is or ever has been that human creature at breathing, however
stupid or perverse, who has not on many, perhaps on most occasions of his life,
deferred to it. By the natural constitution of the human frame, on most occasions
of their lives men in general embrace this principle, without thinking of it: if not for
the ordering of their own actions, yet for the trying of their own actions, as well as
of those of other men. There have been, at the same time, not many perhaps,
even of the most intelligent, who have been disposed to embrace it purely and
without reserve. There are even few who have not taken some occasion or other
to quarrel with it, either on account of their not understanding always how to
apply it, or on account of some prejudice or other which they were afraid to
examine into, or could not bear to part with. For such is the stuff that man is
made of: in principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the
rarest of all human qualities is consistency.
XIII. When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility, it is with reasons
drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle itself. His
arguments, if they prove any thing, prove not that the principle is wrong, but that,
according to the applications he supposes to be made of it, it is misapplied. Is it
possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another
earth to stand upon.
XIV. To disprove the propriety of it by arguments is impossible; but, from the
causes that have been mentioned, or from some confused or partial view of it, a
man may happen to be disposed not to relish it. Where this is the case, if he
thinks the settling of his opinions on such a subject worth the trouble, let him take
the following steps, and at length, perhaps, he may come to reconcile himself to
it.
1. Let him settle with himself, whether he would wish to discard this principle
altogether; if so, let him consider what it is that all his reasonings (in
matters of politics especially) can amount to?
2. If he would, let him settle with himself, whether he would judge and act
without any principle, or whether there is any other he would judge an act
by?
3. If there be, let him examine and satisfy himself whether the principle he
thinks he has found is really any separate intelligible principle; or whether
it be not a mere principle in words, a kind of phrase, which at bottom
expresses neither more nor less than the mere averment of his own
unfounded sentiments; that is, what in another person he might be apt to
call caprice?
4. If he is inclined to think that his own approbation or disapprobation,
annexed to the idea of an act, without any regard to its consequences, is a
sufficient foundation for him to judge and act upon, let him ask himself
whether his sentiment is to be a standard of right and wrong, with respect
to every other man, or whether every man’s sentiment has the same
privilege of being a standard to itself?
5. In the first case, let him ask himself whether his principle is not despotical,
and hostile to all the rest of human race?
6. In the second case, whether it is not anarchial, and whether at this rate
there are not as many different standards of right and wrong as there are
men? and whether even to the same man, the same thing, which is right
to-day, may not (without the least change in its nature) be wrong to-
morrow? and whether the same thing is not right and wrong in the same
place at the same time? and in either case, whether all argument is not at
an end? and whether, when two men have said, “I like this”, and “I don’t
like it”, they can (upon such a principle) have any thing more to say?
7. If he should have said to himself, No: for that the sentiment which he
proposes as a standard must be grounded on reflection, let him say on
what particulars the reflection is to turn? if on particulars having relation to
the utility of the act, then let him say whether this is not deserting his own
principle, and borrowing assistance from that very one in opposition to
which he sets it up: or if not on those particulars, on what other
particulars?
8. If he should be for compounding the matter, and adopting his own
principle in part, and the principle of utility in part, let him say how far he
will adopt it?
9. When he has settled with himself where he will stop, then let him ask
himself how he justifies to himself the adopting it so far? and why he will
not adopt it any farther?
10. Admitting any other principle than the principle of utility to be a right
principle, a principle that it is right for a man to pursue; admitting (what is
not true) that the word right can have a meaning without reference to
utility, let him say whether there is any such thing as a motive that a man
can have to pursue the dictates of it: if there is, let him say what that
motive is, and how it is to be distinguished from those which enforce the
dictates of utility: if not, then lastly let him say what it is this other principle
can be good for?
- Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Jeremy Bentham
Chapter 1
Of the Principle of Utility