reading room
Hedonic Calculus
This morning, I wanted toast. Bentham whispers: weigh the pleasures, weigh the pains.
Pleasure: warmth, crunch, jam dripping off the edge like a sunrise. Pain: sticky fingers, crumbs in my bed for the next three weeks.
I assign numbers, pretend to be objective. Who knew breakfast came out at +4.9 units of happiness? (The decimals make it philosophy.)
By lunch, chips or fruit. Chips: salt, joy, +7 but greasy fingers (-2) and vinegar stinging a paper cut (-3) Fruit: refreshing, healthy, +5, but sometimes the banana betrays me with brown spots (-4).
I calculate so long the chips go cold. Net pleasure: –∞.
Soon I'm rating everything. Brushing my teeth? +3, unless the tap's icy, then -1. Crossing the road? +1 if safe, -70 if flattened. Scrolling my phone? +2 for content, -5 for reading the comments.
By evening, my brain is a spreadsheet— with trust issues.
And then. The thought. The unspeakable thought:
Should I do a hedonic calculus on whether doing hedonic calculuses is even worth it?
Intensity: headache. Duration: eternal. Certainty: 100%. Fecundity: terrifying— calculating the pleasure of calculating the pleasure of calculating the pleasure...
Somewhere in the loop, I picture Jeremy Bentham, propped in his glass box at UCL, his real body stuffed in a chair, his wax head staring like a bad museum exhibit. He nods politely— then sighs, because he never meant this. It was just a neat framework, a scaffold for ethics, not a way to rate toast like it's Eurovision.
So I give up, rate the whole day as "medium, could be better," and wonder what rating Bentham would give his glass-box life.
— Lilith