Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard
(Allen Lane, £17.99)
In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Jeremy Bentham describes his “felicific calculus”—an algorithm for working out the amount of happiness likely to be caused by a given action. Under Bentham’s utilitarianism, the right action is that which leads to the greatest happiness. So the felicific calculus—including such variables as intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity and purity—provided people with a scientific method for determining how to behave morally.
This approach to an aspect of human existence as apparently intangible as happiness seems anachronistic, a curious artefact of late-Enlightenment optimism. And this is how many 20th-century moral philosophers have seen it. But Richard Layard, Labour peer and labour economist, has reheated Bentham for the 21st century.
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