1817 | London

Accounting for Taste

Jeremy Bentham’s typology of pains and pleasures.

PLEASURES and PAINS,

—of the Taste—the Palate—the Alimentary Canal—of Intoxication.

——

Corresponding Interest, Interest of the PALATE—Interest of the Bottle.

——

Corresponding MOTIVES—with Names,

I. Neutral : viz.

  1. Hunger.

    2. ——

  2. Need of food.
  3. Want of food.
  4. Desire of food.
  5. Fear of hunger.

    6. ——

  6. Thirst.
  7. Drought.

    8. ——

  8. Need, want, desire—of the means of quenching, relieving, abating, &c. thirst.

    9. ——

  9. Inanition.

II. Eulogistic : viz.

Proper, none.

——

Improper.

  1. Love of the pleasures of the social board—of the social bowl, or glass—of good cheer—of good living—of the good goddess—of the jolly god, &c.

III. Dyslogistic : viz.

  1. Gluttony.
  2. Gulosity.
  3. Voracity.
  4. Voraciousness.
  5. Greediness.
  6. Ravenousness.

    7. ——

  7. Liquorishness.
  8. Daintiness.

    9. ——

  9. Love, appetite, craving, hankering, propensity, eagerness, passion, rage—of, for, to, and after cramming, stuffing, devouring, gormandizing, gutting, &c.
  10. Drunkenness.
  11. Ebriety.
  12. Intoxication.
  13. Sottishness.

    14. ——

      
  • Love, &c. (as per No. 9) of &c. drink, liquor—drinking, tippling, toping, boozing, guzzling, swilling, soaking, sotting, carousing—junketing, reveling, &c.
Painted portrait of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
Contributor

Jeremy Bentham

From A Table of the Springs of Action. Published twenty-eight years after his Principles of Morals and Legislation, this tract includes several tables illustrating his philosophy of utilitarianism, in which the morality of human actions are judged by the pleasure or pain they produce. “Through an exaggerated zeal for utility,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Bentham “overstepped the limits of his own doctrine, and thus became a radical both in politics and in religion.” Karl Marx referred to Bentham as “a genius of bourgeois stupidity.”