James Mac Kaye - The Economy of Happiness

The Economy of Happiness

In this highly original but now largely forgotten work, MacKaye attempted to rescue the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham from the changes that this doctrine had subsequently undergone as a result of John Stuart Mill's moderating influence. MacKaye conceived human beings—and sentient beings generally—as mechanisms of transforming resources into happiness, which he argued was the only intrinsic good. The goal of a society was therefore viewed by MacKaye as the problem of finding that arrangement which would produce the highest output of happiness attainable given the inputs available. As he wrote,

That which society should seek to attain, the maximum surplus of happiness, may be referred to by different names according to the relation in which we think of it, e.g. the utilitarian end, the end or object of utility, of society or of justice, and so forth. It is in the nature of a perfectly definite magnitude. Quantities of pain or pleasure may be regarded as magnitudes having the same definiteness as tons of pig iron, barrels of sugar, bushels of wheat, yards of cotton, or pounds of wool; and as political economy seeks to ascertain the conditions under which these commodities may be produced with the greatest efficiency--so the economy of happiness seeks to ascertain the conditions under which happiness, regarded as a commodity, may be produced with the greatest efficiency--how the maximum output of happiness may be achieved with the means available. In order to ascertain what these conditions are, we need to proceed as any manufacturer trained to his business would proceed, were he endeavoring to ascertain how he could most economically produce beer, or molasses, or oil, or tacks. He would satisfy himself by the inductive or common sense method what laws and resources of nature and of human nature were available under conditions as he found them, and the means thus available he would, to the best of his ability, adapt to his ends. Our problem is a similar one, and we shall adopt similar means to solve it.

MacKaye concluded that the form of social organization most conducive to that goal was a particular type of socialism which he dubbed "pantocracy".