Bentham regarded everything in a utilitarian way: instead of being cremated, which he could see no benefit in, he left instructions to be dissected in front of two hundred students for their anatomical assistance. His body was then kept on display as a reminder to people of the absence of God and the afterlife and that people should live their lives to the maximum. As a result of utilitarianism, Bentham believed honesty was not intrinsically good but was in fact an instrumental value leading to happiness.
Through this theory, Bentham developed "The Hedonic Calculus." This is the concept that human pleasures and pains are quantifiable, therefore actions can be judged right or wrong on the basis of moral arithmetic. The mathematics involved correspond to the amount of pleasure or pain and/or pain the actions contain. Bentham admitted that the experience of pleasure is complex and that pleasures are rarely completely "pure." As a result most actions have both pleasurable and painful elements within them. He developed this in his calculus. To a person considered by himself, the value of pleasure or pain considered by itself will be greater or less, according to the following circumstances: its intensity, both pleasure and pain are taken into account. For example taking drugs, the pleasure being extreme but the pain generally being inferior; its Duration, the length of time the pleasure/pain lasts and also potential pain; its certainty or uncertainty, how sure you can be that the action will create as much pleasure as expected; its propinquity; its fecundity, how positive you are that the action will lead to extra pleasure/pain, knock on effects. For example, Capital Punishment may decrease the number of murders but if it simultaneously reduces burglaries then this is an additional benefit. Consequently, more points would be added. Its purity, the chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind.
