11 Political Philosophy Utilitarianism and Liberalism n introducing his greatest happiness principle, Bentham was less concerned to provide a criterion for individual moral choices than to offer guidance to rulers and legislators on the management of communities But it is precisely in this area, when we have to consider not just the total quantity of happiness in a community but also its distribution, that the greatest happiness principle, on its own, fails to provide a credible decision procedure Suppose that, by whatever means, we have succeeded in establishing a scale for the measurement of happiness: a scale from to 10 on which represents maximum misery, 10 represents maximum happiness, and a state of indifference Imagine that we are devising political and legal institutions for a society, and that we have a choice between implementing two models The result of adopting model A will be that 60 per cent of the population will score 6, and 40 per cent will score The result of adopting model B will be that 80 per cent of the population will score 10 and 20 per cent will score Faced with such a choice, anyone with a care for either equality or humanity will surely wish to implement model A rather than model B Yet if we operate Bentham’s felicific calculus in the obvious manner, model A scores only 520 points, while model B achieves a total of 800 The principle that we should seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number clearly leads to different results depending on whether we opt to maximize happiness or to maximize the number of happy people The principle needs, at the very least, to be supplemented by some limits on the I