Jeremy Bentham and Émilie Du Châtelet both place happiness at the center of moral thinking, but they arrive there from very different directions. While the two philosophers never met, Bentham was born around a year before Du Châtelet’s death, their concepts of happiness share small similarities and stark differences. Bentham applies happiness into a public moral calculus, a tool for law and policy, while Du Châtelet treats happiness as a series of methods involving personal pursuits of pleasure.

Hedonism

Both philosophers are optimistic that our lives can be improved through reasoning. Bentham’s moral philosophy reduces moral value to the balance of pleasure over pain: the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” becomes an evaluative rule that can (in principle) be applied across acts, laws, and institutions. He famously proposed what we now call the felicific (or hedonistic) calculus to judge the optimality of any public decision, where pleasures and pains can be weighed according to seven factors in which public policy should maximize aggregate utility. Du Châtelet seems to share the basic hedonistic intuition that pleasurable sensations and feelings matter, but she frames the thesis in a much more personal and phenomenological tone. In her Discourse on Happiness she argues that our business in the world is to secure certain sensations and feelings, and that passions are essential sources of those pleasures. But she doesn’t go as far as Bentham in proposing a formal arithmetic system for hedons. Instead, she offers a practical psychology like to preserve your health, free yourself from prejudice, cultivate passions that serve you, cherish illusions, practice virtue for the inward good of conscience, and love study as an independence-producing passion for women especially. Her essay reads like pragmatic advice for shaping one’s inner and outward life so as to be happy within the constraints of one’s station.

Religion as a Means

One striking point of similarity is their shared rejection of religious superstition as an obstacle to happiness. Du Châtelet explicitly criticizes religion as a prejudice that distorts life and obstructs pleasure; she urges readers to clear themselves of prejudices to better pursue happiness. Bentham’s critique is more legalistic, he attacks religious privilege when it stands in the way of rational law and equal treatment and argues for both religious freedom and separation of church and state. Both therefore situate happiness as a secular, achievable through individual pursuits and not governed by God.

Measure for Happiness

Bentham is a systematic consequentialist; moral and political questions are handled by applying a universal metric. His egalitarian move is also radical for the period with each person’s pleasure counts equally in the sum to be maximized, including those of women, with his main motivations to influence major policies surrounding prison, law, and economic reform. Bentham’s happiness is aggregative, where it takes account of all individuals. Du Châtelet’s happiness is individualized and focuses mainly on those of similar status as hers. She writes for “people of quality,” explicitly acknowledging that rank, fortune, and health shape what sorts of pleasures are available and sensible to pursue. She views acceptance of one’s station, moderation of desires, and the cultivation of passions (especially the love of study for women) as a route towards autonomy of happiness that depends less on others. Where Bentham’s system abstracts away from status, Du Châtelet insists that the social structure and one’s place in it are ineliminable parts of happiness. Her ethic is therefore less universalist in practical application even if she retains the Enlightenment ideals of reason.

Émilie Du Châtelet’s home that she shared with Voltaire

Another fundamental difference concerns the role of measurement and the status of qualitative experience. Bentham’s felicific calculus aims to render pleasures commensurable where a moral decision becomes a matter of comparing aspects of pleasure and pain (utility). That methodology promises clear guidance for law and reform but has been criticized for reducing experiences into numerical qualities (e.g., reducing art or friendship to units of utility). Du Châtelet, by contrast, celebrates qualitative variety and distinguishes between tastes and passions, and insists on the importance of illusion not as mere faults in judgement but as a necessary belief that makes many pleasures possible. To her, it seems that the intensity and character of a passion matter in ways that are irreducible to pure numeric quantities. To Bentham, Du Châtelet’s importance on illusion is flawed as they are mere errors in judgement, to believe that happiness derives from errors is just a miscalculation of the consequences of all actions.

Women’s Rights

Gender and social critique add a final layer of similarity. Du Châtelet writes explicitly that study for women is the primary method of independence and happiness because social structures bar most other routes. Her theory of happiness, while limited for women, seems to take light about the facts of societal pressures and aims to provide women with a path towards equality. Bentham, on the other hand, writes that women should have equal rights to happiness and moral consideration, grounding his argument in his principle of utility. He also writes about complete equality of men and women, arguing that women should have equal rights to vote, ask for divorce, and hold government positions. Both authors therefore believe that systemic social barriers hinder women’s capacity to pursue happiness and autonomy. Yet, while du Châtelet offers a practical route toward achieving happiness through education within an unequal society, Bentham envisions structural reform for equality.

Conclusion

Ultimately, this comparison between Bentham and Du Châtelet illuminates two different paths born from a similar hedonistic idea. Bentham’s utilitarianism is a radical project for a social system where it provides a universal, quantitative method for reforming the state, demanding that the law itself be judged by the aggregate happiness it produces. Du Châtelet’s discourse, by contrast, is an aristocratic, self-examined strategy for personal achievement. Her work offers a qualitative path for navigating an imperfect world, one that employs passions, study, and even illusion to secure an individual’s well-being. While Bentham envisions a calculable, egalitarian happiness for decision making.

References

Bentham, J. (1789). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/bentham1780.pdf

Bentham, J. (1995). Colonies, Commerce, and Constitutional Law: Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria and Other Writings on Spain and Spanish America. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.