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If Bentham posited a sense of guilt as pain that most would feel when doing wrong by others, then surely Utilitarianism would be unnecessary due to Bentham's own work on the motivation of human beings.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

If Bentham were to maintain this view whilst considering a sense of guilt as pain then wouldn't we naturally behave in a morally permissible way?

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    The point you have made is a good point. However, consider that guilt is not the only source of pain. If doing something that makes you feel guilty causes the least amount of pain and the most pleasure compared to other methods, Bentham would consider this method the moral one.
    – Cicero
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 22:27
  • I never thought of including guilt as a pain. Perhaps this could change certain utilitarian calculations.
    – Cicero
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 22:27
  • My hunch is Bentham was painting in broad strokes, and left the rest "as an exercise to the reader".
    – Hudjefa
    Commented Aug 10 at 5:01
  • Guilt as an emotional response is subjective to the moral actors and recipients of the action, so I doubt he'd have intended for it to be measured quantitively. Perhaps this is why a form of non-hedonistic utilitarianism might be superior to Bentham's theory.
    – sket
    Commented Sep 12 at 16:13

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Guilt would serve suitably to make us utilitarians iff guilt were perfectly causally correlated to the proportion of pain and pleasure any act we did caused. That is, if a harmful act always caused a person to feel guilty and did so in proportion to the amount of harm caused weighed against the pleasure produced by the act (for the doer and for others) then guilt would be an adequate guide to acting in accordance with utilitarian considerations.

Unfortunately, guilt is not guaranteed. For example, I have broken promises I believe would have been better in toto to keep and not felt guilty for doing so. Or, Ted Bundy said he did not feel guilt for his actions:

B: I mean, I feel no guilt or remorse, but they don’t understand. (this book, page 217)

Our feelings, guilt included, poorly correlate to objective (howsoever construed) states of affairs, including the consequences on pain and pleasure our actions have.

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You can factor guilt into the calculation, but the conclusion that this would lead to naturally behaving morally does not follow.

Take, for example, the classic example of the trolley problem. Let's say that pulling the lever causes a great degree of psychological distress/guilt that later leads to your suicide. Pulling the lever still remains the utilitarian choice, as now the calculation is five lives saved weighed against two lives ruined instead of one.

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