noun1
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- Late 18th–early 19th century, Jeremy Bentham, manuscript cited in Élie Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, Paris: Félix Alcan, Volume 3, 1904, note 55, p. 481,
’Tis vain to talk of adding quantities which after the addition will continue distinct as they were before, one man’s happiness will never be another man’s happiness: a gain to one man is no gain to another: you might as well pretend to add 20 apples to 20 pears, after which you had done that could not be 40 of any one thing but 20 of each just as there was before. This addibility of happiness of different subjects, however when considered rigorously it may appear fictitious, is a postulation without the allowance of which all political reasoning is at a stand:
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