Ian Shapiro, teaching Yale's Moral Foundations of Politics course, opens the class's treatment of Enlightenment political theory with Jeremy Bentham's classical utilitarianism. Drawing on Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation, Shapiro lays out the principle of utility, the idea that all people seek pleasure and avoid pain, and argues that Bentham's system has five defining features: it is comprehensive and deterministic, pre-Darwinian in its naturalism, egoistic without being subjectivist, strongly consequentialist, and premised on utility being measurable and comparable across persons. He connects this to Bentham's view that government exists to maximize the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The lecture then tests the theory against Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment, the problem of public goods, and the tragedy of the commons, weighing where classical utilitarianism holds up and where it strains.