Bentham's Pleasure Calculator

Jeremy Bentham tried to make hedonism scientific with his felicific calculus — a system for measuring pleasure along seven dimensions: intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, fecundity, purity, and extent.

The idea that pleasure could be measured like temperature was radical. Bentham imagined laws judged purely by their net pleasure production: whatever creates more pleasure than pain for the most people is good. In practice the calculus failed, because real pleasures resist being put on a single scale.