| Summary: | James Mill sur la moralité et la décision : une question de calcul. === Through the part it played in the formation of William Stanley Jevons’s mathematical theory of economics (Nathalie Sigot 2002), Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus seems to have influenced recent views on individual behavior and decisional issues (William Stark 1946; Collison R. D. Black 1988). Obviously, this influence was complex, such that Bentham’s teaching remained far from being a mere pre-figuration of the standard approach (see, forinstance, Andre Lapidus & Sigot 2000). This conjunction between an influence on the standard approach and an analysis which was irreducible to it, recalls that Bentham’s own period was also a turning point: that of a passage from the moral debates of the eighteenth century, to the first formulation of the manner in which decision-making became understood from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. It is from this point of view that James Mill was to play a crucial part, and not only as a well-known friend of Bentham and as official spokesman for classical Utilitarianism. James Mill had something to say about calculation, which had specific relevance for him through the importance he gave to associationism and, more generally, to psychological matters.
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