Claim. Bentham’s utilitarian ethics, while wrong to reduce happiness to material pleasure, was providentially proposed for the sake of restoring the environment as the Second Advent of Christ approached, paralleling Kant’s role in restoring human beings.
Elaboration. Lee’s appraisal of Bentham (Unification Thought Appraisal of Bentham’s Perspective of Ethics) is more sympathetic than his appraisal of Kant. Bentham was right against Kant that a good act is one that leads to happiness; his error was reducing happiness to material pleasure, calculable quantitatively. Advanced countries today demonstrate that material prosperity is insufficient for true happiness — social disorder and crime increase even amid affluence.
The striking move is the providential framing: ‘Bentham’s thought was proposed for the sake of restoring the environment… from the providential viewpoint, such philosophies become necessary as the Second Advent of Christ approaches.’ Kant, by contrast, ‘advocated a philosophy for the sake of restoring human beings.’ The two philosophers thus map onto the two restoration tracks Divine Principle posits: restoration of fallen-nature inside the person (Kant: duty, character) and restoration of the fallen environment outside the person (Bentham: material conditions, social reform). Communism appears later as another environment-restoring philosophy but goes wrong by adopting violent revolution.
This is a remarkable historiographical claim: major Western philosophers are reinterpreted as providentially-deployed instruments preparing for the Messiah’s return, each carrying partial truth corresponding to one aspect of restoration. True happiness, Lee concludes, requires unified spiritual and material restoration, achievable only on a standard of goodness that harmonizes both.
The move is unfalsifiable from outside the framework — once any philosophical movement can be retrofitted as providentially-deployed, the schema absorbs all data — but it does explain why Unification Thought engages traditional ethics charitably rather than dismissively. Each tradition is a partial truth corresponding to a stage of providence. Worth a thread once a counter atomic on providential historiography exists.
See also. kant-categorical-imperative-fails-without-purpose-of-creation, modern-axiology-failed-greek-and-christian-decline, pragmatism-inverts-the-purpose-life-relation