 To many legal theorists that approach appeared, as H.L.A. Hart put it, ‘as a revelation, bringing down to earth an elusive notion and restating it in the same clear, hard, empirical terms as are used in science’ (Hart 2012, 84). The theory supported not only Bentham’s empiricism, but also his utilitarianism, because it privileged what he viewed as the ultimate sensible (and therefore intelligible) ‘affections’: the pain and pleasure that utilitarianism treats as the basis for a theory of value and of morality.