Bentham argued that the end goal of ethics should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, and the number of people affected by an action or policy (extent) was part of his hedonic calculus. Does this mean that Bentham would have preferred universe A, which has 100 people who will experience a collective 100 points of pleasure for 1 year, over universe B which has 25 people who will experience a collective 200 points of pleasure for 2 years, would he factor in the number of beneficiaries as opposed to just the intensity and duration of the actual pleasure itself? Or was 'extent' just his way of aggregating the sum total of pleasure among everyone affected by an action? Just curious.

Also, do you think that propinquity (the nearness or remoteness of the pleasure/pain to be felt), fecundity (the probability that the pleasure will lead to more pleasure) and the purity (the probability that pain will lead to more pain) is necessary? Unless the remoteness of expected pleasure/pain plays a role in how likely it is to occur, why does it matter when it occurs as long as it does? Instead of calculating whether or not the immediate pleasure or pain by X indirectly causes more pleasure/pain, can't we just factor in any indirect pleasure or pain caused to begin with (instead of saying X will cause 5 points of pain, then later on, that pain will indirectly cause another 20 points of pain etc., can't we just say that X will cause 25 points of pain)?

I recall reading that Bentham later revised his statement to just "the greatest happiness," since as you say, it could be the case that a strongly affected minority outweighs a mildly affected majority. I can't remember where I read this -- maybe in one of Singer's articles or on Wikipedia.

As far as your second paragraph, yes, your way is simpler. Presumably Bentham would have agreed, and he was just saying it in a roundabout manner?

I get the impression Bentham wasn't familiar with the concept of expected value, and was basically trying to describe it.

Yeah, I agree with Arepo. It reads like a description of an expected value calculation. In this day and age, his list of seven steps of the hedonic calculus are useful as a list of considerations not to be omitted from an expected value calculation.

Brian is right: Bentham eventually became aware that the formula 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number'--which he borrowed from David Hartley--implied that there were two independent maximanda and as a consequence dropped the second part. This is described in his autobiographical 'Article on Utilitarianism', included in Deontology, Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism (Oxford, 1983), which is unfortunately not available online.

As for Ubuntu's second question, my understanding is that it is unclear whether Bentham discounted future pleasures and pains merely because they were in the future. I recall that Derek Parfit referred to Bentham's six 'marks of pleasures and pains' and interpreted Bentham as endorsing temporal discounting somewhere in Reasons and Persons.