A Fragment on Government (1776)
Attack on Blackstone's Commentaries; states that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong"
Philosophy
Jeremy Bentham
1748–1832 · English
Utilitarianism; legal positivism; philosophical radicalism
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist and social reformer, the founder of modern utilitarianism. He held that the right action or law is the one that produces the greatest happiness, and he applied this principle relentlessly to law, punishment, prisons and government.
How to spot them
- ▸"The greatest happiness of the greatest number"; the felicific (hedonic) calculus
- ▸The Panopticon prison design
- ▸The auto-icon: his preserved skeleton and wax head at University College London
- ▸Natural rights as "nonsense upon stilts"
Key works
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
Opens by declaring that nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure; sets out the principle of utility
Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House (1791)
Design for a circular prison in which inmates can be watched from a central tower without knowing when
Anarchical Fallacies (1796)
Critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, calling natural and imprescriptible rights "nonsense upon stilts" (written c. 1796, published 1816 in French)
Key ideas
- Principle of utility: actions and laws are right insofar as they tend to promote happiness (pleasure and the absence of pain) and wrong insofar as they produce the reverse
- Psychological and ethical hedonism: pleasure and pain govern what we do and determine what we ought to do
- Felicific calculus: pleasures and pains can be measured by intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent
- Pleasures differ only in quantity, not quality: "the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry" if it gives equal pleasure — a view J. S. Mill later modified
- Legal positivism: law is the command of a sovereign; there are no natural rights, only legal rights created by law
- The moral status of animals rests on their capacity to suffer, not to reason or talk
Quick-fire facts
- •Wrote of animals: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
- •His body was dissected and his skeleton, dressed in his clothes with a wax head, is displayed as the auto-icon at UCL
- •Often called the "spiritual father" of UCL, though he did not found it
- •Coined the words "international", "maximise" and "codification"
- •Mentor of James Mill, who raised his son John Stuart Mill as a utilitarian
- •Founded the Westminster Review (1823), the journal of the Philosophic Radicals
- •Entered Queen's College, Oxford, aged 12
- •The phrase "greatest happiness of the greatest number" had earlier appeared in Francis Hutcheson and (in Italian) Cesare Beccaria
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Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Jeremy Bentham
- Anthony Kenny — A New History of Western Philosophy