History
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an influential English philosopher and social reformer in the 18th and 19th centuries. He is best known for his development of utilitarianism, a moral theory that advocates for actions that maximize overall happiness and minimize suffering. Bentham's ideas had a significant impact on political and legal reform, and his work continues to be influential in the fields of ethics and political philosophy.
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12 Key excerpts on "Jeremy Bentham"
eBook - ePub- Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey, Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
Jeremy Bentham 1748–1832 JAMES MILL 1773–1836 Jeremy Bentham may be variously described as a political and legal philosopher, a social reformer, the founder of utilitarianism, and a philosophe. “Utilitarianism” indicates the view that whether an act is right or wrong depends on whether one believes its consequences to be good or bad. For Bentham, “good” and “bad” refer to pleasures or pains produced in the experiences of individual human beings. “Philosophe” refers to a category of European intellectuals of the eighteenth century, among whom Bentham enjoyed much more immediate success than in his native England. Like the philosophes, Bentham believed that the human condition must inevitably improve through the sheer proliferation of knowledge in the sense of encyclopedic information, coupled with abstract principles for classifying the information and putting it to work in reforming society. 1 Bentham distrusted inherited experience and features of political order defended by appeal to traditional acceptance. Reliance on past practice was, to him, a sign of ignorance. In this view, ignorance, to Bentham, was a problem with a solution. The antidote to ignorance was to become well informed. Not surprisingly, then, Bentham rejected with scorn the notion of Socratic ignorance. The latter points to the mysterious difficulty of reaching any fixed, final understanding of the fundamental questions of how we ought to live. According to Plato’s Socrates, questions of right and wrong, good and bad, the beautiful and the ugly, must apparently ever be in dispute in political life (Euthyphro, 7 d). The beginning of wisdom would be always to keep in mind this sobering and limiting condition in our arguments with each other. The follower of Socrates may question the received opinions of society but not necessarily to overthrow them, since it is always possible that those opinions may be discovered to be worthy of support
eBook - ePubA History of Western Thought
From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century
- Nils Gilje, Gunnar Skirbekk(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
chapter 14 Utilitarianism and liberalismJeremy Bentham AND JAMES MILL – HEDONIC CALCULUS AND LEGAL REFORM
BENTHAM
The British jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was one of the so-called philosophical radicals who pressed for legal reforms in British society. Hence, he criticized certain aspects of that society. But the critic must have a normative standard from which to criticize. In line with the utilitarian-empiricist tradition, Bentham accepted neither the idea of natural rights nor that of contract theory. The only justification for authority and for political changes are human needs, namely, utility and pleasure. Here, Bentham followed Helvétius:1 Pleasure and pain are the causes of human action; therefore, we can influence human behaviour by changing the relationship between pleasure and pain.2 Pleasure is what justifies legislation and political authority.We have previously mentioned that the first point in this scheme may represent an unacceptable simplification, and that the second point may entail a logical short-circuit insofar as something that is normative, namely, justification, is held to follow from something that is descriptive, namely, the assertion that everyone seeks pleasure.Bentham followed Helvétius in that he took the utilitarian principle of the greatest possible happiness (utility) for the greatest number of people as the fundamental normative standard. What is new in Bentham’s thought is that he, more consistently than the others, used this principle as a guideline for legal reforms, and that he developed a system for calculating what provides the most pleasure.Bentham’s calculation of pleasure and pain considers the various factors that determine which actions and situations, as a whole, provide the most pleasure. This calculation involves the intensity of pleasure or pain, how long the pleasure or pain lasts, how certain it is that pleasure or pain will occur, how long that pleasure or pain will persist, how many persons are involved, and how various experiences of pleasure and pain interfere with one another.
eBook - ePub- John Shand, John Shand(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
the principle of utility, according to which “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” (B i.227). Over the following half century, he demonstrated that this principle required comprehensive political and legal reforms, including an overthrow of the traditional aristocracy in favor of democracy, social equality, and personal and economic liberty. Earlier philosophers had declared that utility or happiness was central to morality and public life, but it was Bentham who finally laid out a systematic utilitarian moral and political theory, as well as a set of institutional reforms based on those ideas.Bentham's historical significance is underappreciated today, but the civil, constitutional, and penal codes he developed to promote the general happiness had wide influence in Great Britain and beyond. He became an inspiration for the radical politics of the early nineteenth century, arguing in particular that democratic accountability is needed to ensure that government works for the universal interest, and not for the sinister (or partial) interest of a person or group. The principle of utility requires that each person's happiness count equally in the justification of policy, regardless of social rank, race, or gender.In Britain, Bentham's arguments motivated an impressive collection of thinkers and political reformers loosely referred to as the Philosophical Radicals.2 Most influential among them at the time were James Mill (1773–1836) and, later, his son John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). If Bentham was the intellectual godfather of this group, James Mill was initially its strongest personality and practical leader, whose “Essay on Government” (1820) served as a guiding text. Like Bentham, he argued especially that good government required democratic accountability to maintain an “identity of interest” between the rulers and the ruled (Mill 1992 , p. 22). Despite his own philosophical achievements, however, perhaps his greatest contribution was training his son into the utilitarian fold. Like Bentham, John Stuart Mill was a child prodigy. By his teens he became a significant contributor to the radical program and, owing to later works such as Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women
- A. R. M. Murray(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
CHAPTER XII The Utilitarian Theories of Bentham and Mill Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806– 1873) are the outstanding exponents of the theory known as Utilitarianism, which was destined to exercise a profound influence upon both political and economic thought in England during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The theory stands in sharp contrast to the idealism of Hegel in the stress which it lays upon the primacy of the individual and the artificial character of the state. Bentham was born in London on 15 February, 1748, and was educated at Westminster School and Queen’s College, Oxford, which he entered at the age of thirteen. He was called to the Bar in 1769. At Oxford he had acquired a considerable interest in natural science, and he soon realized that his true inclination lay not in the practice of law but in the examination and criticism of its moral basis. He therefore decided to devote his life to working out a scientific system of jurisprudence and legislation. A private income made this possible, and he published a considerable number of books, of which the best known and most important is the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. In this work Bentham sought to work out a scientific basis for a legal code. The book brought him an international reputation, and his advice on legal codification was sought by several foreign governments. At home, apart from his literary interests, he was engaged for nearly twenty-five years in negotiations for the erection of a ‘Panopticon’, or model prison in which all convicts could be observed by an unseen inspector; and when this scheme was finally abandoned Bentham claimed, and received, £23,000 by way of compensation from the Government. Other varied activities engaged him in his later years. In 1823 he established the Westminster Review, and later put forward schemes for canals through the isthmus of Suez and the isthmus of Panama
eBook - ePubJustice and Cities
Metro Morals
- Mark Davidson(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Image 2.1 ), as per his final will and testament.Source: Wiki Commons.Image 2.1Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon on display at the Metropolitan Museum, New York City, 2018.Bentham (1748–1832) wrote his contributions to political philosophy during the late 1700s and early 1800s. During this time, he lived and worked in London. His key contribution to political philosophy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, was published in 1780. In it, Bentham lays out a fully formed theory of utilitarianism. This was philosophy written with a purpose. Bentham was an avid social reformer. His writings were never meant for the academe. London would impress on him this need for a popular audience. During the 1760s and 1770s, the city was experiencing what would become the hallmark changes of the early industrial city: canals were being dug, bridges constructed, the Stock Exchange opened, building regulations passed, new diseases were rampant, commercial fortunes made, and riots squashed. This scene was consequently impressing on the city’s residents the need to develop new institutions, sciences, and political judgments. Since Bentham wrote into this context, one way to understand utilitarianism is as a particularly urban political philosophy.Everyone is intuitively familiar with utilitarianism’s central premise: that political and moral decisions should be based on what best for the whole community (i.e., majoritarianism). This makes utilitarianism a consequentialist theory of justice (see Box 2.3 ) since it defines justice by its outcomes. For a utilitarian, something is morally just when the “happiness” of a population is maximized. Of course, such a simple proposition can quickly become complicated. It is not always easy to know what is best for a community, or what makes people happy. Utilitarian theorists, people like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (1806–73), therefore set out to work through the theoretical and political problems associated with this simple proposition. Mill (2010 ; also see Cowling, 1990
eBook - ePub- H. Scott Gordon(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 7 that a focus upon worldly happiness was a central element in the ethical philosophy of the Scottish moralists. Francis Hutcheson, the first member of the group, was the one who coined the motto that later came to represent the utilitarian credo: ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’. But precursors are only precursors, after all. It is Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) who must be acknowledged the founder of utilitarianism, because he did not merely state the principle; he commenced to build upon it an edifice of positive and normative social analysis, which his followers elaborated and extended throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, without diminution of influence down to the present day.Young Jeremy Bentham was a precocious child who read adult literature at the age of three and had a good knowledge of Greek and Latin by the age of six. His father expected great things of him and aimed his son for a career in law. At twelve years old he was ready for university, so he was sent to Oxford, where William Blackstone, the most renowned authority on law in Britain, was teaching. After graduation he went on to one of the London Inns of Court, the next step in becoming a practising barrister. But young Bentham had a mind of his own that survived the assiduous efforts of parent and teachers to turn him into a great lawyer. His study of law convinced him that what the law needed was not another practitioner who could argue cases with a great display of learning and scholastic reasoning, but someone who would undertake to reform the English legal system, root and branch, changing not only the substantive content of the law but its basic philosophical foundations. So Bentham’s father educated a son to become a distinguished lawyer, perhaps even a Lord Chancellor and elevate the Bentham family line to the aristocracy, only to have raised instead a thoroughgoing radical, who never practised, never held office, and, since he remained a bachelor, did nothing even to continue the Bentham name, let alone raise it to the peerage.
eBook - ePubRoutledge History of Philosophy Volume VII
The Nineteenth Century
- C. L. Ten(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
CHAPTER 1 The early utilitarians Bentham and James Mill G.L.Williams Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748 in London; his prosperous father, a lawyer who became wealthy from property rather than the law, planned out for his son a brilliant legal career. After an early education at Westminster and Oxford he was called to the Bar in 1769. However, instead of mastering the complexities, technicalities, precedents and mysteries of the law in order to carve out a successful career, Bentham’s response to such chaos and absurdity was to challenge the whole structure of law and to attempt to replace it with a system as perfect and as rational as it could be. In many ways a typical philosophe of the eighteenth century, Bentham at this early stage seized on the possibility of improvement through knowledge, on the supremacy of reason over superstition and of order over chaos. Despite his living and writing into the new age of the nineteenth century—post-revolutionary, industrialized, democratic—this early inspiration that enlightenment would bring about a better world never left him. To help create a world as it might be—as it ought to be—rather than succeed in a world as it was—customary, prejudiced and corrupt—was his constant aim whatever the particular object he pursued within his encyclopaedic interests, and whether the study be abstract and philosophical or detailed and practical. His central concern was the study of legislation, a concern developed from his own disillusionment with the state of English law and his positive response to the works of those like Helvetius and Beccaria who had argued that there must be some general and rational test as to the adequacy of existing law in order to justify its reform
- Susan Dimock(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Thus he says: “Ethics at large may be defined, the art of directing men’s actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness, on the part of those whose interest is in view” (Principles of Morals and Legislation 17:2). Here we come closer to the current understanding of the principle of utility, which requires that individuals act so as to produce the greatest amount of happiness possible. In this form, utilitarianism is a maximizing doctrine: everyone must act so as to maximize the total amount of good in the world, insofar as they have it within their power to do so. Bentham is widely recognized as the founder of modern utilitarianism, but our concern is directly with his application of utilitarianism to the issue of legal punishment. His basic position is that all punishment is an evil, because it produces pain, anxiety, and loss, and so it requires justification. The justification must, according to the utilitarian theory, be framed in terms of the good consequences that such punishment may bring about. Indeed, in order to be justified, it must be the case that punishment produces more good than the harm it does, and more good than any available alternative response to illegal behavior. After exploring the various goods that might be thought to come about as a result of punishing, Bentham considers some cases in which those benefits cannot be expected, and thus in which punishment must be deemed inappropriate. Finally, he considers a series of principles that lawmakers ought to follow when determining how severely different crimes should be punished. Jeremy Bentham: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation [From Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: 1789). The present selection is reprinted from the 1823 edition, which contains the author’s final corrections
eBook - ePubLoyal Dissent
Brief Lives of Westminster School
- Patrick Derham, Ian Donaldson, A. C. Grayling, James Campbell, Peter Cox, Nick Clegg(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- University of Buckingham Press(Publisher)
Bentham argued that what he came to call “utilitarianism” imposes an obligation on legislators as well as individuals to “minister to general happiness,” an obligation which, he said, is “paramount to and inclusive of every other.” He used the term “utility” to denote “[whatever] tends to produce benefit, advantage, good or happiness,” these all being synonymous in Bentham’s usage. He defined the principle of utility itself as “that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” Although Bentham refined and developed these ideas during the course of his long life and many writings, this was the core of what he sought to put to work across the whole range of his interests.Note that utilitarianism, whether of Bentham’s or later more elaborate kinds, is a “consequentialist” theory of morality, that is, one which understands moral value in terms only of the consequences of actions, leaving aside any questions about the intentions of agents or their characters. Other theories of morality focus on the latter, but the distinctive feature of utilitarian theories is that they measure right and wrong, good and bad, wholly as a matter of expected outcomes. Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who are jointly known as the “Classical Utilitarians” though the latter made a number of advances over Bentham’s version of the view, agreed in regarding happiness as the greatest good, and each person’s happiness as being equal in value to anyone else’s. This means that working to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number – that is, the greatest good – is done impartially; anyone’s reason for promoting the good is the same as anyone else’s reason for doing so.It is immediately obvious that there is a tension at the heart of this view. Bentham regarded pleasure and pain as “sovereign masters” which, as he put it, “govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.” This view is known as Hedonism, and it is in essence an egoistic or self-regarding view. How is this fact about each of us, if fact it is, consistent with the demand to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, when my own “sovereign masters” might drive me to act in ways that advantage me at the expense of the general happiness? Life demonstrates that this tends to happen rather more often than does generalised altruism.
eBook - ePub- Kath M Melia(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
7 Utilitarianism – Greatest Happiness TheoryThe ultimate end or object of human life: something that is in itself completely satisfying. Happiness fits this description.(Aristotle, Ethics, 384–322 BC)Utilitarianism is the doctrine that we should always act so as to maximize the good (whatever ‘good’ may be, or whatever may be good) (MacCormick, 2008: 107). Given the complexity of health care provision and in particular the practice of nursing, MacCormick's somewhat sceptical description of utilitarianism has some resonance for health care. It also, by and large, is a good definition of the theory, which is also known as the ‘greatest happiness’ principle.Among the oft-used theories in medical and nursing ethics texts, utilitarianism is perhaps the best known. This consequence-based theory of Jeremy Bentham1 (1748–1842) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73) centres on the idea of the greatest happiness, or good, for the greatest number. At its simplest, a utilitarian theory would hold that an action is right or wrong as judged by the good or bad consequences yielded (Smart and Williams, 1973: 9). The basic principle in operation here, as the name implies, is utility. Utility, as Bentham and Mill's usage of the word shows us, had a wider meaning than it does its contemporary use. So whilst the ‘greatest happiness theory’ may sound rather arcane to our 21st-century ears, it does convey the wider sentiment, including the idea of pleasure. The sentiment is, though, difficult to measure and this is a problem because the theory rests on a calculation of the greatest good for the greatest number.1 Bentham was a reformer and an altruistic man; he was the first, as far as we know, to give his body to anatomy for dissection. His skeleton is in on display in University College London (Mill, 1962).The ‘greatest good’ as a slogan, as it might be viewed today, is fine but how to put it into practice as a policy is another matter. A contemporary analogy would be when the government of the day claims that the health service is safe in their hands (and all political parties make this claim one way or another); it is a good sentiment, but we have to ask what exactly does it mean?
eBook - ePub- Ferdinand Mount(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Simon & Schuster UK(Publisher)
Introduction , p. 34, italics are Bentham’s) So, willy-nilly, we are driven off the Benthamite individual physical criterion and back on to communally determined standards of right and wrong.But let us assume for a moment that we are agreed on Bentham’s guiding principle. How are we to evaluate, let alone achieve ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’? How are we to maximize that happiness? Here we come to what, I think, is a genuine discovery of Bentham’s – or at least a more precise working out of something of which his predecessors were only dimly aware. This is the principle of ‘marginal utility’, a key element in his felicific calculus, and one that continues to bear fruit today, especially in economics.Why was it fair, for example, to redistribute some of the wealth of the rich man to his poorer neighbours? Because £10 was worth much more to the poor man than to the millionaire. Money had a diminishing marginal utility as you travelled up the income scale: ‘The effect of wealth in the production of happiness goes on diminishing, as the quantity by which the wealth of one man exceeds that of another goes on increasing: in other words, the quantity of happiness produced by a particle of wealth . . . will be less and less at every particle.’ (Dinwiddy, p. 52; Works , III, p. 229) This idea of marginal utility can be applied not just to income distribution, but to almost any practical decision we take or refrain from taking: to work more hours, or to take on more debt, for example. In that sense, we are all calculators of our own marginal felicity. It is from Bentham’s calculus that is born the modern economist’s model man who seeks always to maximize his satisfactions.In this field, Bentham had a sharper sense of reality even than Adam Smith. His best known economic writing, Defence of Usury (1787), criticizes Smith for supporting the legal maximum on interest rates (which Pitt was thinking of reducing from 5 per cent to 4 per cent at the time). Bentham thought that lenders and borrowers had a better sense of the risks and rewards involved than any government official could have. Those who justified such restrictions as necessary ‘to restrain projects and projectors’ ought to remember that economic progress depended on risk-taking: ‘for think, Sir, let me beg of you [he was addressing Adam Smith, normally his economic mentor], whether whatever is now the routine of trade, was not, at its commencement, project ? whether whatever is now establishment was not, at one time, innovation?’ (Defence of Usury
eBook - ePubPublic Reason in Political Philosophy
Classic Sources and Contemporary Commentaries
- Piers Norris Turner, Gerald Gaus, Piers Norris Turner, Gerald Gaus(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
7Jeremy Bentham: THEORIST OF PUBLICITYGerald J. Postema1Publicity is a pervasive theme running through Bentham’s moral, political, and legal theory. Publicity is foundational to his thought. Bentham was one of the first theorists of publicity of the modern era, and surely its most thorough. He knitted together a systematic theory of (what we would now call) public reason, integrating utility and law into a complex framework for public reasoning, with a detailed architecture of public spaces, articulating key institutions and incentives for public accountability and public deliberation. However, despite its fundamental role in Bentham’s thought, publicity has rarely been the focus of critical discussion of his work. This may be due to the fact that Bentham highlighted publicity only relatively late in his career and much of his early work in which publicity plays a critical role is as yet unpublished. In this chapter, I will document Bentham’s reliance on the idea of publicity throughout his career and demonstrate its centrality to his moral, legal, and political thought.21 Utility as Public Reason
Bentham maintained resolutely throughout his life that the principle of utility is the foundation of all moral judgment, the principle by which every action, practice, law, institution, code, and constitution is to be judged. This ruler and decider of all things (UC 96.73) sets the only right and proper (ultimate) end of government,3 underwrites and guides the analysis and construction of law (LPBJ 224), and provides the sole measure of moral right and wrong.4 It “furnishes us with that reason , which alone depends not upon any higher reason, but which is itself the sole and all-sufficient reason for every point of practice whatsoever” (FG 448, author’s emphasis).Bentham recognized that this “principium generalissimum” (UC 96.75) cannot be defended directly, but he frequently offered a telling indirect argument for it (IPML ch. 2). He observed, to begin, that moral judgments express the sentiments of approbation or disapprobation (B viii, 93) of persons making the judgments, just as empirical judgments express beliefs. But moral judgments are not “mere averment[s] of one’s unfounded sentiments” (IPML 14), or “mere opinion of men self-constituted into Legislators” (UC 69.190); rather, they purport to direct attention to something beyond the sentiment or opinion of the appraiser. Appraisers disapprove of some act or object, “conceiving at the same time that it will be alike disapproved of by most others,” because they appreciate or respond to the same judgment-independent ground. They appeal beyond the sentiment of the appraiser to “something that is fixed and certain, and that all men are agreed about, and that it could be told by certain indications independent of opinion, whether a given course of conduct was reasonable [good, right, or ought to be done] or otherwise” (CoC 159). Moral judgments claim to be appraiser-transcendent and point to something in the world on which the appraiser’s judgment rests, something others could access and assess. In the absence of such appraiser-transcending grounds, expressions of sentiments of approbation and disapprobation are arbitrary, a matter of the appraiser’s whim or caprice, which could only be either “despotical” (because one imposes one’s idiosyncratic sentiments on everyone else without allowing them the same privilege) or “anarchical” (allowing as many standards as there are appraisers) (IPML 11, 14, 15).
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