Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist and social reformer, the founder of modern utilitarianism (Utilitarianism). His Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) proposed that the sole standard of right and wrong, in private conduct and public law alike, is the principle of utility — the tendency of an action to promote happiness, understood as pleasure and the absence of pain. From this single principle he derived a lifelong programme of reform: codification of the law, democratic suffrage, the secret ballot, prison reform, the abolition of the death penalty and of slavery, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the protection of animals. He designed the Panopticon, an all-seeing prison. With his disciples James Mill and John Stuart Mill, the “Philosophical Radicals”, he shaped nineteenth-century British liberalism.

Life

Bentham was born on 15 February 1748 in Houndsditch, London, the son of a prosperous lawyer. A prodigy — he was reading Latin at three — he entered Queen’s College, Oxford, at twelve, and was trained for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. But listening to the lectures of William Blackstone, the great authority on English law, he was repelled by what he saw as its complacency and confusion, and resolved instead to reform the law on rational principles. His first book, A Fragment on Government (1776), attacked Blackstone. Supported by his father and then by an inheritance, he spent the rest of his long life writing — tens of thousands of manuscript pages, much still being edited — at his house in Queen Square Place, Westminster, which he called his “Hermitage”. He travelled to Russia (1785–87), where his brother Samuel was managing estates for Prince Potemkin and where the Panopticon idea was born. He was made an honorary citizen of the French Republic in 1792. He founded the Westminster Review (1823), and his ideas inspired the founding of University College London (1826), the first English university to admit students regardless of religion. He died on 6 June 1832, the day before the Great Reform Act received royal assent.

The principle of utility

The Introduction opens: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” Every human being seeks pleasure and avoids pain; the right standard of conduct is therefore the one that produces “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (a phrase he took from Joseph Priestley and Beccaria and later refined as “the greatest happiness principle”). All other principles — the “moral sense”, the law of nature, the will of God, “sympathy and antipathy” — are either disguised appeals to utility or mere expressions of the speaker’s prejudice.

To apply the principle, Bentham proposed the felicific (or hedonic) calculus: the value of a pleasure or pain depends on its intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity (its tendency to produce more pleasures), purity (its freedom from pains) and extent (the number of persons affected). The legislator adds up the pleasures and pains an action or law will produce for everyone affected, and chooses the greatest balance. Pleasures differ only in quantity, not quality: “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.”

Law and punishment

Bentham’s main concern was legislation. Since punishment is itself a pain, it is justified only if it prevents greater pains; punishment should be proportioned to deterrence, not to vengeance or desert. He distinguished descriptive “expository” jurisprudence from “censorial” jurisprudence, which asks what the law ought to be, and proposed codifying the whole of English law into clear, rational codes (he coined “codification”). He was a founder of legal positivism: law is the command of the sovereign, and its existence is one thing, its merit another.

Nonsense upon stilts

In Anarchical Fallacies, a critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, Bentham wrote: “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.” Rights are created by laws; there are no rights prior to and independent of government. Talk of natural rights, he feared, encouraged anarchy, since anyone could claim that any law violated them.

Animals and sexual freedom

In a famous footnote of the Introduction, Bentham argued that the day might come when animals would be protected by law, as slaves were beginning to be: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” The passage became a founding text of the animal welfare movement. In unpublished essays written around 1785, he argued that sexual acts between consenting persons of the same sex harm no one and should not be punished — at a time when they carried the death penalty in England.

The Panopticon

Bentham’s design for a prison, the Panopticon (“all-seeing”), was a circular building with cells around the circumference and an inspector’s lodge at the centre, from which every inmate could be watched at any moment, while inmates could not see whether they were being watched. The arrangement, he claimed, offered “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”, applicable to prisons, factories, workhouses, hospitals and schools. He spent years and much of his fortune trying to persuade the government to build one; Parliament eventually paid him compensation. In the twentieth century Michel Foucault took the Panopticon as the model of modern disciplinary power.

The auto-icon

Bentham left instructions that his body be dissected for the benefit of medical science and his skeleton preserved, dressed in his clothes and seated, as an “auto-icon”. It remains on display at University College London, with a wax head; the preserved real head, damaged in the process, was kept separately.

In conversation

• “Can they suffer?” — the founding question of animal ethics.
• The Panopticon — power through invisible surveillance.
• “Nonsense upon stilts” — against natural rights.