Bentham on the RPF

Bio

Born in Spitalfields, London, into a wealthy Tory family, Jeremy Bentham
was recognised as a child prodigy when discovered as a toddler sitting at
his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England. He studied
Latin from the age of three.

He went to Westminster School, and in 1760 his father sent him to
Queen's College, Oxford, where he took his Bachelor's degree in 1763
and his Master's degree in 1766. Bentham trained as a lawyer and was
called to the bar in 1769. A prosperous attorney, his father had decided
that Bentham would follow him into the law, and felt quite sure that his
brilliant son would one day be Lord Chancellor of England.

Soon, however, Bentham became disillusioned with the law, especially
after hearing the lectures of the leading authority of the day, Sir William
Blackstone. Deeply frustrated with the complexity of the English legal
code, which he termed the ‘Demon of Chicane,’ he decided, instead of
practising the law, to write about it, and he spent his life criticising the
existing law and suggesting ways for its improvement. In 1776 he wrote
his first book, A Fragment on Government, which was an attack on
Blackstone. In 1781 he wrote his well-known work, An Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation. His father's death left him financially
independent, allowing him to devote himself full-time to writing in
Westminster. For nearly forty years he lived there quietly, producing
between ten and twenty sheets of manuscript a day, even when he was in
his eighties. Among his many proposals for legal and social reform was
a design for a prison building he called the Panopticon. Although it was
never built, the idea had an important influence in later generations of
thinkers and influenced the radial design of Pentonville Prison as well as
several other prisons.

Bentham is frequently associated with the foundation of the University of
London, which was later to become University College London, though
this is not actually true. Bentham was eighty years old when the University
opened in 1828, and had no part in its establishment. However, Bentham
strongly believed that education should be more widely available,
particularly to those who were not wealthy or who did not belong to the
established church, both of which were required by the traditional
universities at Oxford and Cambridge. As University College London was
the first English university to admit all, regardless of race, creed or
political belief, it was largely consistent with Bentham's vision, and he
oversaw the appointment of one of his pupils, John Austin, as the first
Professor of Jurisprudence in 1829.

After death, Bentham's body was (as requested in his will) preserved and
stored in a wooden cabinet, termed his ‘Auto-Icon,’ at University College
London. It has occasionally been brought out of storage at official
functions so that the eccentric presence of Bentham would live on. The
Auto-Icon has always had a wax head, as Bentham's head was badly
damaged in the preservation process. The real head was displayed in the
same case for many years, but became the target of repeated student
pranks, being stolen on more than one occasion, and is now locked away
securely.

Utilitarianism

Bentham not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also
devised moral principles on which they should be based. He felt there
was no such thing as natural rights in the Lockean sense: ‘Natural rights
is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical
nonsense—nonsense upon stilts. ...Right, the substantive right, is the
child of law: from real laws come real rights’ (Anarchical Fallacies).

Bentham agreed with Hume that it was impossible to found absolute
moral principles—such as what the good is—on empirical observations.
The good is simply that which produces pleasure or happiness in the
person in question. Thus, Bentham argued that our moral code needed to
be based on the principle of utility, which he defined as the property of
being able to produce pleasure or happiness, or likewise decrease pain
or unhappiness. This philosophy, utilitarianism, essentially maintained
that the correct civic policy was that which would cause ‘the greatest
happiness of the greatest possible number’ (Principles of the Civil Code).
In The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham summarizes the
principle of utility, and suggests a detailed pleasure-pain calculus to
mechanically estimate the moral status of any action.

Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's more famous
disciple, John Stuart Mill. It is often said that Bentham's theory, unlike
Mill's, faces the problem of lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a
conception of justice. Thus, some critics object, it would be moral to e.g.
torture one person if this would produce an amount of happiness in other
people outweighing the unhappiness of the tortured individual. However,
as P. J. Kelly forcibly argued in his book Utilitarianism and Distributive
Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law [ISBN 0-19-825418-0],
Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such undesirable
consequences. According to Kelly, for Bentham the law delimits ‘spheres
of personal inviolability within which individuals can form and pursue their
own conceptions of well-being’ (op. cit., p. 81). Since his happiness
calculus shows ‘expectation utilities’ to be much higher than ‘natural’
ones, it follows that Bentham does not favour the sacrifice of a few to the
benefit of the many.

(Excerpts adapted and portrait taken from the Wikipedia article on Bentham. Click
here for complete article. To correct errata in this article, please contact the RPF
editor.)

Works

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Anarchical Fallacies