Jeremy Bentham
Judging every institution by its effects: counting the pleasures and pains a law actually produces, rather than appealing to tradition or supposed natural rights.
English · 1748 – 1832
An English jurist and reformer of the late Enlightenment, founder of classical , heir to the of and Hume and a reader of Helvétius and Beccaria. Faced with the arbitrariness of the common law and the tangle of the penal law of his day, he sought a single, measurable, secular criterion for judging laws and institutions, set out in his major book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). The animating figure of the circle of "philosophical radicals" and designer of the Panopticon, he left a lasting mark on law, economics and political reform; gathered and reshaped his legacy. His body, mummified at his own wish into an "auto-icon", is still kept at University College London.
A single rule judges every action, the : good is what tends to augment happiness, bad what tends to diminish it, and nothing else.
Nature has placed us under two masters, and pain: there is no good but the agreeable, no evil but the painful.
No pleasure is nobler than another: at equal quantity of pleasure, a child's game is as good as poetry, and quantity alone should count.
What grounds a claim to moral consideration is neither reason nor language but sentience: the question is whether a being can suffer.
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Justification
In the empiricist line, Bentham grants reality only to what is observed and measured, and hunts down fictions, terms such as natural right that mimic the naming of a thing while no sensible fact answers to them. Certainty is therefore not won by an a priori reason laying down definitive truths, but by the recording of facts and by calculation; every metaphysical pretension to knowledge beyond experience stays suspect. The stance is measured: not the skeptic's doubt, but trust in empirical knowledge alone, fallible and correctable.
Theory of Fictions; Chrestomathia
Justification
In the line of and Hume, Bentham holds real only what can be observed and measured, and suspects any term that answers to no sensible entity. This drives his critique of fictions: an expression like natural right claims to name a thing while no fact corresponds to it, and is merely a word with which a demand is cloaked rather than justified. His method is thus resolutely inductive and naturalistic, anchored in the experience of pleasures and pains rather than in a priori rational principles, and it is on that ground that he dismisses natural rights.
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts.Anarchical Fallacies
Anarchical Fallacies (natural rights, nonsense upon stilts)
Justification
Bentham starts from what he takes to be a fact of nature: pleasure and pain are the only two things we actually seek and shun as ends. Good and evil then have no separate content: to call a thing "good" says no more than that it tends to produce pleasure or ward off pain. Hence a at once psychological and moral, welding fact to norm through the same two sovereign masters and leaving no room for a flourishing or perfection distinct from the agreeable, against the objective goods of the Aristotelian tradition.
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.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1
Justification
For Bentham, pain is evil itself: together with pleasure, it is one of the two sovereign masters of conduct, and the whole moral and legislative calculus aims to minimize it. No suffering has redemptive value; the only relevant question is that of its quantity and of what can reduce it, for every being capable of feeling it.
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I and IV
Justification
Bentham expressly rejects the principle of asceticism, which would hold privation to be a good: pleasure is the only good, pain the only evil, and the end is to maximize the former. Desires are therefore not to be extinguished but satisfied; the only legitimate sorting is the calculation of the quantities of pleasure and pain they produce.
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I-IV
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Justification
Bentham assigns life no cosmic or providential end: the only meaning is the one measured by the principle of utility, namely to produce happiness and reduce suffering, for oneself and for the greatest number. A wholly immanent significance, anchored in sensibility, without recourse to an order that would surpass us.
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I
Justification
A materialist and enemy of fictions, Bentham acknowledges no hereafter: death is the simple cessation of sensibility, hence neither to be feared nor surrounded with superstition. He pushes the consequence so far as to bequeath his body to science and have it preserved as an auto-icon, a lucid gesture against the religious terror of death.
Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living
Justification
The whole of Bentham's science rests on a constant human nature: the human being is governed by pleasure and pain, everywhere and always. This given hedonic psychology is the fixed bedrock from which morals and legislation are calculated, rather than a nature to be invented or transformed.
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I
Justification
All human conduct is governed by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; the legislator can therefore act on behaviour by bearing on motives through sanctions, which add a pain or a pleasure to the balance. This psychology of motives presupposes actions by their causes, the very condition of the penal calculus working, though Bentham does not thematize the metaphysical question of .
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. III and X (motives and their operation)
Justification
No pleasure is bad in itself: the pleasures of sense appear on the same footing as the rest in Bentham's catalogue, and only their quantitative effect on the overall balance matters. Far from any asceticism, which he ranks among the mistaken principles, he celebrates on principle every pleasure, bodily ones included, so long as it breeds no more pain than it yields enjoyment.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. V (the catalogue of pleasures and pains) · An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. II (against the principle of asceticism)
Justification
A morality, for Bentham, is worth nothing unless it supplies a public, demonstrable criterion rather than the disguised echo of a personal taste. The rival principles fail this test: the principle of asceticism condemns pleasure for no reason, and the principle of sympathy and antipathy sets up moral sentiment as a rule without answering for it, often masking a bare I approve or I disapprove. Only an action's tendency to augment or diminish happiness yields an external, checkable measure of right and wrong; any approval that does not reduce to it is mere caprice dressed up as a principle. Hence a thoroughgoing consequentialism: no act is good or bad in itself, independently of its outcomes.
By the principle of utility is meant 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.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §2
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I-II
Justification
If the sole title to enter the calculus is to be able to feel pleasure and pain, then the boundary of moral consideration must follow sentience, not reason or language. Bentham thus turns back both the Cartesian argument of the animal-machine and the one that once excluded the slave: it is not the faculty of reasoning or talking that grounds a claim to consideration, but the capacity to suffer. The conclusion follows from the consistency of the utilitarian criterion itself: consideration extends to every sentient being, placing him in pathocentrism and making him a precursor of the animal cause.
The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XVII
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XVII, §1, footnote (the suffering of animals)
Justification
In reckoning collective happiness, everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one: no interest weighs more by reason of rank or birth. This egalitarianism of the count, joined to the idea of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth, inclines Bentham toward a more equal distribution of well-being, without his advocating a strict equality of goods, which would wreck security.
Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.Utilitarianism, ch. V
Principles of the Civil Code (the diminishing utility of wealth, security and equality) · Maxim reported by J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. V
Justification
Punishment is in itself an evil, a pain, and is justified only by the utility it yields: all punishment in itself is evil; upon the principle of utility, if it ought at all to be admitted, it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some greater evil. Its first end is the prevention of offences, chiefly by deterrence and secondarily by the reform of the offender; Bentham explicitly rejects retribution and the lex talionis as an evil added to an evil, with no profit.
All punishment in itself is evil. Upon the principle of utility, if it ought at all to be admitted, it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some greater evil.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XIII, §2
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XIII-XIV (punishment, its ends and its measure)
Justification
Bentham judges institutions by their present utility alone, never by their antiquity: law must be methodically reformed, statutes codified, irrational survivals abolished. A radical reformer of the penal and carceral system (the Panopticon project), he denounces the nonsense of the common law and campaigns for a rational recasting of the codes. This is an avowed reformist progressivism.
A Fragment on Government (critique of Blackstone and the common law) · Panopticon, or the Inspection-House
Justification
Persuaded after 1809 that only the governed have an interest in aiming at the happiness of the greatest number, Bentham embraced representative democracy: near-universal suffrage, the secret ballot, frequent elections, against the sinister interests of the ruling classes. Power should belong to the people, the surest guarantor of the general utility, not to an elite presumed more competent.
Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817) · Constitutional Code (representative democracy against sinister interests)
Justification
In the reckoning of utility, each person's pleasure and pain count equally, with no privilege for oneself, one's kin or one's group: each to count for one, none for more than one. This strict impartialism, in which the agent's own well-being weighs no more than anyone else's, is one of the most characteristic and most demanding features of classical utilitarianism.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. IV (extent: the number of persons affected)
Justification
A right, for Bentham, is nothing but the benefit of an obligation that the law lays on others and backs by a sanction: no positive law, no obligation, hence no right. Natural rights prior to any law are therefore a contradiction in terms, a wish dressed up as a legal fact, and even a danger, since to invoke an imprescriptible right against the law opens the door to anarchy. The rejection is not nihilist but utilitarian: there are indeed rights, but it is utility, not nature, that should guide the legislator in creating them.
Anarchical Fallacies; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Justification
For Bentham, the community is a fiction: its interest is but the sum of the interests of the members who compose it. There is no collective entity with a good of its own above individuals; social happiness is but the aggregate of individual happinesses. This is a clear methodological individualism, the foundation of the whole utilitarian calculus.
The interest of the community then is, what? — the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §4
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §4 (the interest of the community, the sum of individual interests)
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Justification
The holds for all people and all times: the criterion of pleasure and pain is a universal natural fact, and the calculus applies the same way everywhere. Bentham does not relativize morality to cultures nor reduce it to mere convention; this is a naturalistic universalism, grounded in a sentience common to all beings.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I-IV (the principle and its measure, universally valid)
Justification
Bentham wants a fully codified law, clear and systematic, in which every offence and every penalty is defined in advance, so as to take justice out of the judge's discretion and out of the nonsense of the common law. This trust in explicit, pre-established rules rather than in case-by-case prudential judgement places him on the side of legalism, even though the rule itself remains justified by utility.
Of Laws in General and Constitutional Code (the codification project) · A Fragment on Government (against the arbitrariness of the common law)
Justification
Bentham takes it as a fact that everyone is moved by self-interest, the pursuit of one's own pleasure and the avoidance of one's own pain: a psychological egoism. Yet the moral criterion demands aiming at the happiness of the greatest number: how can a naturally self-interested motive ground a requirement of impartiality? The whole art of the legislator lies in arranging the sanctions so that private interest coincides with the general interest. The norm thus leans toward the altruism of an impartial count, against a backdrop of naturally self-interested motive.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. III (the four sanctions)
Justification
Requiring one always to act so as to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, counting each equally, lays on the agent a potentially very heavy demand: no private sphere escapes evaluation by utility in principle. This maximalist demand collides, however, with the legislator's realism, which knows it cannot regulate everything: the principle itself sets no a priori limit, whereas its implementation necessarily presupposes one.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I-IV (the greatest happiness principle applied to every action)
Justification
Bentham builds his reforms on the real nature of human beings, moved by their interest, and devises institutions, sanctions and constitutional mechanisms meant to channel that interest toward the general utility. This concern for concrete effectiveness and for gripping the sinister interests belongs to a political realism, even if the ultimate reforming aim, to recast the whole of society rationally, keeps a near-utopian streak of ambition.
Constitutional Code (institutions designed on real interests)
Justification
Since all punishment is an evil justified only by its utility, inflicting suffering with no net benefit is groundless; Bentham accordingly lists the cases where punishment is unmeet, notably where it would be inefficacious or unprofitable. One may infer that excusing or remitting a penalty obeys the same conditions of utility, tying any pardon or leniency to a conditional examination, though Bentham does not treat forgiveness as such explicitly.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XIII (cases unmeet for punishment)
Justification
Since only the quantity of pleasure enters the balance, there is nowhere to lodge an intrinsic superiority of one pleasure over another: at equal quantity, a vulgar amusement and an art reputed noble are exactly worth the same. To rank pleasures by their dignity would smuggle in a criterion foreign to pleasure, which the forbids. This egalitarianism of taste is the breaking point with , who would distinguish higher and lower pleasures precisely to parry the charge of a doctrine worthy only of swine: where Mill gives ground, Bentham carries strict quantification through to the end.
Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.The Rationale of Reward
The Rationale of Reward (pushpin is as good as poetry)
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Justification
Bentham's morality is wholly secular: good and evil are settled by the sole calculus of pleasures and pains, with no recourse to a divine will. Under the pen name Philip Beauchamp he published a critique of the usefulness of natural religion, and his analysis of the theological principle of antipathy rejects religious sanction as a moral foundation. The leaning is markedly anti-religious and critical, without an explicitly systematized metaphysical atheism.
Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (as Philip Beauchamp) · An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. II (the theological principle reducible to the others)
Justification
Human nature reduces, for Bentham, to a constant and universal datum: sensitivity to pleasure and pain, the mainspring of all conduct in every place and time. It is on this natural footing, not on variable cultural determinations, that he founds his science of legislation, placing him clearly on the side of anthropological naturalism.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I (the two sovereign masters, constant for all)
Justification
Bentham distrusts moral sentiments set up as rules: the principle of sympathy and antipathy approves or condemns at the whim of feeling, without giving a reason, and often masks prejudice. To affective spontaneity he opposes the felicific calculus, a reflective, quasi-arithmetic procedure for weighing pleasures and pains. Morality thus rests on methodical reasoning rather than on emotion.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. II (the principle of sympathy and antipathy)