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| Western Philosophers 19th-century philosophy | |
|---|---|
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| Name | Jeremy Bentham |
| Birth | February 15, 1748 London, England |
| Death | June 6, 1832 London, England |
| School/tradition | Utilitarianism, Legal Positivist |
| Main interests | Political philosophy, Ethics, Economics |
| Notable ideas | greatest happiness principle |
| Influenced by | John Locke, David Hume, Baron de Montesquieu, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Thomas Hobbes |
| Influenced | John Stuart Mill, Michel Foucault, Peter Singer, Iain King, John Austin |
Jeremy Bentham (IPA: [\'benθəm] or [\'bentəm]) (February 15 , 1748–June 6, 1832) was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He was a political radical, and a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law. He is best known for his advocacy of utilitarianism, for the concept of animal rights,ThinkQuest Article on Animal RightsThe Moral Status of Animals (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) and his opposition to the idea of natural rights, with his oft-quoted statement that the idea of such rights is "nonsense upon stilts."Harrison, Ross. Jeremy Bentham, in Honderich, Ted. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford, 1995, pp. 85-88. See also Jeremy Bentham, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He also influenced the development of welfarism.Jeremy Bentham: His Life and Impact--jk
He became known as one of the most influential of the utilitarians, through his own work and that of his students. These included his secretary and collaborator on the utilitarian school of philosophy, James Mill; James Mill\'s son John Stuart Mill; and several political leaders including Robert Owen, who later became a founder of socialism.
Bentham\'s position included arguments in favour of individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, animal rights, the end of slavery, the abolition of physical punishment (including that of children), the right to divorce, free trade, usury,Defence of Usury and the decriminalization of homosexuality.OFFENCES AGAINST ONE\'S SELFBoralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed. p. 37.
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Bentham was born in Spitalfields, London, into a wealthy Tory family. He was a child prodigy and was found as a toddler sitting at his father\'s desk reading a multi-volume history of England. He began his study of Latin at the age of three.Jeremy Bentham. University College London. Retrieved on 2007-01-04.
He went to Westminster School, and in 1760 his father sent him to The Queen\'s College, Oxford, where he took his Bachelor\'s degree in 1763 and his Master\'s degree in 1766. He trained as a lawyer and (though he never practised) was called to the bar in 1769. He became deeply frustrated with the complexity of the English legal code, which he termed the "Demon of Chicane".
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 upon later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of a whole raft of nineteenth-century \'disciplinary\' institutions.
Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people. Adam Smith, for example, had opposed free interest rates before Bentham\'s arguments convinced him on the subject. As a result of his correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution, he was declared an honorary citizen of France, but Bentham was an outspoken critic of the revolutionary discourse of natural rights, and of the violence which arose after the Jacobins took power (1792). In between 1808 and 1810 he held a personal friendship with Latin American Independence Precursor Francisco de Miranda, and paid visits to Miranda\'s Grafton Way house in London.
In 1823, he co-founded the Westminster Review with James Mill as a journal for the "Philosophical Radicals" - a group of younger disciples through whom Bentham exerted considerable influence in British public life.Joseph Hamburger, Intellectuals in politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophical Radicals (Yale University Press, 1965); William Thomas, The philosophic radicals: nine studies in theory and practice, 1817-1841 (Oxford, 1979)
Bentham is frequently associated with the foundation of the University of London, specifically University College London (UCL), though in fact he was 78 years old when UCL opened in 1826, and played no active part in its establishment. However, it is likely that without his inspiration, UCL would not have been created when it was. 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 of students by Oxford and Cambridge. As UCL 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.
As requested in his will, his body was preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet, termed his "Auto-icon". Originally kept by his disciple Dr. Southwood Smith,C.F.A. Marmoy, The \'Auto-Icon\' of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London. University College London. Retrieved on 2007-03-03. "It seems that the case with Bentham\'s body now rested in New Broad Street; Southwood Smith did not remove to 38 Finsbury Square until several years later. Bentham must have been seen by many visitors, including Charles Dickens." it was acquired by University College London in 1850. The Auto-icon is kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the College. For the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, the Auto-icon was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where he was listed as "present but not voting".History-Chemical History of UCL-The Autoicon. University College London. Retrieved on 2007-07-06. Tradition holds that if the council\'s vote on any motion is tied, the auto-icon always breaks the tie by voting in favour of the motion.
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 including being stolen on more than one occasion. It is now locked away securely.
There is a plaque on Queen Anne\'s Gate, Westminster commemorating the house where Bentham lived, which at the time was called Queen\'s Square Place.
An insight into his character is given in Michael St. John Packe\'s, The Life of John Stuart Mill (1952), p. 16:
| “ | During his youthful visits to Bowood, the country seat of his patron Lord Lansdowne, he had passed his time at falling unsuccessfully in love with all the ladies of the house, whom he courted with a clumsy jocularity, while playing chess with them or giving them lessons on the harpsichord. Hopeful to the last, at the age of eighty he wrote again to one of them, recalling to her memory the far-off days when she had \'presented him, in ceremony, with the flower in the green lane\' [citing Bentham\'s memoirs]. To the end of his life he could not hear of Bowood without tears swimming in his eyes, and he was forced to exclaim, \'Take me forward, I entreat you, to the future -- do not let me go back to the past.\' | ” |
Bentham has a complicated publishing history. Most of his writing was never published in his own lifetime; much of that which was published (see this list of published works) was prepared for publication by others.
Works published in Bentham\'s lifetime included:
The essay Offences Against One\'s Self, argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexuality.Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed. p. 40 The essay remained unpublished during his lifetime for fear of offending public morality. It was finally published for the first time in 1931.Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed. p. 37
Several of Bentham\'s works appeared first in French translation, prepared for the press by Étienne Dumont. Some made their first appearance in English in the 1820s as a result of back-translation from Dumont\'s 1802 collection (and redaction) of Bentham\'s writing on civil and penal legislation.
John Bowring, a British politician who had been Bentham\'s trusted friend, was appointed his literary executor and charged with the task of preparing a collected edition of his works. This appeared in 11 volumes in 1838-1843: Bowring based his edition on previously published editions (including those of Dumont) rather than Bentham\'s own manuscripts, and did not reprint Bentham\'s works on religion at all.
In 1952-54 Wilhelm Stark published a three-volume set, "Jeremy Bentham\'s Economic Writings," in which he attempted to bring together all of Bentham\'s writings on economic matters, including both published and unpublished material. Not trusting Bowring\'s edition, he painstakingly reviewed thousands of Bentham\'s original manuscripts and notes, a task made monumentally more difficult due to the manner in which they had been left by Bentham and organized by Bowring.
Bentham left manuscripts amounting to some 5,000,000 words. Since 1968, the Bentham Project at University College London have been busy working on an edition of his collected work. So far, 25 volumes have appeared; there may be as many still to come before the project is completed.
Bentham\'s ambition in life was to create a "Pannomion", a complete Utilitarian code of law. Bentham not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. This philosophy, utilitarianism, argued that the right act or policy was that which would cause "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" — a phrase of which he is generally, though erroneously, regarded as the author — though he later dropped the second qualification and embraced what he called "the greatest happiness principle," often referred to as the principle of utility.
He attributed his theory to Joseph Priestley: "Priestley was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth:- That the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."Bentham, quoted in Joseph Priestley, Utilitarianism.com, retrieved March 3, 2007.
He also suggested a procedure for estimating the moral status of any action, which he called the Hedonistic or felicific calculus. Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham\'s student, John Stuart Mill. In Mill\'s hands, "Benthamism" became a major element in the liberal conception of state policy objectives.
People are often impressed by Bentham\'s classification of 12 pains and 14 pleasures and \'felicific calculus\' by which we might test the \'happiness factor\' of any action. Nonetheless, it is should not be overlooked that Bentham\'s \'hedonistic\' theory (a term from J.J.C Smart), unlike Mill\'s, is often said to lack a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice. In "Bentham and the Common Law Tradition", Gerald J. Postema states, "No moral concept suffers more at Bentham\'s hand than the concept of justice. There is no sustained, mature analysis of the notion ..." Postema, Gerald J. Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, p. 148. Thus, some critics object, it would be acceptable to torture one person if this would produce an amount of happiness in other people outweighing the unhappiness of the tortured individual - cf. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". However, as P. J. Kelly argued in his book, Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such consequences. According to Kelly, for Bentham the law "provides the basic framework of social interaction by delimiting spheres of personal inviolability within which individuals can form and pursue their own conceptions of well-being."Kelly, P.J. Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law. p. 81. They provide security, a precondition for the formation of expectations. As the hedonic 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.
In contrast, J.J.C Smart and Bernard Williams\'s Utilitarianism: For and Against provides a more complete picture with both sides of the argument in relation to the theory.
His opinions about monetary economics were totally different from those of David Ricardo; however, they had some similarities to those of Thornton. He focused on monetary expansion as a means of helping to create full employment. He was also aware of the relevance of forced saving, propensity to consume, the saving-investment relationship and other matters that form the content of modern income and employment analysis. His monetary view was close to the fundamental concepts employed in his model of utilitarian decision making. Bentham stated that pleasures and pains can be ranked according to their value or “dimension” such as intensity, duration, certainty of a pleasure or a pain. He was concerned with maxima and minima of pleasures and pains, and they set a precedent for the future employment of the maximization principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm and the search for an optimum in welfare economics.Spiegel (1991). "The growth of Economic Thought", Ed.3. Duke University. ISBN 0-8223-0973-4., p. 341-343.
Bentham is widely recognized as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights. He argued that animal pain is very similar to human pain, and that "[t]he day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny."Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789. Latest edition: Adamant Media Corporation, 2005. Bentham argued that the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, must be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. If the ability to reason were the criterion, many human beings, including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as though they were things. He wrote:
| “ | Insert the text of the quote here, without quotation marks. | ” |
Bentham\'s ideas were severely criticised by, among others, free market economist Murray Rothbard in his essay, Jeremy Bentham: The Utilitarian as Big Brother published in his work, Classical Economics.Murray N. Rothbard (1995).Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 1-85278-962-X The Canadian author Brebner wrote in 1948 that "British laissez faire was a political and economic myth...Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who have been commonly represented as typical, almost fundamental, formulators of laissez faire, were in fact the opposite, that is, the formulator of state intervention for collectivist ends and his devout apostle."Brebner, John Bartlet. "Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain", Journal of Economic History, volume 8, 1948, pp. 59-73.
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| Schools of economics | |
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| Pre-modern | Ancient schools · Medieval Islamic |
| Early modern | Scholasticism · Mercantilism · Merchant capitalism · Physiocrats |
| Modern | Classical · English historical · German historical · Socialist · Neoclassical · Lausanne · Institutional |
| 20th century | Stockholm · Keynesian · Austrian · Chicago · Gandhian · Islamic economic jurisprudence · Microfinance |
| Related | Economics · History of economic thought |
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bentham, Jeremy |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 15, 1748 O.S. (February 26, 1748 N.S.) |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Spitalfields, London |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 6, 1832 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | London |
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