Bentham, Jeremy

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BENTHAM, JEREMY

BENTHAM, JEREMY (1748–1832), English philosopher and political theorist, founder of utilitarianism.

The son of a wealthy lawyer and Tory, Jeremy Bentham was born in London on 15 February 1748. A child prodigy—studying historical tomes at age three and Latin at age six—he entered Oxford at twelve and at fifteen was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, one of the four English Inns of the Court where undergraduates studied law in preparation for being called to the Bar as barristers. Awkward in public, he did not practice the law he had studied under the legal scholar William Blackstone (1723–1780), who wrote the first definitive compilation of English law, Commentaries on the Laws of England (volumes published between 1765–1769). In 1776 Bentham gained notoriety for printing Fragment on Government, a critique of Blackstone and the legal system's reliance on fictions, common law, obscure language, and convoluted reasoning, among other things. Thereafter, his writing provided groundwork for continuing analysis of English jurisprudence. Establishing the school of utilitarianism (otherwise known as Benthamism or philosophical radicalism), he worked to codify regulations for every societal institution to produce the best citizenry and form of government for the greatest number of people. He had avid disciples in Britain and Continental Europe. Indeed, later in life, he provided utilitarian blueprints of constitutional principles (which featured the legislature as dominant over the executive) for Greece and Portugal.

Bentham based his utilitarian ideas on the writings of David Hume (1711–1776), Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), David Hartley (1705–1757), and Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), from whom he took the phrase most associated with utilitarian thought: "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Laying out the foundations and taxonomies of utilitarianism in his major work, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Bentham asserted that humans are motivated by self-interest and that they will always seek pleasure and avoid pain. The term utilitarianism referred to the notion that everything has an effect that can be measured and that one could decide what laws to invoke based on their usefulness in fulfilling the greatest happiness. Grounded in Enlightenment reason, Bentham created the "felicific calculus," a mathematical method of discovering the greatest quantity of happiness by numerically calculating the intensity, purity, and degree of pleasure and pain caused by specific actions.

To Bentham the group ("the greatest number") was as important as "the greatest pleasure" as he attempted to solve the problem of how to make self-interested governmental and individual entities choose actions that are responsive to the needs of the whole community. Intensely aware of the ideals and failures of the French Revolution, he believed that with the guidance of utilitarian philosophers and the extension of citizenship to the masses, the more responsible British government could be about seeking the happiness of the greatest number. Likewise, citizens could be trained through utilitarian principles and punishments to achieve self-interest precisely by seeking the happiness of the majority. Not surprisingly, contemporary and current critics charge that utilitarianism's assumptions are questionable and unquantifiable, and that they discount quality of pleasure, human altruism, and the needs of the minority. Nevertheless, John Troyer notes that Bentham's greatest happiness model "dominates" modern economics by seeing "rational action as an attempt to maximize net utility" (p. vii).

A prolific, often disorganized and idiosyncratic writer, Bentham relied on his followers—including James Mill (1773–1836) and his son John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)—to edit and collate his massive stockpile of manuscripts. Though some current scholars question the degree of Bentham's influence, it has been traditional to view his ideas as helping to spawn political reforms that transformed British government, founding it on the science of governing. During the Victorian period (1830s–1901), utilitarians are commonly seen as an important force in bringing about the New Poor Laws, the 1832 Reform Bill, the civil service, the secret ballot, Catholic Emancipation, universal suffrage, the end of aristocratic sinecures, and the abolition of slavery, as well as laws establishing education reforms.

Particularly interested in prison reform, for twenty years Bentham worked on a blueprint for a "Panopticon," a prison that featured a semi-circular penitentiary with a central observation tower that constantly had a view into the surrounding cells. He argued that making prisoners perpetually subject to the guard's observation would cause them to internalize self-discipline and thus learn behavior that was in the self-interest of society. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) famously uses the Panopticon as a metaphor for what he sees as the oppressive, omniscient modern state that engenders and depends on self-monitoring individuals. Many critics have incorporated this influential concept into their work, while others argue that Foucault's use of Bentham's complex ideas is simplistic, monolithic, and lacking in appreciation for Bentham's democratic impulses.

See alsoMill, James; Mill, John Stuart; Utilitarianism.