Bentham

Jeremy Bentham 1748 - 1832

Life

• Early life
  • Born in London
  • Elder son of an attorney
  • Child prodigy, learned Latin at a young age
  • Finished his studies at Oxford at 15
  • Experiences at Westminster and Oxford inspired an interest in educational reform
  • Family was conservative and wealthy
  • Product of self-study, believed in study by interest
• Career
  • Not so interested in law or judge
  • Hoped to follow a political career
  • Critical of law and judicial and political institutions
  • Friends with James Mill

• Death

  • Wanted to be put on display, gave instructions in his will
  • Symbolic gesture against the church
  • Had to be dissected publicly because of dissection laws
  • His head could not be displayed the way he intended, it was found inside his abdomen
  • Head kept getting stolen by students at University College London
  • His body in the auto-icon still on display

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Philosophy

Utilitarianism

• What is utilitarianism?
  • School of ethical theories that prescribe action to maximize happiness (or utility) and wellbeing for the greatest amount of individuals
  • He is considered an ethical hedonist
  • Morality is a function of the pain or pleasure it produces
  • He believed people were selfish, and ought to promote the greatest happiness
  • nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure - the good increases pleasure and the bad increases pain
  • Believed it should be the foundation of ethics
  • Devised 12 forms of pain and 15 forms of pleasure
  • Optimum between individual and society must be maintained/determined by gov
• felicific calculus
  • Method for calculating amounts of happiness
  • Uses units of measurement hedons and dolors
  • He thought everything was quantifiable
  • Based on how strong the pleasure, its duration, its certainty, its expediency, prospect of reoccurring, purity (opposite effect) and people effected
  • Criticized as a useless calculation

• Government

  • Needed to be aimed at utilitarian ends
  • Proponent of democracy

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• Enlightenment

  • Reform, anti-tradition, laws need to be replaced with their utilitarian version
  • Went from favoring enlightened despotism
  • Egalitarian view of morality

• Civil rights

  • Unpublished work advocated for acceptance of homosexuality
  • Wrote about the rights of women
  • Animal rights

• Panopticon

  • Devises the dome prison
  • Guard stands in the middle and can see all the prisoners
  • Ultimate form of surveillance, prisoners behave because they are always watched
  • Used in hospitals
  • Used in education

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Judiciary

• Dedicated most of his life to reform the law
• Rationle of Judicial Evidence
  • Describes methods that court should use to obtain truth as quickly as possible
• Essay on Political Tactics
  • Most effective forms of a legislative assembly
  • Based on the procedure of the House of Commons
  • Concerned with efficiency, defined in terms of happiness
• Laws
  • Did not believe it natural laws, all laws originate from the legislator
  • Greatest amount of pleasure determines whether a law is just
  • Justice is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain in the aggregate

Social issues

• Reforms
  • Supported making prisons more hospitable
  • Free education and greater democracy
  • Improved working conditions
• Economic
  • Minimum wage
  • Guaranteed employment
  • Sickness benefit
  • old age insurance

Impact

• Justice
  • Inspired League of Nations framework
• Criticism
  • Lack of connection to the humane
  • Universalistic view
• Liberalism
  • Considered a central figure