Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham an English philosopher, jurist and legal reformer (1748-1832), the founder of modern utilitarianism, who held that the rightness of actions, laws and institutions is to be measured by the happiness they produce and who devoted his long life to the reform of the law and of social arrangements on that principle.

Life and Education

Jeremy Bentham was born on 15 February 1748 in London, the son of a prosperous attorney who hoped to see him rise in the law, and he was a child of remarkable precocity who read Latin as an infant and was set to the study of the classics almost before he could walk. He was sent to Westminster School and then to Queen's College, Oxford, where he took his degree at the age of fifteen. He was called to the bar in 1769 but never practised, finding the law as it stood confused, uncertain and in need of thorough reconstruction.

He inherited property and a modest independence, and he chose to spend his life in study and writing rather than in the pursuit of office or income. He lived for many years in a house in Westminster and worked to a strict daily routine, rising early, taking long walks for his health, and devoting long hours to his manuscripts, many of which were left unfinished or were edited and published by disciples who admired his energy and his radical aims and who carried his ideas into print and into the reforming movements of the next generation.

He travelled in Russia in his youth and wrote a part of his first important book there, and he corresponded with thinkers and reformers throughout Europe and the Americas, from France and Spain to the new republics of Latin America. Though he never married, he maintained close and affectionate friendships and a wide acquaintance among the reforming statesmen of his day, and he gathered around himself a circle of younger men who carried his ideas forward into the nineteenth century and made his philosophy a force in practical politics.

The Principle of Utility

Bentham's fundamental principle was that of utility, the belief that the sole measure of right and wrong is the tendency of an action to increase or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question. He associated happiness with pleasure and the absence of pain, and he sought to make this principle the foundation of morals and of legislation alike, sweeping away the appeals to natural law, custom and divine command upon which the older jurisprudence had rested and which he thought served chiefly to obscure the real interests of human beings.

To give the principle a practical instrument, he elaborated a method for measuring pleasures and pains according to their intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity and purity, a device that later became known as the felicific calculus. His aim was to place moral and legal reasoning upon a scientific footing, and he insisted that in the calculation the interest of each person is to be counted equally with that of every other, no one being entitled to a greater share of consideration because of rank, wealth or the accident of birth.

From this foundation he drew the maxim that the object of government should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He applied it relentlessly to the laws, the constitution, the prisons and the penal code of his day, and he exposed as irrational many practices that custom had made familiar, including the savage severity of punishments for trivial offences, the confused mass of the common law and the privileges that shielded the powerful from the rigour of the law and left the poor without remedy against their oppressors.

Reform of Law and Government

Bentham directed much of his energy to the criticism and codification of the law. He attacked the obscurity and complexity of the common law, which he called the dog law of the judges because it was made known to the citizen only after he had suffered for breaking it, and he argued for a clear, rational and written code that any person of ordinary understanding could consult and comprehend. His writings on legislation covered civil, criminal and constitutional law and influenced legal reform in Britain and abroad.

He wrote an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation that set out his system with clarity and precision, and he produced a famous essay on the principles of punishment and of reward in which he analysed the motives of human conduct and the means by which the legislator might direct them to the public good. He ridiculed the idea of natural rights as rhetorical nonsense, holding that rights are the creatures of law and that the language of abstract rights served only to obstruct sober argument about consequences.

In politics he advanced the cause of democracy, arguing that rulers were most likely to govern for the happiness of the governed when they were answerable to the people through frequent elections, a secret ballot, the freedom of the press and the right of public association. He proposed a representative republic and attacked the influence of monarchy, aristocracy and established religion as sources of misrule, and his arguments helped to lay the intellectual foundations of the radical and democratic movements of the following century.

Prisons, Institutions and Practical Schemes

Bentham took an intense interest in prisons, workhouses and other institutions, and he designed a model prison, the Panopticon, in which a single central observer could survey all the inmates without being seen by them. He believed that such a building would combine economy with effective supervision and that the consciousness of being watched would reform the character of the prisoner, and he spent years and much of his own fortune in a vain effort to see it constructed before the scheme was abandoned and the government awarded him compensation.

He proposed an array of practical reforms and inventions that reached far beyond the law: a system of national education, savings banks, a postal service of cheap and uniform rates, a census of population, a code of sanitary regulation and improvements in the treatment of the poor and the sick. Many of these measures were later adopted, and some of them anticipated the institutions of the welfare state by more than half a century, showing how fertile his mind was in the invention of administrative machinery and in the practical improvement of social life.

He was also active as a legal adviser to foreign governments, and he corresponded with statesmen in France, Spain, Portugal, Russia and the new nations of Latin America, offering codes and constitutions framed on utilitarian lines. His ambition was to rationalise the laws of nations upon a single principle, and he took an unmistakable satisfaction in the thought that his ideas were being tried in distant lands, where his works were translated and his advice was sought by governments eager for reform.

Influence and Legacy

Bentham gathered and inspired a group of followers, including James Mill and later John Stuart Mill, who became known as the philosophical radicals and who exercised a considerable influence upon British political and administrative reform in the nineteenth century. His ideas shaped the reform of the criminal law, the Poor Law, the civil service, public health and the structure of local government, and his insistence upon the test of utility gave the reformers of his age a common standard by which to measure the value of existing institutions.

At his own request his body was preserved after death, and his skeleton, dressed in his own clothes and topped with a wax head, was kept in a wooden cabinet at University College London, which he was instrumental in founding as an institution open to students excluded from the older universities on religious grounds. The college became a home for radical and utilitarian thought, and his auto-icon remains one of the curiosities of the academic world and a fitting emblem of his distinctive and unsentimental character.

He is remembered as the founder of the utilitarian tradition and as one of the most prolific and systematic of all legal and political thinkers. His insistence that laws and institutions must justify themselves by their contribution to human welfare has passed into the common stock of modern thought, and his reformist energy left a permanent mark upon the liberal and democratic politics that followed, from the reform of prisons to the organisation of the modern state and the growth of a rational and humane system of public administration.

See also

• Utilitarianism
• Panopticon
• Philosophical radicals
• Legal positivism