Early modern Europe · 1748–1832
Jeremy Bentham
English legal reformer who founded utilitarianism
Nature has placed humankind under two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, so laws should aim at the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He extended moral concern to animals: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
Life and thought
Jeremy Bentham, the son of a London attorney, entered Oxford at twelve and was trained for the bar, but was so repelled by the confusion of English law, and by the praise heaped on it by William Blackstone, that he devoted his life to reforming it. He wrote endlessly on law, prisons (including his “Panopticon” design), poor relief, elections and economics, and gathered disciples such as James Mill. At his own wish his preserved body, the “auto-icon”, is kept at University College London.
Bentham’s principle of utility says that the rightness of any action or law depends on its tendency to increase or reduce happiness, understood as pleasure and the absence of pain. Everyone’s happiness counts equally, and pleasures can be compared by their intensity, duration, certainty and so on. Laws should be codified, punishment should deter rather than avenge, and talk of natural rights was, he said, “nonsense upon stilts”. He argued privately for decriminalising homosexuality and held that animals count because they can suffer. His followers, the “philosophical radicals”, drove many nineteenth-century reforms.