Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss (French: [mos]; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice, and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology.^[1] His most famous book is The Gift (1925).

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1Background
• 2Theoretical views
• 3Critiques
• 4Legacy
• 5Selected works
• 6See also
• 7References
• 8Further reading
• 9External links

Background[edit]

Mauss was born in Épinal, Vosges, to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his maternal uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time. He passed the agrégation in 1893. He was also first cousin of the much younger Claudette (née Raphael) Bloch, a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, who has become a noted anthropologist. Instead of taking the usual route of teaching at a lycée following college, Mauss moved to Paris and took up the study of comparative religion and Sanskrit.

His first publication in 1896 marked the beginning of a prolific career that would produce several landmarks in the sociological literature. Like many members of Année Sociologique, Mauss was attracted to socialism, especially that espoused by Jean Jaurès. He was particularly active in the events of the Dreyfus affair. Towards the end of the century, he helped edit such left-wing papers as Le Populaire, L'Humanité and Le Mouvement socialiste, the last in collaboration with Georges Sorel.

In 1901 Mauss took up a chair in the 'history of religion and uncivilized peoples' at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), one of the grandes écoles in Paris. It was at this time that he began drawing more on ethnography, and his work began to develop characteristics now associated with formal anthropology.

The years of World War I were absolutely devastating for Mauss. Many of his friends and colleagues died in the war, and his uncle Durkheim died shortly before its end. Politically, the postwar years were also difficult for Mauss. Durkheim had made changes to school curricula across France, and after his death a backlash against his students began.

Like many other followers of Durkheim, Mauss took refuge in administration. He secured Durkheim's legacy by founding institutions to carry out directions of research, such as l'Institut Français de Sociologie (1924) and l'Institut d'Ethnologie in 1926. Among students he influenced was George Devereux, later an influential anthropologist who combined ethnology with psychoanalysis.

In 1931 Mauss took up the chair of Sociology at the Collège de France. He actively fought against anti-semitism and racial politics both before and after World War II. He died in 1950.

Theoretical views[edit]

In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never truly free. Rather, human history is full of examples of gifts bringing about reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: "What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?" (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a "total prestation" (see law of obligations), imbued with "spiritual mechanisms", engaging the honour of both giver and receiver (the term "total prestation" or "total social fact" (fait social total) was coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim's social fact). Such transactions transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that, according to Mauss, is almost "magical". The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them" (1990:31). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on the part of the recipient. Not to reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse: in Polynesia, failure to reciprocate means to lose mana, one's spiritual source of authority and wealth. Mauss distinguished between three obligations: giving, the necessary initial step for the creation and maintenance of social relationships; receiving, for to refuse to receive is to reject the social bond; and reciprocating in order to demonstrate one's own liberality, honour, and wealth.

An important notion in Mauss' conceptualisation of gift exchange is what Gregory (1982, 1997) refers to as "inalienability". In a commodity economy, there is a strong distinction between objects and persons through the notion of private property. Objects are sold, meaning that the ownership rights are fully transferred to the new owner. The object has thereby become "alienated" from its original owner. In a gift economy, however, the objects that are given are inalienated from the givers; they are "loaned rather than sold and ceded". It is the fact that the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given that causes the gift to have a power which compels the recipient to reciprocate. Because gifts are inalienable they must be returned; the act of giving creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid. Because of this, the notion of an expected return of the gift creates a relationship over time between two individuals. In other words, through gift-giving, a social bond evolves that is assumed to continue through space and time until the future moment of exchange. Gift exchange therefore leads to a mutual interdependence between giver and receiver. According to Mauss, the "free" gift that is not returned is a contradiction because it cannot create social ties. Following the Durkheimian quest for understanding social cohesion through the concept of solidarity, Mauss's argument is that solidarity is achieved through the social bonds created by gift exchange. Mauss emphasizes that exchanging gifts resulted from the will of attaching other people – 'to put people under obligations', because "in theory such gifts are voluntary, but in fact they are given and repaid under obligation".^[2]

Critiques[edit]

Mauss's views on the nature of gift exchange have had critics. French anthropologist Alain Testart (1998), for example, argues that there are "free" gifts, such as passers-by giving money to beggars, e.g. in a large Western city. Donor and receiver do not know each other and are unlikely ever to meet again. In this context, the donation certainly creates no obligation on the side of the beggar to reciprocate; neither the donor nor the beggar have such an expectation. Testart argues that only the latter can actually be enforced. He feels that Mauss overstated the magnitude of the obligation created by social pressures, particularly in his description of the potlatch amongst North American Indians.

Another example of a non-reciprocal "free" gift is provided by British anthropologist James Laidlaw (2000). He describes the social context of Indian Jain renouncers, a group of itinerant celibate renouncers living an ascetic life of spiritual purification and salvation. The Jainist interpretation of the doctrine of ahimsa (an extremely rigorous application of principles of nonviolence) influences the diet of Jain renouncers and compels them to avoid preparing food, as this could potentially involve violence against microscopic organisms. Since Jain renouncers do not work, they rely on food donations from lay families within the Jain community. However, the former must not appear to be having any wants or desires, and only very hesitantly and apologetically receives the food prepared by the latter.

"Free" gifts therefore challenge the aspects of the Maussian notion of the gift unless the moral and non-material qualities of gifting are considered. These aspects are, of course, at the heart of the gift, as demonstrated in books such as Annette Weiner's (1992) Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving.

Mauss offers one possible response to such criticisms in the section "Note on Alms".

Legacy[edit]

While Mauss is known for several of his own works – most notably his masterpiece Essai sur le Don ('The Gift') – much of his best work was done in collaboration with members of the Année Sociologique, including Durkheim (Primitive Classification), Henri Hubert (Outline of a General Theory of Magic and Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice), Paul Fauconnet (Sociology) and others.

Like many prominent French academics, Mauss did not train a great number of students. Nevertheless, many anthropologists claim to have followed in his footsteps, most notably Claude Lévi-Strauss. The essay on The Gift is the origin for anthropological studies of reciprocity. His analysis of the Potlatch has inspired Georges Bataille (The Accursed Share), then the situationists (the name of the first situationist journal was Potlatch). This term has been used by many interested in gift economies and Open Source software, although this latter use sometimes differs from Mauss' original formulation. See also Lewis Hyde's revolutionary critique of Mauss in "Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property".

Selected works[edit]

• Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, (with Henri Hubert) 1898.
• La sociologie: objet et méthode, (with Paul Fauconnet) 1901.
• De quelques formes primitives de classification, (with Durkheim) 1902.
• Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie, (with Henri Hubert) 1902.
• Essai sur le don, 1925.
• Les techniques du corps, 1934. [1] Journal de Psychologie 32 (3-4). Reprinted in Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, 1936, Paris: PUF.
• Sociologie et anthropologie, (selected writings) 1950.
• Manuel d'ethnographie. 1967. Editions Payot & Rivages. (Manual of Ethnography 2009. Translated by N. J. Allen. Berghan Books.)

See also[edit]

• Anthropology portal
• Biography portal
• Sociology portal

• Archaeology of trade
• Bronisław Malinowski
• De Beneficiis
• Kula ring
• Ernest Becker

References[edit]

1. Jump up ^ Barth, Fredrik (2005). One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. University of Chicago Press, p. 208, Quote: "Marcel Mauss' two most influential followers were Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908) and Louis Dumont (1911–1998). The impact of his work on both of them was strong."
2. Jump up ^ D. Walczak. 2015. The process of exchange, solidarity and sustainable development in building a community of responsibility. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6 (1S1), p. 506.

Further reading[edit]

• Derrida, J., 1992 [1991]. Given Time I. Counterfeit Money. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
• Cannell, Fenella (2006) The anthropology of Christianity, Introduction
• Gregory, C. A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London.
• Gregory, C. A. 1997. Savage money: the anthropology and politics of commodity exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic.
• Laidlaw, J. 2000. ‘A free gift makes no friends’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6:617-634.
• Mauss, M. 1990 (1922). The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.
• Testart, A. 1998. 'Uncertainties of the 'Obligation to Reciprocate': A Critique of Mauss' in Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute. James, W. and Allen, N. J. (eds.). New York: Berghahn Books.
• Weiner, Annette (1992). Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving. Berkeley, University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07604-4.

• Dianteill, Erwan, ed., Marcel Mauss – L’anthropologie de l’un et du multiple, Paris, PUF, collection « Débats philosophiques », 2013.
• Dzimira, Sylvain, Marcel Mauss, savant et politique, La Découverte, 2007 (lire en ligne la préface de Marcel Fournier, le sommaire et l'intro.).
• Fournier, Marcel. 1994. Marcel Mauss. Fayard: Paris (the definitive biography in French). see Marcel Mauss: A Biography, PUP, 2005
• Ferguson, Kennan. 2007. 'The Gift of Freedom.' Social Text. 25:2 39-52.
• Graeber, David Give it away, an essay
• Lévi-Strauss, C.. 1987 [1950]. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London. Routledge.
• Moebius, Stephan/Papilloud, Christian (Ed.). 2005. Gift – Marcel Mauss' Kulturtheorie der Gabe. Wiesbaden: VS.
• Moebius, Stephan. 2006. Marcel Mauss. Konstanz

External links[edit]

• Collection of French writing provided by the University of Quebec

Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss (French: [mos]; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice, and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology.^[1] His most famous book is The Gift (1925).

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1Background
• 2Theoretical views
• 3Critiques
• 4Legacy
• 5Selected works
• 6See also
• 7References
• 8Further reading
• 9External links

Background[edit]

Mauss was born in Épinal, Vosges, to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his maternal uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time. He passed the agrégation in 1893. He was also first cousin of the much younger Claudette (née Raphael) Bloch, a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, who has become a noted anthropologist. Instead of taking the usual route of teaching at a lycée following college, Mauss moved to Paris and took up the study of comparative religion and Sanskrit.

His first publication in 1896 marked the beginning of a prolific career that would produce several landmarks in the sociological literature. Like many members of Année Sociologique, Mauss was attracted to socialism, especially that espoused by Jean Jaurès. He was particularly active in the events of the Dreyfus affair. Towards the end of the century, he helped edit such left-wing papers as Le Populaire, L'Humanité and Le Mouvement socialiste, the last in collaboration with Georges Sorel.

In 1901 Mauss took up a chair in the 'history of religion and uncivilized peoples' at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), one of the grandes écoles in Paris. It was at this time that he began drawing more on ethnography, and his work began to develop characteristics now associated with formal anthropology.

The years of World War I were absolutely devastating for Mauss. Many of his friends and colleagues died in the war, and his uncle Durkheim died shortly before its end. Politically, the postwar years were also difficult for Mauss. Durkheim had made changes to school curricula across France, and after his death a backlash against his students began.

Like many other followers of Durkheim, Mauss took refuge in administration. He secured Durkheim's legacy by founding institutions to carry out directions of research, such as l'Institut Français de Sociologie (1924) and l'Institut d'Ethnologie in 1926. Among students he influenced was George Devereux, later an influential anthropologist who combined ethnology with psychoanalysis.

In 1931 Mauss took up the chair of Sociology at the Collège de France. He actively fought against anti-semitism and racial politics both before and after World War II. He died in 1950.

Theoretical views[edit]

In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never truly free. Rather, human history is full of examples of gifts bringing about reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: "What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?" (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a "total prestation" (see law of obligations), imbued with "spiritual mechanisms", engaging the honour of both giver and receiver (the term "total prestation" or "total social fact" (fait social total) was coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim's social fact). Such transactions transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that, according to Mauss, is almost "magical". The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them" (1990:31). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on the part of the recipient. Not to reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse: in Polynesia, failure to reciprocate means to lose mana, one's spiritual source of authority and wealth. Mauss distinguished between three obligations: giving, the necessary initial step for the creation and maintenance of social relationships; receiving, for to refuse to receive is to reject the social bond; and reciprocating in order to demonstrate one's own liberality, honour, and wealth.

An important notion in Mauss' conceptualisation of gift exchange is what Gregory (1982, 1997) refers to as "inalienability". In a commodity economy, there is a strong distinction between objects and persons through the notion of private property. Objects are sold, meaning that the ownership rights are fully transferred to the new owner. The object has thereby become "alienated" from its original owner. In a gift economy, however, the objects that are given are inalienated from the givers; they are "loaned rather than sold and ceded". It is the fact that the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given that causes the gift to have a power which compels the recipient to reciprocate. Because gifts are inalienable they must be returned; the act of giving creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid. Because of this, the notion of an expected return of the gift creates a relationship over time between two individuals. In other words, through gift-giving, a social bond evolves that is assumed to continue through space and time until the future moment of exchange. Gift exchange therefore leads to a mutual interdependence between giver and receiver. According to Mauss, the "free" gift that is not returned is a contradiction because it cannot create social ties. Following the Durkheimian quest for understanding social cohesion through the concept of solidarity, Mauss's argument is that solidarity is achieved through the social bonds created by gift exchange. Mauss emphasizes that exchanging gifts resulted from the will of attaching other people – 'to put people under obligations', because "in theory such gifts are voluntary, but in fact they are given and repaid under obligation".^[2]

Critiques[edit]

Mauss's views on the nature of gift exchange have had critics. French anthropologist Alain Testart (1998), for example, argues that there are "free" gifts, such as passers-by giving money to beggars, e.g. in a large Western city. Donor and receiver do not know each other and are unlikely ever to meet again. In this context, the donation certainly creates no obligation on the side of the beggar to reciprocate; neither the donor nor the beggar have such an expectation. Testart argues that only the latter can actually be enforced. He feels that Mauss overstated the magnitude of the obligation created by social pressures, particularly in his description of the potlatch amongst North American Indians.

Another example of a non-reciprocal "free" gift is provided by British anthropologist James Laidlaw (2000). He describes the social context of Indian Jain renouncers, a group of itinerant celibate renouncers living an ascetic life of spiritual purification and salvation. The Jainist interpretation of the doctrine of ahimsa (an extremely rigorous application of principles of nonviolence) influences the diet of Jain renouncers and compels them to avoid preparing food, as this could potentially involve violence against microscopic organisms. Since Jain renouncers do not work, they rely on food donations from lay families within the Jain community. However, the former must not appear to be having any wants or desires, and only very hesitantly and apologetically receives the food prepared by the latter.

"Free" gifts therefore challenge the aspects of the Maussian notion of the gift unless the moral and non-material qualities of gifting are considered. These aspects are, of course, at the heart of the gift, as demonstrated in books such as Annette Weiner's (1992) Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving.

Mauss offers one possible response to such criticisms in the section "Note on Alms".

Legacy[edit]

While Mauss is known for several of his own works – most notably his masterpiece Essai sur le Don ('The Gift') – much of his best work was done in collaboration with members of the Année Sociologique, including Durkheim (Primitive Classification), Henri Hubert (Outline of a General Theory of Magic and Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice), Paul Fauconnet (Sociology) and others.

Like many prominent French academics, Mauss did not train a great number of students. Nevertheless, many anthropologists claim to have followed in his footsteps, most notably Claude Lévi-Strauss. The essay on The Gift is the origin for anthropological studies of reciprocity. His analysis of the Potlatch has inspired Georges Bataille (The Accursed Share), then the situationists (the name of the first situationist journal was Potlatch). This term has been used by many interested in gift economies and Open Source software, although this latter use sometimes differs from Mauss' original formulation. See also Lewis Hyde's revolutionary critique of Mauss in "Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property".

Selected works[edit]

• Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, (with Henri Hubert) 1898.
• La sociologie: objet et méthode, (with Paul Fauconnet) 1901.
• De quelques formes primitives de classification, (with Durkheim) 1902.
• Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie, (with Henri Hubert) 1902.
• Essai sur le don, 1925.
• Les techniques du corps, 1934. [1] Journal de Psychologie 32 (3-4). Reprinted in Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, 1936, Paris: PUF.
• Sociologie et anthropologie, (selected writings) 1950.
• Manuel d'ethnographie. 1967. Editions Payot & Rivages. (Manual of Ethnography 2009. Translated by N. J. Allen. Berghan Books.)

See also[edit]

• Anthropology portal
• Biography portal
• Sociology portal

• Archaeology of trade
• Bronisław Malinowski
• De Beneficiis
• Kula ring
• Ernest Becker

References[edit]

1. Jump up ^ Barth, Fredrik (2005). One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. University of Chicago Press, p. 208, Quote: "Marcel Mauss' two most influential followers were Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908) and Louis Dumont (1911–1998). The impact of his work on both of them was strong."
2. Jump up ^ D. Walczak. 2015. The process of exchange, solidarity and sustainable development in building a community of responsibility. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6 (1S1), p. 506.

Further reading[edit]

• Derrida, J., 1992 [1991]. Given Time I. Counterfeit Money. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
• Cannell, Fenella (2006) The anthropology of Christianity, Introduction
• Gregory, C. A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London.
• Gregory, C. A. 1997. Savage money: the anthropology and politics of commodity exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic.
• Laidlaw, J. 2000. ‘A free gift makes no friends’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6:617-634.
• Mauss, M. 1990 (1922). The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.
• Testart, A. 1998. 'Uncertainties of the 'Obligation to Reciprocate': A Critique of Mauss' in Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute. James, W. and Allen, N. J. (eds.). New York: Berghahn Books.
• Weiner, Annette (1992). Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving. Berkeley, University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07604-4.

• Dianteill, Erwan, ed., Marcel Mauss – L’anthropologie de l’un et du multiple, Paris, PUF, collection « Débats philosophiques », 2013.
• Dzimira, Sylvain, Marcel Mauss, savant et politique, La Découverte, 2007 (lire en ligne la préface de Marcel Fournier, le sommaire et l'intro.).
• Fournier, Marcel. 1994. Marcel Mauss. Fayard: Paris (the definitive biography in French). see Marcel Mauss: A Biography, PUP, 2005
• Ferguson, Kennan. 2007. 'The Gift of Freedom.' Social Text. 25:2 39-52.
• Graeber, David Give it away, an essay
• Lévi-Strauss, C.. 1987 [1950]. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London. Routledge.
• Moebius, Stephan/Papilloud, Christian (Ed.). 2005. Gift – Marcel Mauss' Kulturtheorie der Gabe. Wiesbaden: VS.
• Moebius, Stephan. 2006. Marcel Mauss. Konstanz

External links[edit]

• Collection of French writing provided by the University of Quebec

Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales

The Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (Anti-utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences) is a French intellectual movement.^[1] It is based around the ideology of "anti-utilitarianism", a critique of economism in social sciences and instrumental rationalism in moral and political philosophy. The movement was founded in 1981 by sociologist Alain Caillé, with the establishment of its interdisciplinary monthly journal Revue du MAUSS^[2] which is still published and edited by Caillé.

The journal covers topics in economics, anthropology, sociology and political philosophy from an anti-utilitarian perspective. His name is both an acronym and a tribute to the famous anthropologist Marcel Mauss.^[3] The movement works to promote a third paradigm, as a complement to, or replacement for holism and methodological individualism.^[4][5][6]

The movement began through conversations between Caillé and Swiss anthropologist Gerald Berthoud wondering why the economic theory of Marcel Mauss based on obligatory reciprocity and debt did not provide any possibilities of a "free gift" motivated by empathy rather than rational self-interest. The movement's early efforts considered the possibility of reintroducing an aspect of genuine interest in the welfare of others in economic theory. Among the economic policies suggested by the movement is the basic income guarantee a concept originally developed by Thomas Paine.^[1]

Some regular contributors to the journal[edit]

• Paul Jorion
• Paul Ariès
• Genevieve Azam
• Gerald Berthoud
• Alain Caillé
• Philippe Chanial
• Jacques Dewitte
• Mary Douglas
• Denis Duclos
• Jean-Pierre Dupuy
• Michael Freitag
• Marcel Gauchet
• Philippe d'Iribarne
• Stephen Kalberg
• Serge Latouche
• Louis Maitrier
• Jean-Claude Michea
• Thierry Paquot
• Lucien Scubla
• Camille Tarot
• Frederic Vandenberghe
• Raoul Vaneigem
• Jean-Pierre Voyer

References[edit]

1. ^ Jump up to: ^a b GIVE IT AWAY By Anthropologist David Graeber, published at www.freewords.org
2. Jump up ^ La revue du M.A.U.S.S.
3. Jump up ^ Short History of Economical Anthropology by Chris Hann published at www.thememorybanck.co.uk
4. Jump up ^ À propos du M.A.U.S.S.
5. Jump up ^ Interview with Alain Caillé at www.revue-sociologique.org
6. Jump up ^ Michèle Richman. 2002. The French Sociological Revolution from Montaigne to Mauss. SubStance. Vol. 31, No. 1, Issue 97: Special Issue: The American Production of French Theory (2002), pp. 27-35

Categories:

utilitarianism v sociobiology

utilitarianism v sociobiology

invisible hand of God (for market mechanism)

does not requires altruism

utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory which states that the best action is the one that maximizes utility. "Utility" is defined in various ways, usually in terms of the well-being of sentient entities. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility as the sum of all pleasure that results from an action, minus the suffering of anyone involved in the action. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism, utilitarianism considers the interests of all beings equally.

Proponents of utilitarianism have disagreed on a number of points, such as whether actions should be chosen based on their likely results (act utilitarianism) or whether agents should conform to rules that maximize utility (rule utilitarianism). There is also disagreement as to whether total (total utilitarianism) or average (average utilitarianism) utility should be maximized.

Though the seeds of the theory can be found in the hedonists Aristippus and Epicurus, who viewed happiness as the only good, the tradition of utilitarianism properly began with Bentham, and has included John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, R. M. Hare, David Braybrooke, and Peter Singer. It has been applied to social welfare economics, the crisis of global poverty, the ethics of raising animals for food and the importance of avoiding existential risks to humanity.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1Etymology
• 2Historical background
  • 2.1Chinese philosophy
  • 2.2Western philosophy
• 3Classical utilitarianism
  • 3.1Jeremy Bentham
  • 3.2John Stuart Mill
    • 3.2.1Higher and lower pleasures
    • 3.2.2Mill's 'proof' of the principle of utility
• 4Twentieth-century developments
  • 4.1Ideal utilitarianism
  • 4.2Act and rule utilitarianism
  • 4.3Two-level utilitarianism
  • 4.4Preference utilitarianism
• 5More varieties of utilitarianism
  • 5.1Negative utilitarianism
  • 5.2Motive utilitarianism
• 6Criticisms
  • 6.1Ignores justice
  • 6.2Predicting consequences
  • 6.3Demandingness objection
  • 6.4Aggregating utility
  • 6.5Calculating utility is self-defeating
  • 6.6Karl Marx's criticism
  • 6.7John Paul II's personalist criticism
• 7Additional considerations
  • 7.1Average v. total happiness
  • 7.2Motives, intentions, and actions
• 8Humans alone, or other sentient beings?
  • 8.1Nonhuman animals
  • 8.2AI
• 9Application to specific issues
  • 9.1World poverty
• 10See also
• 11Notes
• 12References
• 13Further reading
• 14External links

Etymology[edit]

Benthamism, the utilitarian philosophy founded by Jeremy Bentham, was substantially modified by his successor John Stuart Mill, who popularized the word 'Utilitarianism'.^[1] In 1861, Mill acknowledged in a footnote that, though "believing himself to be the first person who brought the word 'utilitarian' into use, he did not invent it. Rather, he adopted it from a passing expression in" John Galt's 1821 novel Annals of the Parish.^[2] Mill seems to have been unaware that Bentham had used the term 'utilitarian' in his 1781 letter to George Wilson and his 1802 letter to Étienne Dumont.^[1]

Historical background[edit]

Chinese philosophy[edit]

In Chinese philosophy the Mohists and their successors the "Chinese Legalists"^{[citation needed]} might be considered utilitarians, or at least the "earliest form of consequentialism". Of particular concern for them, the fourth century witnessed the emergence of discussions polarizing the concepts of self and private, commonly used in conjunction with profit and associated with fragmentation, division, partiality, and one-sidelines, with that of the state and "public", represented by the duke and referring to what is official or royal, that is, the ruler himself, associated with unity, wholeness, objectivity, and universality. The later denotes the "universal Way".^[3]

However, the Mohists did not focus on emotional happiness, but promoted objective public goods: material wealth, a large population or family, and social order.^[4] On the other hand, the "Legalist" Han Fei "is motivated almost totally from the ruler's point of view."^[5]

Western philosophy[edit]

See also: Hedonism

The importance of happiness as an end for humans has long been recognized. Forms of hedonism were put forward by Aristippus and Epicurus; Aristotle argued that eudaimonia is the highest human good and Augustine wrote that "all men agree in desiring the last end, which is happiness." Happiness was also explored in depth by Aquinas.^{[6][7][8][9][10]} Different varieties of consequentialism also existed in the ancient and medieval world, like the state consequentialism of Mohism or the political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli. Mohist consequentialism advocated communitarian moral goods including political stability, population growth, and wealth, but did not support the utilitarian notion of maximizing individual happiness.^[11] Machiavelli was also an exponent of consequentialism. He believed that the actions of a state, however cruel or ruthless they may be, must contribute towards the common good of a society.^[12] Utilitarianism as a distinct ethical position only emerged in the eighteenth century.

Although utilitarianism is usually thought to start with Jeremy Bentham, there were earlier writers who presented theories that were strikingly similar. In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume writes:^[13]

In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the question cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil.

Hume studied the works of, and corresponded with, Francis Hutcheson, and it was he who first introduced a key utilitarian phrase. In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue(1725), Hutcheson says^[14] when choosing the most moral action, virtue is in proportion to the number of people a particular action brings happiness to. In the same way, moral evil, or vice, is proportionate to the number of people made to suffer. The best action is the one that procures the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers—and the worst is the one that causes the most misery.

In the first three editions of the book, Hutcheson included various mathematical algorithms "...to compute the Morality of any Actions." In this, he pre-figured the hedonic calculus of Bentham.

Some claim that John Gay developed the first systematic theory of utilitarian ethics.^[15] In Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality (1731), Gay argues that:^[16]

happiness, private happiness, is the proper or ultimate end of all our actions… each particular action may be said to have its proper and peculiar end…(but)…. they still tend or ought to tend to something farther; as is evident from hence, viz. that a man may ask and expect a reason why either of them are pursued: now to ask the reason of any action or pursuit, is only to enquire into the end of it: but to expect a reason, i.e. an end, to be assigned for an ultimate end, is absurd. To ask why I pursue happiness, will admit of no other answer than an explanation of the terms.

This pursuit of happiness is given a theological basis:^[17]

Now it is evident from the nature of God, viz. his being infinitely happy in himself from all eternity, and from his goodness manifested in his works, that he could have no other design in creating mankind than their happiness; and therefore he wills their happiness; therefore the means of their happiness: therefore that my behaviour, as far as it may be a means of the happiness of mankind, should be such…thus the will of God is the immediate criterion of Virtue, and the happiness of mankind the criterion of the wilt of God; and therefore the happiness of mankind may be said to be the criterion of virtue, but once removed…(and)… I am to do whatever lies in my power towards promoting the happiness of mankind.

 

Modern Utilitarianism by Thomas Rawson Birks 1874

Gay's theological utilitarianism was developed and popularized by William Paley. It has been claimed that Paley was not a very original thinker and that the philosophical part of his treatise on ethics is "an assemblage of ideas developed by others and is presented to be learned by students rather than debated by colleagues."^[18] Nevertheless, his book The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) was a required text at Cambridge^[18] and Smith says that Paley's writings were "once as well known in American colleges as were the readers and spellers of William McGuffey and Noah Webster in the elementary schools."^[19] Although now largely missing from the philosophical canon, Schneewind writes that "utilitarianism first became widely known in England through the work of William Paley."^[20] The now forgotten significance of Paley can be judged from the title of Thomas Rawson Birks's 1874 work Modern Utilitarianism or the Systems of Paley, Bentham and Mill Examined and Compared.

Apart from restating that happiness as an end is grounded in the nature of God, Paley also discusses the place of rules. He writes:^[21]

...actions are to be estimated by their tendency. Whatever is expedient, is right. It is the utility of any moral rule alone, which constitutes the obligation of it.

But to all this there seems a plain objection, viz. that many actions are useful, which no man in his senses will allow to be right. There are occasions, in which the hand of the assassin would be very useful… The true answer is this; that these actions, after all, are not useful, and for that reason, and that alone, are not right.

To see this point perfectly, it must be observed that the bad consequences of actions are twofold, particular and general. The particular bad consequence of an action, is the mischief which that single action directly and immediately occasions. The general bad consequence is, the violation of some necessary or useful general rule…

You cannot permit one action and forbid another, without showing a difference between them. Consequently, the same sort of actions must be generally permitted or generally forbidden. Where, therefore, the general permission of them would be pernicious, it becomes necessary to lay down and support the rule which generally forbids them.

Classical utilitarianism[edit]

Jeremy Bentham[edit]

Main article: Jeremy Bentham

 

Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham's book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was printed in 1780 but not published until 1789. It is possible that Bentham was spurred on to publish after he saw the success of Paley's The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy.^[22] Bentham's book was not an immediate success^[23] but his ideas were spread further when Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont translated edited selections from a variety of Bentham's manuscripts into French. Traité de legislation civile et pénale was published in 1802 and then later retranslated back into English by Hildreth as The Theory of Legislation, although by this time significant portions of Dumont's work had already been retranslated and incorporated into Sir John Bowring's edition of Bentham's works, which was issued in parts between 1838 and 1843.

Bentham's work opens with a statement of the principle of utility:^[24]

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do… By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.

In Chapter IV, Bentham introduces a method of calculating the value of pleasures and pains, which has come to be known as the hedonic calculus. Bentham says that the value of a pleasure or pain, considered by itself, can be measured according to its intensity, duration, certainty/uncertainty and propinquity/remoteness. In addition, it is necessary to consider "the tendency of any act by which it is produced" and, therefore, to take account of the act's fecundity, or the chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind and its purity, or the chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind. Finally, it is necessary to consider the extent, or the number of people affected by the action.

Perhaps aware that Hutcheson eventually removed his algorithms for calculating the greatest happiness because they "appear'd useless, and were disagreeable to some readers",^[25] Bentham contends that there is nothing novel or unwarranted about his method, for "in all this there is nothing but what the practice of mankind, wheresoever they have a clear view of their own interest, is perfectly conformable to."

Rosen warns that descriptions of utilitarianism can bear "little resemblance historically to utilitarians like Bentham and J. S. Mill" and can be more "a crude version of act utilitarianism conceived in the twentieth century as a straw man to be attacked and rejected."^[26] It is a mistake to think that Bentham is not concerned with rules. His seminal work is concerned with the principles of legislation and the hedonic calculus is introduced with the words "Pleasures then, and the avoidance of pains, are the ends that the legislator has in view." In Chapter VII, Bentham says: "The business of government is to promote the happiness of the society, by punishing and rewarding… In proportion as an act tends to disturb that happiness, in proportion as the tendency of it is pernicious, will be the demand it creates for punishment."

The question then arises as to when, if at all, it might be legitimate to break the law. This is considered in The Theory of Legislation, where Bentham distinguishes between evils of the first and second orders. Those of the first order are the more immediate consequences; those of the second are when the consequences spread through the community causing "alarm" and "danger".

It is true there are cases in which, if we confine ourselves to the effects of the first order, the good will have an incontestable preponderance over the evil. Were the offence considered only under this point of view, it would not be easy to assign any good reasons to justify the rigour of the laws. Every thing depends upon the evil of the second order; it is this which gives to such actions the character of crime, and which makes punishment necessary. Let us take, for example, the physical desire of satisfying hunger. Let a beggar, pressed by hunger, steal from a rich man's house a loaf, which perhaps saves him from starving, can it be possible to compare the good which the thief acquires for himself, with the evil which the rich man suffers? … It is not on account of the evil of the first order that it is necessary to erect these actions into offences, but on account of the evil of the second order.^[27]

John Stuart Mill[edit]

Main article: John Stuart Mill

Mill was brought up as a Benthamite with the explicit intention that he would carry on the cause of utilitarianism.^[28] Mill's book Utilitarianism first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and was reprinted as a single book in 1863.^{[29][citation needed]}

Higher and lower pleasures[edit]

Mill rejects a purely quantitative measurement of utility and says:^[30]

It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.

The word utility is used to mean general well-being or happiness, and Mill's view is that utility is the consequence of a good action. Utility, within the context of utilitarianism, refers to people performing actions for social utility. With social utility, he means the well-being of many people. Mill's explanation of the concept of utility in his work, Utilitarianism, is that people really do desire happiness, and since each individual desires their own happiness, it must follow that all of us desire the happiness of everyone, contributing to a larger social utility. Thus, an action that results in the greatest pleasure for the utility of society is the best action, or as Jeremy Bentham, the founder of early Utilitarianism put it, as the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Mill not only viewed actions as a core part of utility, but as the directive rule of moral human conduct. The rule being that we should only be committing actions that provide pleasure to society. This view of pleasure was hedonistic, as it pursued the thought that pleasure is the highest good in life. This concept was adopted by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism, and can be seen in his works. According to Mill, good actions result in pleasure, and that there is no higher end than pleasure. Mill says that good actions lead to pleasure and define good character. Better put, the justification of character, and whether an action is good or not, is based on how the person contributes to the concept of social utility. In the long run the best proof of a good character is good actions; and resolutely refuse to consider any mental disposition as good, of which the predominant tendency is to produce bad conduct. In the last chapter of Utilitarianism, Mill concludes that justice, as a classifying factor of our actions (being just or unjust) is one of the certain moral requirements, and when the requirements are all regarded collectively, they are viewed as greater according to this scale of "social utility" as Mill puts it.

He also notes that, contrary to what its critics might say, there is "no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect… a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation." However, he accepts that this is usually because the intellectual pleasures are thought to have circumstantial advantages, i.e. "greater permanency, safety, uncostliness, &c." Instead, Mill will argue that some pleasures are intrinsically better than others.

The accusation that hedonism is "doctrine worthy only of swine" has a long history. In Nicomachean Ethics (Book 1 Chapter 5), Aristotle says that identifying the good with pleasure is to prefer a life suitable for beasts. The theological utilitarians had the option of grounding their pursuit of happiness in the will of God; the hedonistic utilitarians needed a different defence. Mill's approach is to argue that the pleasures of the intellect are intrinsically superior to physical pleasures.

Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs… A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence… It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question…^[31]

Mill argues that if people who are "competently acquainted" with two pleasures show a decided preference for one even if it be accompanied by more discontent and "would not resign it for any quantity of the other", then it is legitimate to regard that pleasure as being superior in quality. Mill recognizes that these "competent judges" will not always agree, and states that, in cases of disagreement, the judgment of the majority is to be accepted as final. Mill also acknowledges that "many who are capable of the higher pleasures, occasionally, under the influence of temptation, postpone them to the lower. But this is quite compatible with a full appreciation of the intrinsic superiority of the higher." Mill says that this appeal to those who have experienced the relevant pleasures is no different from what must happen when assessing the quantity of pleasure, for there is no other way of measuring "the acutest of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations." "It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly-endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constitute, is imperfect."^[32]

Mill's 'proof' of the principle of utility[edit]

In Chapter Four of Utilitarianism, Mill considers what proof can be given for the principle of utility. He says:^[33]

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it... In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it… No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness… we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.

It is usual^[34] to say that Mill is committing a number of fallacies. He is accused of committing the naturalistic fallacy, because he is trying to deduce what people ought to do from what they in fact do; the fallacy of equivocation, because he moves from the fact that (1) something is desirable, i.e. is capable of being desired, to the claim that (2) it is desirable, i.e. that it ought to be desired; and the fallacy of composition, because the fact that people desire their own happiness does not imply that the aggregate of all persons will desire the general happiness.

Such allegations began to emerge in Mill's lifetime, shortly after the publication of Utilitarianism, and persisted for well over a century, though the tide has been turning in recent discussions.

A defence of Mill against all three charges, with a chapter devoted to each, can be found in Necip Fikri Alican's Mill's Principle of Utility: A Defense of John Stuart Mill's Notorious Proof (1994). This is the first, and remains the only, book-length treatment of the subject matter. Yet the alleged fallacies in the proof continue to attract scholarly attention in journal articles and book chapters.

Hall^[35] and Popkin^[36] defend Mill against this accusation pointing out that he begins Chapter Four by asserting that "questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof, in the ordinary acceptation of the term" and that this is "common to all first principles." According to Hall and Popkin, therefore, Mill does not attempt to "establish that what people do desire is desirable but merely attempts to make the principles acceptable."^[34] The type of "proof" Mill is offering "consists only of some considerations which, Mill thought, might induce an honest and reasonable man to accept utilitarianism."^[34]

Having claimed that people do, in fact, desire happiness, Mill now has to show that it is the only thing they desire. Mill anticipates the objection that people desire other things such as virtue. He argues that whilst people might start desiring virtue as a means to happiness, eventually, it becomes part of someone's happiness and is then desired as an end in itself.

The principle of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, are to be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.^[37]

We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which is mankind are capable; we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all humans beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.^[38]

Twentieth-century developments[edit]

Ideal utilitarianism[edit]

The description of ideal utilitarianism was first used by Hastings Rashdall in The Theory of Good and Evil (1907), but it is more often associated with G. E. Moore. In Ethics (1912), Moore rejected a purely hedonistic utilitarianism and argued that there is a range of values that might be maximized. Moore's strategy was to show that it is intuitively implausible that pleasure is the sole measure of what is good. He says that such an assumption:^[39]

involves our saying, for instance, that a world in which absolutely nothing except pleasure existed—no knowledge, no love, no enjoyment of beauty, no moral qualities—must yet be intrinsically better—better worth creating—provided only the total quantity of pleasure in it were the least bit greater, than one in which all these things existed as well as pleasure.

It involves our saying that, even if the total quantity of pleasure in each was exactly equal, yet the fact that all the beings in the one possessed in addition knowledge of many different kinds and a full appreciation of all that was beautiful or worthy of love in their world, whereas none of the beings in the other possessed any of these things, would give us no reason whatever for preferring the former to the latter.

Moore admits that it is impossible to prove the case either way, but he believed that it was intuitively obvious that even if the amount of pleasure stayed the same a world that contained such things as beauty and love would be a better world. He adds that, if a person was to take the contrary view, then "I think it is self-evident that he would be wrong."^[39]

Act and rule utilitarianism[edit]

In the mid-twentieth century a number of philosophers focused on the place of rules in utilitarian thinking.^[40] It was already accepted that it is necessary to use rules to help you choose the right action because the problems of calculating the consequences on each and every occasion would almost certainly result in you frequently choosing something less than the best course of action. Paley had justified the use of rules and Mill says:^[41]

It is truly a whimsical supposition that, if mankind were agreed in considering utility to be the test of morality, they would remain without any agreement as to what is useful, and would take no measures for having their notions on the subject taught to the young, and enforced by law and opinion… to consider the rules of morality as improvable, is one thing; to pass over the intermediate generalisations entirely, and endeavour to test each individual action directly by the first principle, is another… The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal… Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong.

However, rule utilitarianism proposes a more central role for rules that was thought to rescue the theory from some of its more devastating criticisms, particularly problems to do with justice and promise keeping. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, articles were published both for and against the new form of utilitarianism, and through this debate the theory we now call rule utilitarianism was created. In an introduction to an anthology of these articles, the editor was able to say: "The development of this theory was a dialectical process of formulation, criticism, reply and reformulation; the record of this process well illustrates the co-operative development of a philosophical theory."^[42]

Smart^[43] and McCloskey^[44] initially used the terms 'extreme' and 'restricted' utilitarianism but eventually everyone settled on the terms 'act' and 'rule' utilitarianism.

The essential difference is in what determines whether or not an action is the right action. Act utilitarianism maintains that an action is right if it maximizes utility; rule utilitarianism maintains that an action is right if it conforms to a rule that maximizes utility.

In 1956, Urmson published an influential article^[45] arguing that Mill justified rules on utilitarian principles. From then on, articles have debated this interpretation of Mill. In all probability, it was not a distinction that Mill was particularly trying to make and so the evidence in his writing is inevitably mixed. A collection of Mill's writing published in 1977 includes a letter in which he says:^[46]

I agree with you that the right way of testing actions by their consequences, is to test them by the natural consequences of the particular action, and not by those which would follow if everyone did the same. But, for the most part, the consideration of what would happen if everyone did the same, is the only means we have of discovering the tendency of the act in the particular case.

This seems to tip the balance in favour of saying that Mill is best classified as an act utilitarian.

Some school level textbooks and at least one UK examination board^[47] make a further distinction between strong and weak rule utilitarianism. However, it is not clear that this distinction is made in the academic literature.

It has been argued that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism, because for any given rule, in the case where breaking the rule produces more utility, the rule can be refined by the addition of a sub-rule that handles cases like the exception.^[48] This process holds for all cases of exceptions, and so the "rules" have as many "sub-rules" as there are exceptional cases, which, in the end, makes an agent seek out whatever outcome produces the maximum utility.^[49]

Two-level utilitarianism[edit]

Main article: Two-level utilitarianism

In Principles (1973),^[50] R. M. Hare accepts that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism but claims that this is a result of allowing the rules to be "as specific and un-general as we please." He argues that one of the main reasons for introducing rule utilitarianism was to do justice to the general rules that people need for moral education and character development and he proposes that "a difference between act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism can be introduced by limiting the specificity of the rules, i.e., by increasing their generality."^[50]:14 This distinction between a "specific rule utilitarianism" (which collapses into act utilitarianism) and "general rule utilitarianism" forms the basis of Hare's two-level utilitarianism.

When we are "playing God or the ideal observer", we use the specific form, and we will need to do this when we are deciding what general principles to teach and follow. When we are "inculcating" or in situations where the biases of our human nature are likely to prevent us doing the calculations properly, then we should use the more general rule utilitarianism.

Hare argues that in practice, most of the time, we should be following the general principles:^[50]:17

One ought to abide by the general principles whose general inculcation is for the best; harm is more likely to come, in actual moral situations, from questioning these rules than from sticking to them, unless the situations are very extra-ordinary; the results of sophisticated felicific calculations are not likely, human nature and human ignorance being what they are, to lead to the greatest utility.

In Moral Thinking (1981), Hare illustrated the two extremes. The "archangel" is the hypothetical person who has perfect knowledge of the situation and no personal biases or weaknesses and always uses critical moral thinking to decide the right thing to do; the "prole" is the hypothetical person who is completely incapable of critical thinking and uses nothing but intuitive moral thinking and, of necessity, has to follow the general moral rules they have been taught or learned through imitation.^[51] It is not that some people are archangels and others proles, but rather that "we all share the characteristics of both to limited and varying degrees and at different times."^[51]

Hare does not specify when we should think more like an "archangel" and more like a "prole" as this will, in any case, vary from person to person. However, the critical moral thinking underpins and informs the more intuitive moral thinking. It is responsible for formulating and, if necessary, reformulating the general moral rules. We also switch to critical thinking when trying to deal with unusual situations or in cases where the intuitive moral rules give conflicting advice.

Preference utilitarianism[edit]

Main article: Preference utilitarianism

Preference utilitarianism was first put forward in 1977 by John Harsanyi in Morality and the theory of rational behaviour,^[52] but preference utilitarianism is more commonly associated with R. M. Hare,^[51] Peter Singer^[53] and Richard Brandt.^[54]

Harsanyi claimed that his theory is indebted to Adam Smith, who equated the moral point of view with that of an impartial but sympathetic observer; to Kant, who insisted on the criterion of universality, which may also be described as a criterion of reciprocity; to the classical utilitarians who made maximizing social utility the basic criterion of morality; and to "the modern theory of rational behaviour under risk and uncertainty, usually described as Bayesian decision theory".^[52]:42

Harsanyi rejects hedonistic utilitarianism as being dependent on an outdated psychology saying that it is far from obvious that everything we do is motivated by a desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. He also rejects ideal utilitarianism because "it is certainly not true as an empirical observation that people's only purpose in life is to have 'mental states of intrinsic worth'."^[52]:54

According to Harsanyi, "preference utilitarianism is the only form of utilitarianism consistent with the important philosophical principle of preference autonomy. By this I mean the principle that, in deciding what is good and what is bad for a given individual, the ultimate criterion can only be his own wants and his own preferences."^[52]:55

Harsanyi adds two caveats. People sometimes have irrational preferences. To deal with this, Harsanyi distinguishes between "manifest" preferences and "true" preferences. The former are those "manifested by his observed behaviour, including preferences possibly based on erroneous factual beliefs^{[clarification needed]}, or on careless logical analysis, or on strong emotions that at the moment greatly hinder rational choice" whereas the latter are "the preferences he would have if he had all the relevant factual information, always reasoned with the greatest possible care, and were in a state of mind most conducive to rational choice."^[52]:55 It is the latter that preference utilitarianism tries to satisfy.

The second caveat is that antisocial preferences, such as sadism, envy and resentment, have to be excluded. Harsanyi achieves this by claiming that such preferences partially exclude those people from the moral community:

Utilitarian ethics makes all of us members of the same moral community. A person displaying ill will toward others does remain a member of this community, but not with his whole personality. That part of his personality that harbours these hostile antisocial feelings must be excluded from membership, and has no claim for a hearing when it comes to defining our concept of social utility.^[52]:56

More varieties of utilitarianism[edit]

Negative utilitarianism[edit]

Main article: Negative utilitarianism

In The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), Karl Popper argued that the principle "maximize pleasure" should be replaced by "minimize pain". He thought "it is not only impossible but very dangerous to attempt to maximize the pleasure or the happiness of the people, since such an attempt must lead to totalitarianism."^[55] He claimed that:^[56]

there is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness, or between pain and pleasure… In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway. A further criticism of the Utilitarian formula "Maximize pleasure" is that it assumes a continuous pleasure-pain scale which allows us to treat degrees of pain as negative degrees of pleasure. But, from the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure, and especially not one man's pain by another man's pleasure. Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all...

The actual term negative utilitarianism was introduced by R.N.Smart as the title to his 1958 reply to Popper^[57] in which he argued that the principle would entail seeking the quickest and least painful method of killing the entirety of humanity.

Negative total utilitarianism, in contrast, tolerates suffering that can be compensated within the same person.^[58][59]

Negative preference utilitarianism avoids the problem of moral killing with reference to existing preferences that such killing would violate, while it still demands a justification for the creation of new lives.^[60] A possible justification is the reduction of the average level of preference-frustration.^[61]

Others see negative utilitarianism as a branch within modern hedonistic utilitarianism, which assigns a higher weight to the avoidance of suffering than to the promotion of happiness.^[62] The moral weight of suffering can be increased by using a "compassionate" utilitarian metric, so that the result is the same as in prioritarianism.^[63]

Pessimistic representatives of negative utilitarianism can be found in the environment of Buddhism.^[64]

Motive utilitarianism[edit]

Motive utilitarianism was first proposed by Robert Merrihew Adams in 1976.^[65] Whereas act utilitarianism requires us to choose our actions by calculating which action will maximize utility and rule utilitarianism requires us to implement rules which will, on the whole, maximize utility, motive utilitarianism "has the utility calculus being used to select motives and dispositions according to their general felicific effects, and those motives and dispositions then dictate our choices of actions."^[66]

The arguments for moving to some form of motive utilitarianism at the personal level can be seen as mirroring the arguments for moving to some form of rule utilitarianism at the social level.^[67]Adams refers to Sidgwick's observation that "Happiness (general as well as individual) is likely to be better attained if the extent to which we set ourselves consciously to aim at it be carefully restricted."^[68] Trying to apply the utility calculation on each and every occasion is likely to lead to a sub-optimal outcome. Applying carefully selected rules at the social level and encouraging appropriate motives at the personal level is, so it is argued, likely to lead to a better overall outcome even if on some individual occasions it leads to the wrong action when assessed according to act utilitarian standards.^[69]

Adams concludes that "right action, by act-utilitarian standards, and right motivation, by motive-utilitarian standards, are incompatible in some cases."^[70] The necessity of this conclusion is rejected by Fred Feldman who argues that "the conflict in question results from an inadequate formulation of the utilitarian doctrines; motives play no essential role in it…(and that)… Precisely the same sort of conflict arises even when MU is left out of consideration and AU is applied by itself."^[71] Instead, Feldman proposes a variant of act utilitarianism that results in there being no conflict between it and motive utilitarianism.

Criticisms[edit]

Because utilitarianism is not a single theory but a cluster of related theories that have been developed over two hundred years, criticisms can be made for different reasons and have different targets.

Ignores justice[edit]

As Rosen^[22] has pointed out, claiming that act utilitarians are not concerned about having rules is to set up a "straw man". Similarly, Hare refers to "the crude caricature of act utilitarianism which is the only version of it that many philosophers seem to be acquainted with."^[72] Given what Bentham says about second order evils^[73] it would be a serious misrepresentation to say that he and similar act utilitarians would be prepared to punish an innocent person for the greater good. Nevertheless, whether they would agree or not, this is what critics of utilitarianism claim is entailed by the theory. A classic version of this criticism was given by H. J. McCloskey:^[44]

Suppose that a sheriff were faced with the choice either of framing a Negro for a rape that had aroused hostility to the Negroes (a particular Negro generally being believed to be guilty but whom the sheriff knows not to be guilty)—and thus preventing serious anti-Negro riots which would probably lead to some loss of life and increased hatred of each other by whites and Negroes—or of hunting for the guilty person and thereby allowing the anti-Negro riots to occur, while doing the best he can to combat them. In such a case the sheriff, if he were an extreme utilitarian, would appear to be committed to framing the Negro.

By "extreme" utilitarian, McCloskey is referring to what later came to be called "act" utilitarianism. He suggests one response might be that the sheriff would not frame the innocent negro because of another rule: "do not punish an innocent person". Another response might be that the riots the sheriff is trying to avoid might have positive utility in the long run by drawing attention to questions of race and resources to help address tensions between the communities.

In a later article, McCloskey says:^[74]

Surely the utilitarian must admit that whatever the facts of the matter may be, it is logically possible that an 'unjust' system of punishment—e.g. a system involving collective punishments, retroactive laws and punishments, or punishments of parents and relations of the offender—may be more useful than a 'just' system of punishment?

Predicting consequences[edit]

Some argue that it is impossible to do the calculation that utilitarianism requires because consequences are inherently unknowable. Daniel Dennett describes this as the Three Mile Islandeffect.^[75] Dennett points out that not only is it impossible to assign a precise utility value to the incident, it is impossible to know whether, ultimately, the near-meltdown that occurred was a good or bad thing. He suggests that it would have been a good thing if plant operators learned lessons that prevented future serious incidents.

Russell Hardin rejects such arguments. He argues that it is possible to distinguish the moral impulse of utilitarianism (which is "to define the right as good consequences and to motivate people to achieve these") from our ability to correctly apply rational principles which will among other things "depend on the perceived facts of the case and on the particular moral actor's mental equipment."^[76] The fact that the latter is limited and can change doesn't mean that the former has to be rejected. "If we develop a better system for determining relevant causal relations so that we are able to choose actions that better produce our intended ends, it does not follow that we then must change our ethics. The moral impulse of utilitarianism is constant, but our decisions under it are contingent on our knowledge and scientific understanding."^[77]

From the beginning, utilitarianism has recognized that certainty in such matters is unobtainable and both Bentham and Mill said that it was necessary to rely on the tendencies of actions to bring about consequences. G. E. Moore writing in 1903 said:^[78]

We certainly cannot hope directly to compare their effects except within a limited future; and all the arguments, which have ever been used in Ethics, and upon which we commonly act in common life, directed to shewing that one course is superior to another, are (apart from theological dogmas) confined to pointing out such probable immediate advantages…

An ethical law has the nature not of a scientific law but of a scientific prediction: and the latter is always merely probable, although the probability may be very great.

Demandingness objection[edit]

Act utilitarianism not only requires everyone to do what they can to maximize utility, but to do so without any favouritism. Mill said, "As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator."^[79] Critics say that this combination of requirements leads to utilitarianism making unreasonable demands. The well-being of strangers counts just as much as that of friends, family or self. "What makes this requirement so demanding is the gargantuan number of strangers in great need of help and the indefinitely many opportunities to make sacrifices to help them."^[80] As Shelly Kagan says, "Given the parameters of the actual world, there is no question that …(maximally)… promoting the good would require a life of hardship, self-denial, and austerity…a life spent promoting the good would be a severe one indeed."^[81]

Hooker describes two aspects to the problem: act utilitarianism requires huge sacrifices from those who are relatively better off and also requires sacrifice of your own good even when the aggregate good will be only slightly increased.^[82] Another way of highlighting the complaint is to say that in utilitarianism, "there is no such thing as morally permissible self-sacrifice that goes above and beyond the call of duty."^[82] Mill was quite clear about this, "A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted."^[79]

One response to the problem is to accept its demands. This is the view taken by Peter Singer, who says: "No doubt we do instinctively prefer to help those who are close to us. Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, makes a crucial difference to our obligations."^[83]

Others argue that a moral theory that is so contrary to our deeply held moral convictions must either be rejected or modified.^[84] There have been various attempts to modify utilitarianism to escape its seemingly over-demanding requirements.^[85] One approach is to drop the demand that utility be maximized. In Satisficing Consequentialism, Michael Slote argues for a form of utilitarianism where "an act might qualify as morally right through having good enough consequences, even though better consequences could have been produced."^[86] One advantage of such a system is that it would be able to accommodate the notion of supererogatory actions.

Samuel Scheffler takes a different approach and amends the requirement that everyone be treated the same.^[87] In particular, Scheffler suggests that there is an "agent-centered prerogative" such that when the overall utility is being calculated it is permitted to count our own interests more heavily than the interests of others. Kagan suggests that such a procedure might be justified on the grounds that "a general requirement to promote the good would lack the motivational underpinning necessary for genuine moral requirements" and, secondly, that personal independence is necessary for the existence of commitments and close personal relations and that "the value of such commitments yields a positive reason for preserving within moral theory at least some moral independence for the personal point of view."^[88]

Robert Goodin takes yet another approach and argues that the demandingness objection can be "blunted" by treating utilitarianism as a guide to public policy rather than one of individual morality. He suggests that many of the problems arise under the traditional formulation because the conscientious utilitarian ends up having to make up for the failings of others and so contributing more than their fair share.^[89]

Harsanyi argues that the objection overlooks the fact that "people attach considerable utility to freedom from unduly burdensome moral obligations… most people will prefer a society with a more relaxed moral code, and will feel that such a society will achieve a higher level of average utility—even if adoption of such a moral code should lead to some losses in economic and cultural accomplishments (so long as these losses remain within tolerable limits). This means that utilitarianism, if correctly interpreted, will yield a moral code with a standard of acceptable conduct very much below the level of highest moral perfection, leaving plenty of scope for supererogatory actions exceeding this minimum standard."^[90]

Aggregating utility[edit]

The objection that "utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons"^[91] came to prominence in 1971 with the publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. The concept is also important in animal rights advocate Richard Ryder's rejection of utilitarianism, in which he talks of the "boundary of the individual", through which neither pain nor pleasure may pass.^[92]However, a similar objection was noted in 1970 by Thomas Nagel (who claimed that consequentialism "treats the desires, needs, satisfactions, and dissatisfactions of distinct persons as if they were the desires, etc., of a mass person"^[93]), and even earlier by David Gauthier, who wrote that utilitarianism supposes "that mankind is a super-person, whose greatest satisfaction is the objective of moral action. . . . But this is absurd. Individuals have wants, not mankind; individuals seek satisfaction, not mankind. A person's satisfaction is not part of any greater satisfaction."^[94]Thus, the aggregation of utility becomes futile as both pain and happiness are intrinsic to and inseparable from the consciousness in which they are felt, rendering impossible the task of adding up the various pleasures of multiple individuals.

A response to this criticism is to point out that whilst seeming to resolve some problems it introduces others. Intuitively, there are many cases where people do want to take the numbers involved into account. As Alastair Norcross has said, "suppose that Homer is faced with the painful choice between saving Barney from a burning building or saving both Moe and Apu from the building…it is clearly better for Homer to save the larger number, precisely because it is a larger number… Can anyone who really considers the matter seriously honestly claim to believe that it is worse that one person die than that the entire sentient population of the universe be severely mutilated? Clearly not."^[95]

It may be possible to uphold the distinction between persons whilst still aggregating utility, if it accepted that people can be influenced by empathy.^[96] This position is advocated by Iain King,^[97]who has suggested the evolutionary basis of empathy means humans can take into account the interests of other individuals, but only on a one-to-one basis, "since we can only imagine ourselves in the mind of one other person at a time."^[98] King uses this insight to adapt utilitarianism, and it may help reconcile Bentham's philosophy with deontology and virtue ethics.^[99]

The philosopher John Taurek also argued that the idea of adding happiness or pleasures across persons is quite unintelligible and that the numbers of persons involved in a situation are morally irrelevant.^[100] Taurek's basic concern comes down to this: we cannot explain what it means to say that things would be five times worse if five people die than if one person dies. "I cannot give a satisfactory account of the meaning of judgments of this kind," he wrote (p. 304). He argues that each person can only lose one person's happiness or pleasures. There isn't five times more loss of happiness or pleasure when five die: who would be feeling this happiness or pleasure? "Each person's potential loss has the same significance to me, only as a loss to that person alone. because, by hypothesis, I have an equal concern for each person involved, I am moved to give each of them an equal chance to be spared his loss" (p. 307). Parfit^[101] and others^[102] have criticized Taurek's line, and it continues to be discussed.^[103]

Calculating utility is self-defeating[edit]

An early criticism, which was addressed by Mill, is that if time is taken to calculate the best course of action it is likely that the opportunity to take the best course of action will already have passed. Mill responded that there had been ample time to calculate the likely effects:^[79]

...namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time, mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life, are dependent…It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveller respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of landmarks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment.

More recently, Hardin has made the same point. "It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, 'if the reasonable man "worked to rule" by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.'"^[77]

It is such considerations that lead even act utilitarians to rely on "rules of thumb", as Smart^[104] has called them.

Karl Marx's criticism[edit]

Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, criticises Bentham's utilitarianism on the grounds that it does not appear to recognise that different people have different joys:^[105]

Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he who would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naivete he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is "useful," "because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law." Artistic criticism is "harmful," because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, "nulla dies sine linea [no day without a line]", piled up mountains of books.

John Paul II's personalist criticism[edit]

Pope John Paul II, following his personalist philosophy, argued that a danger of utilitarianism is that it tends to make persons, just as much as things, the object of use. "Utilitarianism," he wrote, "is a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of things and not of persons, a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used."^[106]

Additional considerations[edit]

Average v. total happiness[edit]

Main article: Average and total utilitarianism

In The Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick asked, "Is it total or average happiness that we seek to make a maximum?"^[107] He noted that aspects of the question had been overlooked and answered the question himself by saying that what had to be maximized was the average multiplied by the number of people living.^[108] He also argued that, if the "average happiness enjoyed remains undiminished, Utilitarianism directs us to make the number enjoying it as great as possible."^[108] This was also the view taken earlier by Paley. He notes that, although he speaks of the happiness of communities, "the happiness of a people is made up of the happiness of single persons; and the quantity of happiness can only be augmented by increasing the number of the percipients, or the pleasure of their perceptions" and that if extreme cases, such as people held as slaves, are excluded the amount of happiness will usually be in proportion to the number of people. Consequently, "the decay of population is the greatest evil that a state can suffer; and the improvement of it the object which ought, in all countries, to be aimed at in preference to every other political purpose whatsoever."^[109] A similar view was expressed by Smart, who argued that all other things being equal a universe with two million happy people is better than a universe with only one million happy people.^[110]

Since Sidgwick raised the question it has been studied in detail and philosophers have argued that using either total or average happiness can lead to objectionable results.

According to Derek Parfit, using total happiness falls victim to the repugnant conclusion, whereby large numbers of people with very low but non-negative utility values can be seen as a better goal than a population of a less extreme size living in comfort. In other words, according to the theory, it is a moral good to breed more people on the world for as long as total happiness rises.^[111]

On the other hand, measuring the utility of a population based on the average utility of that population avoids Parfit's repugnant conclusion but causes other problems. For example, bringing a moderately happy person into a very happy world would be seen as an immoral act; aside from this, the theory implies that it would be a moral good to eliminate all people whose happiness is below average, as this would raise the average happiness.^[112]

William Shaw suggests that the problem can be avoided if a distinction is made between potential people, who need not concern us, and actual future people, who should concern us. He says, "utilitarianism values the happiness of people, not the production of units of happiness. Accordingly, one has no positive obligation to have children. However, if you have decided to have a child, then you have an obligation to give birth to the happiest child you can."^[113]

Motives, intentions, and actions[edit]

Utilitarianism is typically taken to assess the rightness or wrongness of an action by considering just the consequences of that action. Bentham very carefully distinguishes motive from intention and says that motives are not in themselves good or bad but can be referred to as such on account of their tendency to produce pleasure or pain. He adds that, "from every kind of motive, may proceed actions that are good, others that are bad, and others that are indifferent."^[114] Mill makes a similar point^[115] and explicitly says that "motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the worth of the agent. He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty, or the hope of being paid for his trouble."^[116]

However, with intention the situation is more complex. In a footnote printed in the second edition of Utilitarianism, Mill says: "the morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention—that is, upon what the agent wills to do."^[116] Elsewhere, he says, "Intention, and motive, are two very different things. But it is the intention, that is, the foresight of consequences, which constitutes the moral rightness or wrongness of the act."^[117]

The correct interpretation of Mill's footnote is a matter of some debate. The difficulty in interpretation centres around trying to explain why, since it is consequences that matter, intentions should play a role in the assessment of the morality of an action but motives should not. One possibility "involves supposing that the 'morality' of the act is one thing, probably to do with the praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of the agent, and its rightness or wrongness another."^[118] Jonathan Dancy rejects this interpretation on the grounds that Mill is explicitly making intention relevant to an assessment of the act not to an assessment of the agent.

An interpretation given by Roger Crisp draws on a definition given by Mill in A System of Logic, where he says that an "intention to produce the effect, is one thing; the effect produced in consequence of the intention, is another thing; the two together constitute the action."^[119] Accordingly, whilst two actions may outwardly appear to be the same they will be different actions if there is a different intention. Dancy notes that this does not explain why intentions count but motives do not.

A third interpretation is that an action might be considered a complex action consisting of several stages and it is the intention that determines which of these stages are to be considered part of the action. Although this is the interpretation favoured by Dancy, he recognizes that this might not have been Mill's own view, for Mill "would not even allow that 'p & q' expresses a complex proposition. He wrote in his System of Logic I iv. 3, of 'Caesar is dead and Brutus is alive', that 'we might as well call a street a complex house, as these two propositions a complex proposition'."^[118]

Finally, whilst motives may not play a role in determining the morality of an action, this does not preclude utilitarians from fostering particular motives if doing so will increase overall happiness.

Humans alone, or other sentient beings?[edit]

Nonhuman animals[edit]

Further information: Speciesism and Animal welfare

 

Peter Singer

In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation Bentham wrote "the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"^[120] Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures might suggest that he gave more status to humans but in The Methods of Ethics, philosopher Henry Sidgwick says "We have next to consider who the 'all' are, whose happiness is to be taken into account. Are we to extend our concern to all the beings capable of pleasure and pain whose feelings are affected by our conduct? or are we to confine our view to human happiness? The former view is the one adopted by Bentham and Mill, and (I believe) by the Utilitarian school generally: and is obviously most in accordance with the universality that is characteristic of their principle ... it seems arbitrary and unreasonable to exclude from the end, as so conceived, any pleasure of any sentient being."^[121]

Moreover, John Stuart Mill himself, in Whewell on Moral Philosophy, defends Bentham's advocacy for animal rights, calling it a 'noble anticipation', and writing: "Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral', let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned."^[122]

The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer and many other animal rights activists have continued to argue that the well-being of all sentient beings ought to be seriously considered. Singer suggests that rights are conferred according to the level of a creature's self-awareness, regardless of their species. He adds that humans tend to be speciesist(discriminatory against non-humans) in ethical matters, and argues that, on utilitarianism, speciesism cannot be justified as there is no rational distinction that can be made between the suffering of humans and the suffering of nonhuman animals; all suffering ought to be reduced. Singer writes: "The racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race, when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Similarly the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is the same in each case ... Most human beings are speciesists."^[123]

In his 1990 edition of Animal Liberation, Peter Singer said that he no longer ate oysters and mussels, because although the creatures might not suffer, they might, it's not really known, and it's easy enough to avoid eating them in any case^[124] (and this aspect of seeking better alternatives is a prominent part of utilitarianism).

This view still might be contrasted with deep ecology, which holds that an intrinsic value is attached to all forms of life and nature, whether currently assumed to be sentient or not. According to utilitarianism, the forms of life that are unable to experience anything akin to either enjoyment or discomfort are denied moral status, because it is impossible to increase the happiness or reduce the suffering of something that cannot feel happiness or suffer. Singer writes:

The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering—in so far as rough comparisons can be made—of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account.

Thus, the moral value of one-celled organisms, as well as some multi-cellular organisms, and natural entities like a river, is only in the benefit they provide to sentient beings. Similarly, utilitarianism places no direct intrinsic value on biodiversity, although the benefits that biodiversity bring to sentient beings may mean that, on utilitarianism, biodiversity ought to be maintained in general.

In John Stuart Mill's essay "On Nature"^[125] he argues that the welfare of wild animals is to be considered when making utilitarian judgments. Tyler Cowen argues that, if individual animals are carriers of utility, then we should consider limiting the predatory activity of carnivores relative to their victims: "At the very least, we should limit current subsidies to nature's carnivores."^[126]

AI[edit]

AI's may develop feelings, become self-aware and be legally regarded as sentient beings.^{[127][128][129]}

Application to specific issues[edit]

World poverty[edit]

An article in the American journal for Economics has addressed the issue of Utilitarian ethics within redistribution of wealth. The journal stated that taxation of the wealthy is the best way to make use of the disposable income they receive. This says that the money creates utility for the most people by funding government services.^[130] Many utilitarian philosophers, including Peter Singer and Toby Ord, argue that inhabitants of developed countries in particular have an obligation to help to end extreme poverty across the world, for example by regularly donating some of their income to charity. Peter Singer, for example, argues that donating some of one's income to charity could help to save a life or cure somebody from a poverty-related illness, which is a much better use of the money as it brings someone in extreme poverty far more happiness than it would bring to oneself if one lived in relative comfort. However, Singer not only argues that one ought to donate a significant proportion of one's income to charity, but also that this money should be directed to the most cost-effective charities, in order to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number, consistent with utilitarian thinking.^[131] Singer's ideas have formed the basis of the modern effective altruist movement.

See also[edit]

• Altruism (ethical doctrine)
• Applied ethics
• Anti-Utilitarianism
• Appeal to consequences
• Bounded rationality
• Charity International
• Classical liberalism
• Cost–benefit analysis
• Decision analysis
• Decision theory
• Effective altruism
• Gross national happiness
• List of utilitarians
• Pleasure principle (psychology)
• Prioritarianism
• Probabilistic reasoning
• Relative utilitarianism
• State consequentialism
• Uncertainty
• Utility monster
• Utilitarian bioethics
• Utilitarian cake-cutting

Notes[edit]

1. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Habibi, Don (2001). "Chapter 3, Mill's Moral Philosophy". John Stuart Mill and the Ethic of Human Growth. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. pp. 89–90, 112. ISBN 978-90-481-5668-9.
2. Jump up ^ John Stuart Mill (1861) Utilitarianism, footnote 1.
3. Jump up ^ Erica Brindley, The Polarization of the Concepts Si (Private Interest) and Gong (Public Interest) in Early Chinese Thought. p.6, 8, 12-13, 16, 19, 21-22, 24, 27
4. Jump up ^ Fraser, Chris, "Mohism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/mohism/
5. Jump up ^ Hansen, Chad. Philosophy East & West. Jul94, Vol. 44 Issue 3, p435. 54p. Fa (standards: laws) and meaning changes in Chinese philosophy.
6. Jump up ^ "SUMMA THEOLOGICA: Man's last end (Prima Secundae Partis, Q. 1)". newadvent.org.
7. Jump up ^ "SUMMA THEOLOGICA: Things in which man's happiness consists (Prima Secundae Partis, Q. 2)". newadvent.org.
8. Jump up ^ "SUMMA THEOLOGICA: What is happiness (Prima Secundae Partis, Q. 3)". newadvent.org.
9. Jump up ^ "SUMMA THEOLOGICA: Things that are required for happiness (Prima Secundae Partis, Q. 4)". newadvent.org.
10. Jump up ^ "SUMMA THEOLOGICA: The attainment of happiness (Prima Secundae Partis, Q. 5)". newadvent.org.
11. Jump up ^ Fraser, Chris (2011). The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy. Oxford University Press. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-19-532899-8.
12. Jump up ^ Warburton, Nigel (2000). Reading Political Philosophy: Machiavelli to Mill. Psychology Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-415-21197-0.
13. Jump up ^ Hume, David (2002). "An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. p. 552. ISBN 978-0521003049.
14. Jump up ^ Hutcheson, Francis (2002). "The Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. p. 515. ISBN 978-0521003049.
15. Jump up ^ Ashcraft, Richard (1991) John Locke: Critical Assessments (Critical assessments of leading political philosophers), Routledge, p. 691
16. Jump up ^ Gay, John (2002). "Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. p. 408. ISBN 978-0521003049.
17. Jump up ^ Gay, John (2002). "Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. pp. 404–05. ISBN 978-0521003049.
18. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Schneewind, J. B. (2002). Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. p. 446. ISBN 978-0521003049.
19. Jump up ^ Smith, Wilson (Jul., 1954) William Paley's Theological Utilitarianism in America, The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, Vol. 11, No. 3, Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, pp. 402–24
20. Jump up ^ Schneewind, J. B. (1977). Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy. Oxford University Press. p. 122. ISBN 978-0198245520.
21. Jump up ^ Paley, William (2002). "The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. pp. 455–56. ISBN 978-0521003049.
22. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Rosen, Frederick (2003) Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill. Routledge, p. 132
23. Jump up ^ Schneewind, J.B. (1977) Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 122
24. Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (January 2009). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Dover Philosophical Classics). Dover Publications Inc. p. 1. ISBN 978-0486454528.
25. Jump up ^ An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue – Francis Hutcheson, Introduction, 1726
26. Jump up ^ Rosen, Frederick (2003) Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill. Routledge, p. 32
27. Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy; Dumont, Etienne; Hildreth, R (November 2005). Theory of Legislation: Translated from the French of Etienne Dumont. Adamant Media Corporation. p. 58. ISBN 978-1402170348.
28. Jump up ^ Halevy, Elie (1966). The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. Beacon Press. pp. 282–84. ISBN 0-19-101020-0.
29. Jump up ^ Hinman, Lawrence (2012). Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory. Wadsworth. ISBN 1133050018.
30. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart (1998). Crisp, Roger, ed. Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press. p. 56. ISBN 0-19-875163-X.
31. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart (1998). Crisp, Roger, ed. Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press. pp. 56–57. ISBN 0-19-875163-X.
32. Jump up ^ John Stuart Mill,Utilitarianism,Chapter 2
33. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart (1998). Crisp, Roger, ed. Utilitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 81. ISBN 0-19-875163-X.
34. ^ Jump up to: ^a b c Popkin, Richard H. (1950). "A Note on the 'Proof' of Utility in J. S. Mill". Ethics. 61: 66.
35. Jump up ^ Hall, Everett W. (1949). "The 'Proof' of Utility in Bentham and Mill". Ethics. 60: 1–18.
36. Jump up ^ Popkin, Richard H. (1950). "A Note on the 'Proof' of Utility in J. S. Mill". Ethics. 61: 66–68.
37. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart (1998). Crisp, Roger, ed. Utilitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 82. ISBN 0-19-875163-X.
38. Jump up ^ Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 2.
39. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Moore, G. E. (1912). Ethics, London: Williams and Norgate, Ch. 7
40. Jump up ^ Bayles, M. D., ed. (1968) Contemporary Utilitarianism, Anchor Books, Doubleday
41. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart (1998). Crisp, Roger, ed. Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press. p. 70. ISBN 0-19-875163-X.
42. Jump up ^ Bayles, M. D., ed. (1968) Contemporary Utilitarianism, Anchor Books, Doubleday, p. 1
43. Jump up ^ Smart, J.J.C. (1956). "Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism". The Philosophical Quarterly. VI: 344–54. JSTOR 2216786. doi:10.2307/2216786.
44. ^ Jump up to: ^a b McCloskey, H.J. (October 1957). "An Examination of Restricted Utilitarianism". The Philosophical Review. 66 (4): 466–85. JSTOR 2182745. doi:10.2307/2182745.
45. Jump up ^ Urmson, J.O. (1953). "The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy of J.S.Mill". The Philosophical Quarterly. III: 33–39. JSTOR 2216697. doi:10.2307/2216697.
46. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Gen. Ed. John M. Robson. 33 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91. Vol. 17, p. 1881
47. Jump up ^ Oliphant, Jill, OCR Religious Ethics for AS and A2, Routledge, (2007)
48. Jump up ^ David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism, 1965
49. Jump up ^ Allen Habib (2008), Promises, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
50. ^ Jump up to: ^a b c Hare, R. M. (1972–1973). "The Presidential Address: Principles". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series. 73: 1–18. JSTOR 4544830. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/73.1.1.
51. ^ Jump up to: ^a b c Hare, R.M. (1981). Moral thinking: its levels, method, and point. Oxford New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198246602.
52. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b c d e f} Harsanyi, John C. (1982), "Morality and the theory of rational behaviour", in Sen, Amartya; Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism and beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–62, ISBN 9780511611964.

    Originally printed as: Harsanyi, John C. (Winter 1977). "Morality and the theory of rational behavior". Social Research, special issue: Rationality, Choice, and Morality. The New School. 44 (4): 623–56. JSTOR 40971169.

53. Jump up ^ Singer, Peter (1979). Practical ethics (1st ed.). Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521297202.

    Singer, Peter (1993). Practical ethics (2nd ed.). Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521439718.

54. Jump up ^ Brandt, Richard B. (1979). A theory of the good and the right. Oxford New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198245506.
55. Jump up ^ Popper, Karl (2002). The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2. Routledge. p. 339. ISBN 978-0415278423.
56. Jump up ^ Popper, Karl (2002). The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1: The Spell of Plato. Routledge. pp. 284–85. ISBN 978-0415237314.
57. Jump up ^ Smart, R.N. (October 1958). "Negative Utilitarianism". Mind. 67 (268): 542–43. JSTOR 2251207. doi:10.1093/mind/lxvii.268.542.
58. Jump up ^ Fricke Fabian (2002), Verschiedene Versionen des negativen Utilitarismus, Kriterion, vol.15, no.1, p. 14
59. Jump up ^ Arrhenius Gustav (2000), Future Generations, A Challenge for Moral Theory, FD-Diss., Uppsala University, Dept. of Philosophy, Uppsala: University Printers, p. 100
60. Jump up ^ Fricke Fabian (2002), Verschiedene Versionen des negativen Utilitarismus, Kriterion, vol.15, no.1, pp. 20–22
61. Jump up ^ {Chao, "Negative Average Preference Utilitarianism", Journal of Philosophy of Life, 2012; 2(1): 55–66
62. Jump up ^ Fricke Fabian(2002), Verschiedene Versionen des negativen Utilitarismus, Kriterion, vol.15, no.1, p. 14
63. Jump up ^ Broome John (1991), Weighing Goods, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 222
64. Jump up ^ Bruno Contestabile: Negative Utilitarianism and Buddhist Intuition. In: Contemporary Buddhism Vol.15, Issue 2, S. 298–311, London 2014.
65. Jump up ^ Robert Merrihew Adams, Motive Utilitarianism, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 14, On Motives and Morals (12 August 1976), pp. 467–81
66. Jump up ^ Goodin, Robert E. "Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy" (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy), Cambridge University Press, p. 60
67. Jump up ^ Goodin, Robert E. "Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy" (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy), Cambridge University Press, p. 17
68. Jump up ^ Robert Merrihew Adams, Motive Utilitarianism, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 14, On Motives and Morals (12 August 1976), p. 467
69. Jump up ^ Robert Merrihew Adams, Motive Utilitarianism, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 14, On Motives and Morals (12 August 1976), p. 471
70. Jump up ^ Robert Merrihew Adams, Motive Utilitarianism, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 14, On Motives and Morals (12 August 1976), p. 475
71. Jump up ^ Feldman, Fred, On the Consistency of Act- and Motive-Utilitarianism: A Reply to Robert Adams, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 70, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 211–12
72. Jump up ^ Hare, R. M. (1981) Moral Thinking. Oxford Univ. Press, p. 36
73. Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (2009) Theory of Legislation. General Books LLC, p. 58
74. Jump up ^ McCloskey, H.J. (1963) A Note on Utilitarian Punishment, in Mind, 72, 1963, p. 599
75. Jump up ^ Dennett, Daniel (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon & Schuster, p. 498 ISBN 0-684-82471-X.
76. Jump up ^ Hardin, Russell (May 1990). Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-0226316208.
77. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Hardin, Russell (May 1990). Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
78. Jump up ^ Moore, G.E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Prometheus Books UK. pp. 203–04. ISBN 0879754982.
79. ^ Jump up to: ^a b c Mill, John Stuart. "Utilitarianism, Chapter 2". Retrieved 24 June 2012.
80. Jump up ^ Hooker, Brad (9 September 2011). "Chapter 8: The Demandingness Objection". In Chappell, Timothy. The problem of moral demandingness: new philosophical essays. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 151. ISBN 9780230219403.
81. Jump up ^ Kagan, Shelly (April 1991). The Limits of Morality (Oxford Ethics Series). Clarendon Press. p. 360. ISBN 978-0198239161.
82. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Hooker, Brad (October 2002). Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality. Clarendon Press. p. 152. ISBN 978-0199256570.
83. Jump up ^ Singer, Peter (February 2011). Practical Ethics, Third Edition. Cambridge University Press. pp. 202–03. ISBN 978-0521707688.
84. Jump up ^ Hooker, Brad (9 September 2011). "Chapter 8: The Demandingness Objection". In Chappell, Timothy. The problem of moral demandingness: new philosophical essays. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 148. ISBN 9780230219403.
85. Jump up ^ Kagan, Shelly (Summer 1984). "Does Consequentialism Demand too Much? Recent Work on the Limits of Obligation". Philosophy & Public Affairs. 13 (3): 239–54. JSTOR 2265413.
86. Jump up ^ Slote, Michael (1984). "Satisficing Consequentialism". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes. 58: 140. JSTOR 4106846.
87. Jump up ^ Scheffler, Samuel (August 1994). The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical Investigation of the Considerations Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions, Second Edition. Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0198235118.
88. Jump up ^ Kagan, Shelly (Summer 1984). "Does Consequentialism Demand too Much? Recent Work on the Limits of Obligation". Philosophy & Public Affairs. 13 (3): 254. JSTOR 2265413.
89. Jump up ^ Goodin, Robert E. (May 1995). Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. p. 66. ISBN 978-0521468060.
90. Jump up ^ Harsanyi, John C. (June 1975). "Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls's Theory A Theory of Justice by John Rawls". The American Political Science Review. 69 (2): 601. JSTOR 1959090. doi:10.2307/1959090.
91. Jump up ^ Rawls, John (March 22, 2005). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press; reissue edition. p. 27. ISBN 978-0674017726.
92. Jump up ^ Ryder, Richard D. Painism: A Modern Morality. Centaur Press, 2001. pp. 27–29
93. Jump up ^ Nagel, Thomas (2012). The Possibility of Altruism. Princeton University Press, New Ed edition. p. 134. ISBN 978-0691020020.
94. Jump up ^ Gauthier, David (1963). Practical Reasoning: The Structure and Foundations of Prudential and Moral Arguments and Their Exemplification in Discourse. Oxford University Press. p. 126. ISBN 978-0198241904.
95. Jump up ^ Norcross, Alastair (2009). "Two Dogmas of Deontology: Aggregation, Rights and the Separateness of Persons"(PDF). Social Philosophy and Policy. 26: 81–82. doi:10.1017/S0265052509090049. Retrieved 2012-06-29.
96. Jump up ^ In Moral Laws of the Jungle (link to Philosophy Now magazine), Iain King argues: "The way I reconcile my interests with those of other people is not for all of us to pour everything we care about into a pot then see which of the combination of satisfied wants would generate the most happiness (benefit). If we did that, I could be completely outnumbered…. No, the way we reconcile interests is through empathy. Empathy is one-to-one, since we only imagine ourselves in the mind of one other person at a time. Even when I empathise with 'the people' here… I am really imagining what it is like to be just one woman. I cannot imagine myself to be more than one person at a time, and neither can you." Link accessed 2014-01-29.
97. Jump up ^ King, Iain (2008). How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time. Continuum. p. 225. ISBN 978-1847063472.
98. Jump up ^ This quote is from Iain King's article in issue 100 of Philosophy Now magazine, Moral Laws of the Jungle (link), accessed 29 January 2014.
99. Jump up ^ Chapter Eight of the book Ethics Matters by Charlotte Vardy, ISBN 978-0-334-04391-1 (published by SCM Press, April 2012), entitled "Developments in Utilitarianism", describes Iain King's philosophy as "quasi-utilitarian", and suggests it is an original "development" on the utilitarian theme. Vardy argues King's system is "compatible with consequence-, virtue- and act based ethics." A Google Books link to the reference can be accessed here (link confirmed 2014-01-29.)
100. Jump up ^ John M. Taurek, "Should the Numbers Count?", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6:4 (Summer 1977), pp. 293–316.
101. Jump up ^ Derek Parfit, "Innumerate Ethics", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 7:4 (Summer 1978), pp. 285–301.
102. Jump up ^ See for example: (1) Frances Myrna Kamm, "Equal Treatment and Equal Chances", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14:2 (Spring 1985), pp. 177–94; (2) Gregory S. Kavka, "The Numbers Should Count", Philosophical Studies, 36:3 (October 1979), pp. 285–94.
103. Jump up ^ See for example: (1) Michael Otsuka, "Skepticism about Saving the Greater Number", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32:4 (Autumn 2004), pp. 413–26; (2) Rob Lawlor, "Taurek, Numbers and Probabilities", Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 9:2 (April 2006), pp. 149–66.
104. Jump up ^ Smart, J.J.C.; Williams, Bernard (January 1973). Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0521098229.
105. Jump up ^ Das Kapital Volume I Chapter 24 endnote 50
106. Jump up ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 5 April 2011. Retrieved 1 April 2011.
107. Jump up ^ Sidgwick, Henry (January 1981). Methods of Ethics. Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; 7th Revised edition. p. xxxvi. ISBN 978-0915145287.
108. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Sidgwick, Henry (January 1981). Methods of Ethics. Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; 7th Revised edition. p. 415. ISBN 978-0915145287.
109. Jump up ^ Paley, William (1785). "The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy". Retrieved 1 July 2012.
110. Jump up ^ Smart, J. J. C.; Williams, Bernard (January 1973). Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press. pp. 27–28. ISBN 978-0521098229.
111. Jump up ^ Parfit, Derek (January 1986). Reasons and Persons. Oxford Paperbacks. p. 388. ISBN 978-0198249085.
112. Jump up ^ Shaw, William (November 1998). Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 31–35. ISBN 978-0631202943.
113. Jump up ^ Shaw, William (November 1998). Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 34. ISBN 978-0631202943.
114. Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (January 2009). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Dover Philosophical Classics). Dover Publications Inc. p. 102. ISBN 978-0486454528.
115. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart (1981). "Autobiography". In Robson, John. Collected Works, volume XXXI. University of Toronto Press. p. 51. ISBN 0-7100-0718-3.
116. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Mill, John Stuart (1998). Crisp, Roger, ed. Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press. p. 65. ISBN 0-19-875163-X.
117. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart (1981). "comments upon James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind". In Robson, John. Collected Works, volume XXXI. University of Toronto Press. pp. 252–53. ISBN 0-7100-0718-3. and as quoted by Ridge, Michael (2002). "Mill's Intentions and Motives". Utilitas. 14: 54–70. doi:10.1017/S0953820800003393.
118. ^ Jump up to: ^a b Dancy, Jonathan (2000). "Mill's Puzzling Footnote". Utilitas. 12: 219–22. doi:10.1017/S095382080000279X.
119. Jump up ^ Mill, John Stuart (February 2011). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (Classic Reprint). Forgotten Books. p. 51. ISBN 978-1440090820.
120. Jump up ^ An Introduction to the Principals of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham, 1789 ("printed" in 1780, "first published" in 1789, "corrected by the Author" in 1823.) See Chapter I: Of the Principle of Utility. For Bentham on animals, see Ch. XVII Note 122.
121. Jump up ^ Sidgwick, Henry (January 1981). Methods of Ethics. Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; 7th Revised edition. p. 414. ISBN 978-0915145287.
122. Jump up ^ Mill, JS. "Whewell on Moral Philosophy" (PDF). Collected Works. X: 185–87.
123. Jump up ^ Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, Chapter I, pp. 7–8, 2nd edition, 1990.
124. Jump up ^ Animal Liberation, Second Edition, Singer, Peter, 1975, 1990, excerpt, pp. 171–74, main passage on oysters, mussels, etc. p. 174 (last paragraph of this excerpt). And in a footnote in the actual book, Singer writes "My change of mind about mollusks stems from conversations with R.I. Sikora."
125. Jump up ^ "Mill's "On Nature"". www.lancaster.ac.uk. 1904. Retrieved 2015-08-09.
126. Jump up ^ Cowen, T. (2003). c. Hargrove, Eugene, ed. "Policing Nature". Environmental Ethics. 25 (2): 169–. doi:10.5840/enviroethics200325231.
127. Jump up ^ http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/beware-emotional-robots-giving-feelings-artificial-beings-could-backfire-study-suggests
128. Jump up ^ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/robots-and-ai-could-soon-have-feelings-hopes-and-rights-we-must-prepare-for-the-reckoning-a7597966.html
129. Jump up ^ https://www.fastcompany.com/3062868/robots-are-developing-feelings-will-they-ever-become-people
130. Jump up ^ N. Gregory Mankiw; Matthew Weinzierl (2010). "The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution". American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. American Economic Association. 2: 155–176.
131. Jump up ^ Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism | Talk Video. TED.com.

References[edit]

• Adams, Robert Merrihew (August 1976). "Motive Utilitarianism". The Journal of Philosophy. 73 (14): 467. JSTOR 2025783. doi:10.2307/2025783.
• Alican, Necip Fikri (1994). Mill's Principle of Utility: A Defense of John Stuart Mill's Notorious Proof. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B.V. ISBN 978-90-518-3748-3.
• Anscombe, G. E. M. (January 1958). "Modern Moral Philosophy". Philosophy. 33 (124): 1. JSTOR 3749051. doi:10.1017/s0031819100037943.
• Ashcraft, Richard (1991). John Locke: Critical Assessments. Routledge.
• Bayles, M. D. (1968). Contemporary Utilitarianism. Anchor Books, Doubleday.
• Bentham, Jeremy (January 2009). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Dover Philosophical Classics). Dover Publications Inc. ISBN 978-0486454528.
• Bentham, Jeremy (2001). The Works of Jeremy Bentham: Published under the Superintendence of His Executor, John Bowring. Volume 1. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 978-1402163937.
• Bentham, Jeremy; Dumont, Etienne; Hildreth, R (November 2005). Theory of Legislation: Translated from the French of Etienne Dumont. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 978-1402170348.
• Brandt, Richard B. (1979). A Theory of the Good and the Right. Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-824550-5.
• Bredeson, Dean (2011). "Utilitarianism vgs. Dentological Ethics". Applied Business Ethics: A Skills-Based Approach. Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-0-538-45398-1.
• Broome, John (1991). Weighing Goods. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Dancy, Jonathan (2000). "Mill's Puzzling Footnote". Utilitas. 12: 219. doi:10.1017/S095382080000279X.
• Dennett, Daniel (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-82471-X.
• Feldman, Fred (May 1993). "On the Consistency of Act- and Motive-Utilitarianism: A Reply to Robert Adams". Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition. 70 (2): 201–12. doi:10.1007/BF00989590.
• Gauthier, David (1963). Practical Reasoning: The Structure and Foundations of Prudential and Moral Arguments and Their Exemplification in Discourse. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198241904.
• Gay, John (2002). "Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521003049.
• Goodin, Robert E. (May 1995). Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521468060.
• Goodstein, Eban (2011). "Chapter 2: Ethics and Economics". Economics and the Environment. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-56109-6.
• Habib, Allen (2008), Promises, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Halevy, Elie (1966). The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. Beacon Press. ISBN 0-19-101020-0.
• Hall, Everett W. (1949). "The 'Proof' of Utility in Bentham and Mill". Ethics. 60: 1–18. JSTOR 2378436. doi:10.1086/290691.
• Hardin, Russell (May 1990). Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226316208.
• Hare, R. M. (1972–1973). "The Presidential Address: Principles". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series. 73: 1–18. JSTOR 4544830. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/73.1.1.
• Hare, R. M. (1981). Moral thinking: its levels, method, and point. Oxford New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198246602.
• Harsanyi, John C. (Winter 1977). "Morality and the theory of rational behavior". Social Research, special issue: Rationality, Choice, and Morality. The New School. 44 (4): 623–56. JSTOR 40971169.

Reprinted as: Harsanyi, John C. (1982), "Morality and the theory of rational behaviour", in Sen, Amartya; Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism and beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–62, ISBN 9780511611964.

• Harsanyi, John C. (June 1975). "Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls's Theory of Justice". The American Political Science Review. 69 (2): 594. JSTOR 1959090. doi:10.2307/1959090.
• Hooker, Brad (October 2002). Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality. Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0199256570.
• Hooker, Brad (9 September 2011). "Chapter 8: The Demandingness Objection". In Chappell, Timothy. The problem of moral demandingness: new philosophical essays. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230219403.
• Hume, David (2002). "An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521003049.
• Hutcheson, Francis (2002). "The Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521003049.
• Kagan, Shelly (April 1991). The Limits of Morality (Oxford Ethics Series). Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0198239161.
• Kagan, Shelly (Summer 1984). "Does Consequentialism Demand too Much? Recent Work on the Limits of Obligation". Philosophy & Public Affairs. 13 (3). JSTOR 2265413.
• Lyons, David (November 1965). Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press(UK). ISBN 978-0198241973.
• McCloskey, H.J. (1963). "A Note on Utilitarian Punishment". Mind. 72: 599. JSTOR 2251880. doi:10.1093/mind/LXXII.288.599.
• McCloskey, H.J. (October 1957). "An Examination of Restricted Utilitarianism". The Philosophical Review. 66 (4): 466–85. JSTOR 2182745. doi:10.2307/2182745.
• Mill, John Stuart (1998). Crisp, Roger, ed. Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-875163-X.
• Mill, John Stuart (February 2011). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (Classic Reprint). Forgotten Books. ISBN 978-1440090820.
• Mill, John Stuart (1981). "Autobiography". In Robson, John. Collected Works, volume XXXI. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-7100-0718-3.
• Moore, G.E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Prometheus Books UK. ISBN 0879754982.
• Nagel, Thomas (2012). The Possibility of Altruism. Princeton University Press, New Ed edition. ISBN 978-0691020020.
• Norcross, Alastair (2009). "Two Dogmas of Deontology: Aggregation, Rights and the Separateness of Persons" (PDF). Social Philosophy and Policy. 26: 76. doi:10.1017/S0265052509090049. Retrieved 2012-06-29.
• Oliphant,, Jill (2007). OCR Religious Ethics for AS and A2. Routledge.
• Paley, William (2002). "The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy". In Schneewind, J. B. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521003049.
• Parfit, Derek (January 1986). Reasons and Persons. Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0198249085.
• Popkin, Richard H. (October 1950). "A Note on the 'Proof' of Utility in J. S. Mill". Ethics. 61 (1): 66–68. JSTOR 2379052. doi:10.1086/290751.
• Popper, Karl (2002). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-29063-5.
• Rawls, John (22 March 2005). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press; reissue edition. ISBN 978-0674017726.
• Rosen, Frederick (2003). Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill. Routledge.
• Ryder, Richard D (2002). Painism: A Modern Morality. Centaur Press.
• Scheffler, Samuel (August 1994). The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical Investigation of the Considerations Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions, Second Edition. Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0198235118.
• Schneewind, J. B. (1977). Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198245520.
• Shaw, William (November 1998). Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631202943.
• Sidgwick, Henry (January 1981). Methods of Ethics. Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; 7th Revised edition. ISBN 978-0915145287.
• Singer, Peter (2001). Animal Liberation. Ecco Press. ISBN 978-0060011574.
• Singer, Peter (February 2011). Practical Ethics, Third Edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521707688.
• Slote, Michael (1995). "The Main Issue between Unitarianism and Virtue Ethics". From Morality to Virtue. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509392-6.
• Slote, Michael (1984). "Satisficing Consequentialism". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes. 58: 139–76. JSTOR 4106846. doi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/58.1.139.
• Smart, J. J. C.; Williams, Bernard (January 1973). Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521098229.
• Smart, J.J.C. (1956). "Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism". The Philosophical Quarterly. VI: 344–54. JSTOR 2216786. doi:10.2307/2216786.
• Smart, R.N. (October 1958). "Negative Utilitarianism". Mind. 67 (268): 542–43. JSTOR 2251207. doi:10.1093/mind/LXVII.268.542.
• Smith, Wilson (July 1954). "William Paley's Theological Utilitarianism in America". William and Mary Quarterly. Third Series. 11 (3): 402. doi:10.2307/1943313.
• Soifer, Eldon (2009). Ethical Issues: Perspectives for Canadians. Broadview Press. ISBN 978-1-55111-874-1.
• Urmson, J.O. (1953). "The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy of J.S.Mill". The Philosophical Quarterly. III: 33–39. JSTOR 2216697. doi:10.2307/2216697.

Further reading[edit]

• Cornman, James, et al. (1992). Philosophical Problems and Arguments – An Introduction, 4th edition Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co.
• Glover, Jonathan (1977). Causing Death and Saving Lives, Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140220032. OCLC 4468071
• Hansas, John (2008). "Utilitarianism". In Hamowy, Ronald. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 518–19. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n317.
• Harwood, Sterling (2009). "Ch. 11. Eleven Objections to Utilitarianism". In Pojman, Louis P.; Tramel, Peter. Moral Philosophy: a reader (4th ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. ISBN 978-0872209626. OCLC 488531841.
• Mackie, J. L. (1991). "esp. Chapter 6, Utilitarianism". Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0140135589.
• Martin, Michael (1970). "A Utilitarian Kantian Principle," Philosophical Studies, (with H. Ruf), 21. pp. 90–91.
• Rachels, James; Rachels, Stuart (2012). "esp. Chapters 7&8, The Utilitarian Approach & The Debate of Utilitarianism". The Elements of Moral Philosophy. McGraw-Hill Higher Education. ISBN 978-0078038242.
• Scheffler, Samuel (1988). Consequentialism and its Critics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198750734.
• Silverstein, Harry S. (1972). A Defence of Cornman's Utilitarian Kantian Principle, Philosophical Studies (Dordrecht u.a.) 23, pp. 212–15.
• Singer, Peter (1993). "esp. Chapter 19 & 20, Consequentialism & The Utility and the Good". A Companion to Ethics (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy). Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631187851.
• Singer, Peter (1981). The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 0-374-15112-1
• Stokes, Eric (1959, plus reprints). The English Utilitarians and India, Clarendon Press. OCLC 930495493
• Sumner, L. Wayne. Abortion: A Third Way, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Vergara, Francisco « Bentham and Mill on the “Quality” of Pleasures », Revue d'études benthamiennes, Paris, 2011.
• Vergara, Francisco « A Critique of Elie Halévy; refutation of an important distortion of British moral philosophy », Philosophy, Journal of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, London, 1998.
• Williams, Bernard (1993). "esp. Chapter 10, Utilitarianism". Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521457293.

External links[edit]

• Nathanson, Stephen. "Act and Rule Utilitarianism". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. "Consequentialism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Driver, Julia. "The History of Utilitarianism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Wiki Felicifia, the collaboratively edited encyclopaedia for utilitarians
• utilitarian.org FAQ A FAQ by Nigel Phillips on utilitarianism by a Web Site affiliated to David Pearce
• A Utilitiarian FAQ, by Ian Montgomerie
• The English Utilitarians, Volume l by Sir Leslie Stephen
• The English Utilitarians, Volume ll by Sir Leslie Stephen
• Utilitarian Philosophers Large compendium of writings by and about the major utilitarian philosophers, both classic and contemporary.
• Utilitarianism A summary of classical utilitarianism, and modern alternatives, with application to ethical issues and criticisms
• Utilitarian Resources Collection of definitions, articles and links.
• Primer on the Elements and Forms of Utilitarianism A convenient summary of the major points of utilitarianism.
• International Website for Utilitarianism and Utilitarian Scholar's Conferences and Research
• Utilitarianism as Secondary Ethic A concise review of Utilitarianism, its proponents and critics.
• Essays on Reducing Suffering

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Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 [Old Style and New Style dates|O.S. 4 February 1747][1] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.[2][3]

Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong".[4][5] He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated for individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts.[6] He called for the abolition of slavery, the death penalty, and physical punishment, including that of children.[7] He has also become known in recent years as an early advocate of animal rights.[8] Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them "nonsense upon stilts".[9] Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.

Bentham's students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter's son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin, as well as Robert Owen, one of the founders of utopian socialism.

On his death in 1832, Bentham left instructions for his body to be first dissected, and then to be permanently preserved as an "auto-icon" (or self-image), which would be his memorial. This was done, and the auto-icon is now on public display at University College London (UCL). Because of his arguments in favour of the general availability of education, he has been described as the "spiritual founder" of UCL. However, he played only a limited direct part in its foundation.[10]

Life[edit]

Portrait of Bentham by the studio of Thomas Frye, 1760–1762
Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London, to a wealthy family that supported the Tory party. He was reportedly a child prodigy: he was found as a toddler sitting at his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England, and he began to study Latin at the age of three.[11] He had one surviving sibling, Samuel Bentham, with whom he was close.

He attended Westminster School and, in 1760, at age 12, was sent by his father to The Queen's College, Oxford, where he completed 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".

When the American colonies published their Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the British government did not issue any official response but instead secretly commissioned London lawyer and pamphleteer John Lind to publish a rebuttal.[12] His 130-page tract was distributed in the colonies and contained an essay titled "Short Review of the Declaration" written by Bentham, a friend of Lind, which attacked and mocked the Americans' political philosophy.[13][14]

Among his many proposals for legal and social reform was a design for a prison building he called the Panopticon.[15] He spent some sixteen years of his life developing and refining his ideas for the building and hoped that the government would adopt the plan for a National Penitentiary appointing him as contractor-governor. Although the prison was never built, the concept had an important influence on later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of several 19th-century "disciplinary" institutions.[16]

Bentham became convinced that his plans for the Panopticon had been thwarted by the King and an aristocratic elite acting in their own interests. It was largely because of his brooding sense of injustice that he developed his ideas of "sinister interest" – that is, of the vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest – which underpinned many of his broader arguments for reform.[17]

More successful was his cooperation with Patrick Colquhoun in tackling the corruption in the Pool of London. This resulted in the Thames Police Bill of 1798, which was passed in 1800.[18] The bill created the Thames River Police, which was the first preventive police force in the country and was a precedent for Robert Peel's reforms 30 years later.[19]

Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people. In the 1780s, for example, Bentham maintained a correspondence with the aging Adam Smith, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Smith that interest rates should be allowed to freely float.[20] As a result of his correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution, Bentham was declared an honorary citizen of France.[21] He was an outspoken critic of the revolutionary discourse of natural rights and of the violence that arose after the Jacobins took power (1792). 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.[22] One was John Bowring, to whom Bentham became devoted, describing their relationship as "son and father": he appointed Bowring political editor of the Westminster Review and eventually his literary executor.[23] Another was Edwin Chadwick, who wrote on hygiene, sanitation and policing and was a major contributor to the Poor Law Amendment Act: Bentham employed Chadwick as a secretary and bequeathed him a large legacy.[24]

An insight into his character is given in Michael St. John Packe's The Life of John Stuart Mill:

During his youthful visits to Bowood House, 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."[25]

A psychobiographical study by Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran argues that he may have had Asperger's syndrome.[26]

Bentham was an atheist.[27][28][29]

Death and the auto-icon[edit]

Bentham's auto-icon

Public dissection
Bentham died on 6 June 1832 aged 84 at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London. He had continued to write up to a month before his death, and had made careful preparations for the dissection of his body after death and its preservation as an auto-icon. As early as 1769, when Bentham was 21 years old, he made a will leaving his body for dissection to a family friend, the physician and chemist George Fordyce, whose daughter, Maria Sophia (1765–1858), married Jeremy's brother Samuel Bentham.[30] A paper written in 1830, instructing Thomas Southwood Smith to create the auto-icon, was attached to his last will, dated 30 May 1832.[30]

On 8 June 1832, two days after his death, invitations were distributed to a select group of friends, and on the following day at 3 p.m., Southwood Smith delivered a lengthy oration over Bentham's remains in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine in Southwark, London. The printed oration contains a frontispiece with an engraving of Bentham's body partly covered by a sheet.[30]

Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith,[31] it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, and in 2013,[32] it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as "present but not voting".[33]

Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life. Southwood Smith's experimental efforts at mummification, based on practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand and involving placing the head under an air pump over sulfuric acid and drawing off the fluids, although technically successful, left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull.[30] The auto-icon was therefore given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham's own hair. The real head was displayed in the same case as the auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks. It is now locked away securely.[34]
In 2017 plans were announced to re-exhibit the head and at the same time test Bentham's DNA for autism.[35]

A 360-degree rotatable, high-resolution 'Virtual Auto-Icon'[36] is available at the UCL Bentham Project's website.

Work[edit]
Utilitarianism[edit]
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Bentham's ambition in life was to create a "Pannomion", a complete utilitarian code of law. He not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. This philosophy of utilitarianism took for its "fundamental axiom", it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong".[37] Bentham claimed to have borrowed this concept from the writings of Joseph Priestley,[38] although the closest that Priestley in fact came to expressing it was in the form "the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined".[39]

The "greatest happiness principle", or the principle of utility, forms the cornerstone of all Bentham's thought. By "happiness", he understood a predominance of "pleasure" over "pain". He wrote in The Principles of Morals and Legislation:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think ...[40]

Bentham was a rare major figure in the history of philosophy to endorse psychological egoism.[41] As to religious values, however, while Hobbes was an avowed Anglican, Bentham was a determined opponent of religion. Crimmins observes: "Between 1809 and 1823 Jeremy Bentham carried out an exhaustive examination of religion with the declared aim of extirpating religious beliefs, even the idea of religion itself, from the minds of men."[42]

Bentham 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.

In his exposition of the felicific calculus, Bentham proposed a classification of 12 pains and 14 pleasures, by which we might test the "happiness factor" of any action.[43] Nonetheless, it should not be overlooked that Bentham's "hedonistic" theory (a term from J.J.C. Smart), unlike Mill's, is often criticized for lacking 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..."[44] Thus, some critics[who?] 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. However, as P. J. Kelly argued in 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".[45] It provides 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.

Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation focuses on the principle of utility and how this view of morality ties into legislative practices. His principle of utility regards "good" as that which produces the greatest amount of pleasure and the minimum amount of pain and "evil" as that which produces the most pain without the pleasure. This concept of pleasure and pain is defined by Bentham as physical as well as spiritual. Bentham writes about this principle as it manifests itself within the legislation of a society. He lays down a set of criteria for measuring the extent of pain or pleasure that a certain decision will create.

The criteria are divided into the categories of intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, productiveness, purity, and extent. Using these measurements, he reviews the concept of punishment and when it should be used as far as whether a punishment will create more pleasure or more pain for a society. He calls for legislators to determine whether punishment creates an even more evil offence. Instead of suppressing the evil acts, Bentham argues that certain unnecessary laws and punishments could ultimately lead to new and more dangerous vices than those being punished to begin with, and calls upon legislators to measure the pleasures and pains associated with any legislation and to form laws in order to create the greatest good for the greatest number. He argues that the concept of the individual pursuing his or her own happiness cannot be necessarily declared "right", because often these individual pursuits can lead to greater pain and less pleasure for a society as a whole. Therefore, the legislation of a society is vital to maintain the maximum pleasure and the minimum degree of pain for the greatest number of people.

Economics[edit]

Defence of usury, 1788
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Bentham's opinions about monetary economics were completely different from those of David Ricardo; however, they had some similarities to those of Henry 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. His work is considered to be an early precursor of modern welfare economics.

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 maximisation principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm and the search for an optimum in welfare economics.[46]

Law reform[edit]
Bentham was the first person to aggressively advocate for the codification of all of the common law into a coherent set of statutes; he was actually the person who coined the verb "to codify" to refer to the process of drafting a legal code.[47] He lobbied hard for the formation of codification commissions in both England and the United States, and went so far as to write to President James Madison in 1811 to volunteer to write a complete legal code for the young country. After he learned more about American law and realized that most of it was state-based, he promptly wrote to the governors of every single state with the same offer.

During his lifetime, Bentham's codification efforts were completely unsuccessful. Even today, they have been completely rejected by almost every common law jurisdiction, including England. However, his writings on the subject laid the foundation for the moderately successful codification work of David Dudley Field II in the United States a generation later.[47]

Animal rights[edit]
Bentham is widely regarded as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights, and has even been hailed as "the first patron saint of animal rights".[48] He argued that the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, should be the benchmark, or what he called the "insuperable line". If reason alone were the criterion by which we judge who ought to have rights, human infants and adults with certain forms of disability might fall short, too.[49] In 1789, alluding to the limited degree of legal protection afforded to slaves in the French West Indies by the Code Noir, he wrote:

The day has been, I am sad to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The 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. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?[50]

Earlier in that paragraph, Bentham makes clear that he accepted that animals could be killed for food, or in defence of human life, provided that the animal was not made to suffer unnecessarily. Bentham did not object to medical experiments on animals, providing that the experiments had in mind a particular goal of benefit to humanity, and had a reasonable chance of achieving that goal. He wrote that otherwise he had a "decided and insuperable objection" to causing pain to animals, in part because of the harmful effects such practices might have on human beings. In a letter to the editor of the Morning Chronicle in March 1825, he wrote:

I never have seen, nor ever can see, any objection to the putting of dogs and other inferior animals to pain, in the way of medical experiment, when that experiment has a determinate object, beneficial to mankind, accompanied with a fair prospect of the accomplishment of it. But I have a decided and insuperable objection to the putting of them to pain without any such view. To my apprehension, every act by which, without prospect of preponderant good, pain is knowingly and willingly produced in any being whatsoever, is an act of cruelty; and, like other bad habits, the more the correspondent habit is indulged in, the stronger it grows, and the more frequently productive of its bad fruit. I am unable to comprehend how it should be, that to him to whom it is a matter of amusement to see a dog or a horse suffer, it should not be matter of like amusement to see a man suffer; seeing, as I do, how much more morality as well as intelligence, an adult quadruped of those and many other species has in him, than any biped has for some months after he has been brought into existence; nor does it appear to me how it should be, that a person to whom the production of pain, either in the one or in the other instance, is a source of amusement, would scruple to give himself that amusement when he could do so under an assurance of impunity.[51]

Gender and sexuality[edit]
Bentham said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist.[52] Bentham spoke for a complete equality between sexes.

The essay Offences Against One's Self,[53] argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexual sex.[54] The essay remained unpublished during his lifetime for fear of offending public morality. It was published for the first time in 1931.[55] Bentham does not believe homosexual acts to be unnatural, describing them merely as "irregularities of the venereal appetite". The essay chastises the society of the time for making a disproportionate response to what Bentham appears to consider a largely private offence – public displays or forced acts being dealt with rightly by other laws. When the essay was published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1978, the "Abstract" stated that Bentham's essay was the "first known argument for homosexual law reform in England".[56]

Privacy[edit]
For Bentham, transparency had moral value. For example, journalism puts power-holders under moral scrutiny. However, Bentham wanted such transparency to apply to everyone. This he describes by picturing the world as a gymnasium in which each "gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible impact on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down".[57] He considered both surveillance and transparency to be useful ways of generating understanding and improvements for people's lives.[58]

Fictional entities[edit]
Bentham distinguished among fictional entities what he called "fabulous entities" like Prince Hamlet or a centaur, from what he termed "fictitious entities", or necessary objects of discourse, similar to Kant's categories,[59] such as nature, custom, or the social contract.[60]

Bentham and University College London[edit]
Bentham is widely associated with the foundation in 1826 of London University (the institution that, in 1836, became University College London), though he was 78 years old when the University opened and played only an indirect role in its establishment. His direct involvement was limited to his buying a single £100 share in the new University, making him just one of over a thousand shareholders.[61]

Henry Tonks' imaginary scene of Bentham approving the building plans of London University
Bentham and his ideas can nonetheless be seen as having inspired several of the actual founders of the University. He 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; in Bentham's time, membership of the Church of England and the capacity to bear considerable expenses were required of students entering the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. As the University of London was the first in England to admit all, regardless of race, creed or political belief, it was largely consistent with Bentham's vision. There is some evidence that, from the sidelines, he played a "more than passive part" in the planning discussions for the new institution, although it is also apparent that "his interest was greater than his influence".[61] He failed in his efforts to see his disciple John Bowring appointed professor of English or History, but he did oversee the appointment of another pupil, John Austin, as the first professor of Jurisprudence in 1829.

The more direct associations between Bentham and UCL – the College's custody of his Auto-icon (see above) and of the majority of his surviving papers – postdate his death by some years: the papers were donated in 1849, and the Auto-icon in 1850. A large painting by Henry Tonks hanging in UCL's Flaxman Gallery depicts Bentham approving the plans of the new university, but it was executed in 1922 and the scene is entirely imaginary. Since 1959 (when the Bentham Committee was first established) UCL has hosted the Bentham Project, which is progressively publishing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings.

UCL now endeavours to acknowledge Bentham's influence on its foundation, while avoiding any suggestion of direct involvement, by describing him as its "spiritual founder".[10]

Bibliography[edit]

Jeremy Bentham House in Bethnal Green, East London; a modernist apartment block named after the philosopher
Bentham was an obsessive writer and reviser, but was constitutionally incapable, except on rare occasions, of bringing his work to completion and publication.[62] Most of what appeared in print in his lifetime (see list of published works online)[63] was prepared for publication by others. Several of his works first appeared in French translation, prepared for the press by Étienne Dumont, for example, Theory of Legislation, Volume 2 (Principles of the Penal Code) 1840, Weeks, Jordan, & Company. Boston. 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.

Publications[edit]

The back of No. 19, York Street (1848). In 1651 John Milton moved into a "pretty garden-house" in Petty France. He lived there until the Restoration. Later it became No. 19 York Street, belonged to Jeremy Bentham (who for a time lived next door), was occupied successively by James Mill and William Hazlitt, and finally demolished in 1877.[64][65]
Works published in Bentham's lifetime include:

Short Review of the Declaration (1776). An attack on the United States Declaration of Independence.[66]
A Fragment on Government (1776).[67] This was an unsparing criticism of some introductory passages relating to political theory in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. The book, published anonymously, was well received and credited to some of the greatest minds of the time. Bentham disagreed with Blackstone's defence of judge-made law, his defence of legal fictions, his theological formulation of the doctrine of mixed government, his appeal to a social contract and his use of the vocabulary of natural law. Bentham's "Fragment" was only a small part of a Commentary on the Commentaries, which remained unpublished until the twentieth century.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed for publication 1780, published 1789).[68][69]
Defence of Usury (1787).[70] Bentham wrote a series of thirteen "Letters" addressed to Adam Smith, published in 1787 as Defence of Usury. Bentham's main argument against the restriction is that "projectors" generate positive externalities. G.K. Chesterton identified Bentham's essay on usury as the very beginning of the "modern world". Bentham's arguments were very influential. "Writers of eminence" moved to abolish the restriction, and repeal was achieved in stages and fully achieved in England in 1854. There is little evidence as to Smith's reaction. He did not revise the offending passages in The Wealth of Nations, but Smith made little or no substantial revisions after the third edition of 1784.[71]
Essay on Political Tactics (1791)[72]
Emancipate your Colonies! (1793)[73]
Anarchical Fallacies (printed 1796, published 1816).[74] An attack on the Declaration of the Rights of Man decreed by the French Revolution, and critique of the natural rights philosophy underlying it.
Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802, edited by Étienne Dumont. 3 vols)
Punishments and Rewards (1811)
Panopticon versus New South Wales: or, the Panopticon Penitentiary System, Compared. Containing, 1. Two Letters to Lord Pelham, Secretary of State, Comparing the two Systems on the Ground of Expediency. 2. Plea for the Constitution: Representing the Illegalities involved in the Penal Colonization System. Anno 1803, printed: now first published (1812)
A Table of the Springs of Action (1815)[75]
"Swear Not At All" (1817)
Parliamentary Reform Catechism (1817)[76]
Church-of-Englandism (printed 1817, published 1818)[77]
Elements of the Art of Packing (1821)[78]
The Influence of Natural Religion upon the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (1822, written with George Grote and published under the pseudonym Philip Beauchamp)
Not Paul But Jesus (1823, published under the pseudonym Gamaliel Smith)
Book of Fallacies (1824)[79]
A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825)[80]
Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827)[81]
Posthumous publications[edit]
On his death, Bentham left manuscripts amounting to an estimated 30 million words, which are now largely held by UCL's Special Collections (c. 60,000 manuscript folios), and the British Library (c.15,000 folios).

Bowring (1838–1843)[edit]
John Bowring, the young radical writer who had been Bentham's intimate friend and disciple, 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 much of his edition on previously published texts (including those of Dumont) rather than Bentham's own manuscripts, and elected not to publish Bentham's works on religion at all. The edition was described by the Edinburgh Review on first publication as "incomplete, incorrect and ill-arranged", and has since been repeatedly criticised both for its omissions and for errors of detail; while Bowring's memoir of Bentham's life included in volumes 10 and 11 was described by Sir Leslie Stephen as "one of the worst biographies in the language".[82] Nevertheless, Bowring's remained the standard edition of most of Bentham's writings for over a century, and is still only partially superseded: it includes such interesting writings on international[83] relations as Bentham's A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace written 1786–89, which forms part IV of the Principles of International Law.

Stark (1952–1954)[edit]
In 1952–1954, Werner 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. Although a significant achievement, the work is considered by scholars to be flawed in many points of detail,[84] and a new edition of the economic writings is currently in preparation by the Bentham Project.

Bentham Project (1968–present)[edit]
Further information: Transcribe Bentham
In 1959, the Bentham Committee was established under the auspices of University College London with the aim of producing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings. It set up the Bentham Project[85] to undertake the task, and the first volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham was published in 1968. The Collected Works are providing many unpublished works, as well as much-improved texts of works already published. To date, 31 volumes have appeared; the complete edition is projected to run to around seventy.[86] In June 2017, Volumes 1-5 were re-published in open access by UCL Press

To assist in this task, the Bentham papers at UCL are being digitised by crowdsourcing their transcription. Transcribe Bentham is an award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, run by University College London's Bentham Project,[87] in partnership with UCL's UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Learning and Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre, and the online community. The project was launched in September 2010 and is making freely available, via a specially designed transcription interface, digital images of UCL's vast Bentham Papers collection – which runs to some 60,000 manuscript folios – to engage the public and recruit volunteers to help transcribe the material. Volunteer-produced transcripts will contribute to the Bentham Project's production of the new edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and will be uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository,[88] widening access to the collection for all and ensuring its long-term preservation. Manuscripts can be viewed and transcribed by signing-up for a transcriber account at the Transcription Desk,[89] via the Transcribe Bentham website.[90]

Legacy[edit]
The Faculty of Laws at University College London occupies Bentham House, next to the main UCL campus.[91]

Bentham's name was adopted by the Australian litigation funder IMF Limited to become Bentham IMF Limited on 28 November 2013, in recognition of Bentham being "among the first to support the utility of litigation funding".[92]

Ivan Vazov, national poet and man of letters of Bulgaria (then recently liberated from Ottoman rule, but divided by the Treaty of Berlin) refers to Bentham in his 1881 poem "Дипломираните" (in English: "People with Diplomas").[93][clarification needed]

See also[edit]
List of civil rights leaders
List of liberal theorists
Philosophy of happiness
Rule according to higher law
Rule of law
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ "Ancestry of Jeremy Bentham - countyhistorian".
Jump up ^ "Bentham, Jeremy". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Jump up ^ "Jeremy Bentham".
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (1977). Burns, J.H; Hart, H.L.A., eds. A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government. London: The Athlone Press. p. 393. ISBN 0485132125.
Jump up ^ Burns, J.H (2005). "Happiness and utility: Jeremy Bentham's equation". Utilitas. 17: 46–61.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy. "Offences Against One's Self", first published in Journal of Homosexuality, v.3:4 (1978), pp. 389–405; continued in v.4:1 (1978).
Also see Boralevi, Lea Campos. Bentham and the Oppressed. Walter de Gruyter, 1984, p. 37.
Jump up ^ Bedau, Hugo Adam (1983). "Bentham's Utilitarian Critique of the Death Penalty". The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 74 (3): 1033–65. doi:10.2307/1143143.
Jump up ^ Sunstein, Cass R. "Introduction: What are Animal Rights?", in Sunstein, Cass R. and Nussbaum, Martha (eds.). Animal Rights. Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 3–4.
Francione, Gary. Animals – Property or Persons", in Sunstein and Nussbaum 2005, p. 139, footnote 78.
Gruen, Lori. "The Moral Status of Animals", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1 July 2003.
Benthall, Jonathan. "Animal liberation and rights", Anthropology Today, volume 23, issue 2, April 2007, p. 1.
Jump up ^ Harrison, Ross (1995). "Jeremy Bentham". In Honderich, Ted. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press. pp. 85–88.
Also see Sweet, William (11 April 2001). "Jeremy Bentham". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
^ Jump up to: a b "UCL Academic Figures". Archived from the original on 18 December 2010.
Jump up ^ "Jeremy Bentham". University College London. Archived from the original on 1 January 2007. Retrieved 4 January 2007.
Jump up ^ Declaring Independence: The Origin and Influence of America's Founding Document. Edited by Christian Y. Dupont and Peter S. Onuf. University of Virginia Library (Charlottesville, VA: 2008) pp. 32–33. ISBN 978-0-9799997-0-3.
Jump up ^ "Short Review of the Declaration" (1776) as found in The Declaration of Independence: A Global History by David Armitage
Jump up ^ See "An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress" (First ed.). London: T. Cadell. 1776. Retrieved 11 December 2012
Jump up ^ "Panopticon".
Jump up ^ Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 200, 249–56. ISBN 9780140137224.
Jump up ^ Schofield 2009, pp. 90–93.
Jump up ^ An Act for the More Effectual Prevention of Depredations on the River Thames (39 & 40 Geo 3 c 87); "Thames Police: History – Thames Magistrates' Court". Retrieved 12 February 2013.
Jump up ^ Everett 1966, pp. 67–69
Jump up ^ Persky, Joseph (2007-01-01). "Retrospectives: From Usury to Interest". The Journal of Economic Perspectives. 21 (1): 228.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy, Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin, and Cyprian Blamires (eds), Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, p. 291.
Jump up ^ 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)
Jump up ^ Bartle 1963
Jump up ^ Everett 1968, p. 94
Jump up ^ St. John Packe, Michael. The Life of John Stuart Mill. 1952, p. 16.
Jump up ^ Asperger’s Syndrome and the Eccentricity and Genius of Jeremy Bentham, By Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran, UCL Bentham Project, Journal of Bentham Studies, vol. 8 (2006)
Jump up ^ James E. Crimmins (1986). Bentham on Religion: Atheism and the Secular Society. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 95. Retrieved 4 May 2013. Bentham was an atheist and in no sense of the word could he be described as a theologian.
Jump up ^ Ana Marta González, ed. (2012). Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law: Natural Law As a Limiting Concept. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 81. ISBN 9781409485667. In sum, with Hume's agnosticism and Bentham's atheism, the fundamental voluntarist thesis about the gulf between the divine and the human mind reaches new depths, and this serves to reinforce and radicalize the rejection, begun by Pufendorf, of Grotian rights-theory as the appropriate means of formulating the conventionalist theory of the moral life.
Jump up ^ James E. Crimmins (1990). Secular Utilitarianism: Social Science and the Critique of Religion in the Thought of Jeremy Bentham. Clarendon Press. p. 283. ISBN 9780198277415. Making allowance for Adams's cautious phrasing, this is a concise statement of Bentham's secular positivism, but it is also important to note the conviction with which Bentham held his atheism.
^ Jump up to: a b c d Rosen, F. (2014) [2004]. "Bentham, Jeremy". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/2153. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
Jump up ^ C.F.A. Marmoy, "The 'Auto-Icon' of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London". University College London. Archived from the original on 10 February 2007. Retrieved 3 March 2007. 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.
Jump up ^ "181-year-old corpse of Jeremy Bentham attends UCL board meeting". Metro. Retrieved 18 July 2013.
Jump up ^ "History – Chemical History of UCL – The Autoicon". University College London. Retrieved 6 July 2007.
Jump up ^ "UCL Bentham Project". University College London. Archived from the original on 12 November 2010. Retrieved 22 July 2011.
Jump up ^ Sarah Knapton (2 October 2017). "Severed head of eccentric Jeremy Bentham to go on display as scientists test DNA to see if he was autistic". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 9 October 2017.
Jump up ^ "Virtual Auto-Icon".
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (1776). A Fragment on Government. London., Preface (2nd para.).
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (1821). On the Liberty of the Press, and Public Discussion. London. p. 24.
Jump up ^ Priestley, Joseph (1768). An Essay on the First Principles of Government. London. p. 17.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (1789). The Principles of Morals and Legislation. p. 1. (Chapter I)
Jump up ^ "Psychological Egoism - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy".
Jump up ^ Crimmins, James E. (1986). "Bentham on Religion: Atheism and the Secular Society". Journal of the History of Ideas. 47: 95.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy. The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) Ch IV.
Jump up ^ Postema, Gerald J. (1986). Bentham and the Common Law Tradition. Oxford. p. 148.
Jump up ^ Kelly, P. J. (1990). Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law. Oxford. p. 81.
Jump up ^ Spiegel (1991). The Growth of Economic Thought, Ed.3. Duke University. ISBN 0-8223-0973-4. pp. 341–43.
^ Jump up to: a b Andrew P. Morriss, Codification and Right Answers, 74 Chic.-Kent L. Rev. 355 (1999).
Jump up ^ Benthall, Jonathan. "Animal Liberation and Rights", Anthropology Today, volume 23, issue 2, April 2007, p. 1.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789. Latest edition: Adamant Media Corporation, 2005.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, second edition, 1823, chapter 17, footnote.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (9 March 1825). "To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle". Morning Chronicle. London. p. 2.

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 [Old Style and New Style dates|O.S. 4 February 1747][1] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.[2][3]

Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong".[4][5] He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated for individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts.[6] He called for the abolition of slavery, the death penalty, and physical punishment, including that of children.[7] He has also become known in recent years as an early advocate of animal rights.[8] Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them "nonsense upon stilts".[9] Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.

Bentham's students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter's son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin, as well as Robert Owen, one of the founders of utopian socialism.

On his death in 1832, Bentham left instructions for his body to be first dissected, and then to be permanently preserved as an "auto-icon" (or self-image), which would be his memorial. This was done, and the auto-icon is now on public display at University College London (UCL). Because of his arguments in favour of the general availability of education, he has been described as the "spiritual founder" of UCL. However, he played only a limited direct part in its foundation.[10]

Life[edit]

Portrait of Bentham by the studio of Thomas Frye, 1760–1762
Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London, to a wealthy family that supported the Tory party. He was reportedly a child prodigy: he was found as a toddler sitting at his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England, and he began to study Latin at the age of three.[11] He had one surviving sibling, Samuel Bentham, with whom he was close.

He attended Westminster School and, in 1760, at age 12, was sent by his father to The Queen's College, Oxford, where he completed 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".

When the American colonies published their Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the British government did not issue any official response but instead secretly commissioned London lawyer and pamphleteer John Lind to publish a rebuttal.[12] His 130-page tract was distributed in the colonies and contained an essay titled "Short Review of the Declaration" written by Bentham, a friend of Lind, which attacked and mocked the Americans' political philosophy.[13][14]

Among his many proposals for legal and social reform was a design for a prison building he called the Panopticon.[15] He spent some sixteen years of his life developing and refining his ideas for the building and hoped that the government would adopt the plan for a National Penitentiary appointing him as contractor-governor. Although the prison was never built, the concept had an important influence on later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of several 19th-century "disciplinary" institutions.[16]

Bentham became convinced that his plans for the Panopticon had been thwarted by the King and an aristocratic elite acting in their own interests. It was largely because of his brooding sense of injustice that he developed his ideas of "sinister interest" – that is, of the vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest – which underpinned many of his broader arguments for reform.[17]

More successful was his cooperation with Patrick Colquhoun in tackling the corruption in the Pool of London. This resulted in the Thames Police Bill of 1798, which was passed in 1800.[18] The bill created the Thames River Police, which was the first preventive police force in the country and was a precedent for Robert Peel's reforms 30 years later.[19]

Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people. In the 1780s, for example, Bentham maintained a correspondence with the aging Adam Smith, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Smith that interest rates should be allowed to freely float.[20] As a result of his correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution, Bentham was declared an honorary citizen of France.[21] He was an outspoken critic of the revolutionary discourse of natural rights and of the violence that arose after the Jacobins took power (1792). 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.[22] One was John Bowring, to whom Bentham became devoted, describing their relationship as "son and father": he appointed Bowring political editor of the Westminster Review and eventually his literary executor.[23] Another was Edwin Chadwick, who wrote on hygiene, sanitation and policing and was a major contributor to the Poor Law Amendment Act: Bentham employed Chadwick as a secretary and bequeathed him a large legacy.[24]

An insight into his character is given in Michael St. John Packe's The Life of John Stuart Mill:

During his youthful visits to Bowood House, 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."[25]

A psychobiographical study by Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran argues that he may have had Asperger's syndrome.[26]

Bentham was an atheist.[27][28][29]

Death and the auto-icon[edit]

Bentham's auto-icon

Public dissection
Bentham died on 6 June 1832 aged 84 at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London. He had continued to write up to a month before his death, and had made careful preparations for the dissection of his body after death and its preservation as an auto-icon. As early as 1769, when Bentham was 21 years old, he made a will leaving his body for dissection to a family friend, the physician and chemist George Fordyce, whose daughter, Maria Sophia (1765–1858), married Jeremy's brother Samuel Bentham.[30] A paper written in 1830, instructing Thomas Southwood Smith to create the auto-icon, was attached to his last will, dated 30 May 1832.[30]

On 8 June 1832, two days after his death, invitations were distributed to a select group of friends, and on the following day at 3 p.m., Southwood Smith delivered a lengthy oration over Bentham's remains in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine in Southwark, London. The printed oration contains a frontispiece with an engraving of Bentham's body partly covered by a sheet.[30]

Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith,[31] it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, and in 2013,[32] it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as "present but not voting".[33]

Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life. Southwood Smith's experimental efforts at mummification, based on practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand and involving placing the head under an air pump over sulfuric acid and drawing off the fluids, although technically successful, left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull.[30] The auto-icon was therefore given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham's own hair. The real head was displayed in the same case as the auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks. It is now locked away securely.[34]
In 2017 plans were announced to re-exhibit the head and at the same time test Bentham's DNA for autism.[35]

A 360-degree rotatable, high-resolution 'Virtual Auto-Icon'[36] is available at the UCL Bentham Project's website.

Work[edit]
Utilitarianism[edit]
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Bentham's ambition in life was to create a "Pannomion", a complete utilitarian code of law. He not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. This philosophy of utilitarianism took for its "fundamental axiom", it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong".[37] Bentham claimed to have borrowed this concept from the writings of Joseph Priestley,[38] although the closest that Priestley in fact came to expressing it was in the form "the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined".[39]

The "greatest happiness principle", or the principle of utility, forms the cornerstone of all Bentham's thought. By "happiness", he understood a predominance of "pleasure" over "pain". He wrote in The Principles of Morals and Legislation:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think ...[40]

Bentham was a rare major figure in the history of philosophy to endorse psychological egoism.[41] As to religious values, however, while Hobbes was an avowed Anglican, Bentham was a determined opponent of religion. Crimmins observes: "Between 1809 and 1823 Jeremy Bentham carried out an exhaustive examination of religion with the declared aim of extirpating religious beliefs, even the idea of religion itself, from the minds of men."[42]

Bentham 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.

In his exposition of the felicific calculus, Bentham proposed a classification of 12 pains and 14 pleasures, by which we might test the "happiness factor" of any action.[43] Nonetheless, it should not be overlooked that Bentham's "hedonistic" theory (a term from J.J.C. Smart), unlike Mill's, is often criticized for lacking 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..."[44] Thus, some critics[who?] 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. However, as P. J. Kelly argued in 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".[45] It provides 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.

Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation focuses on the principle of utility and how this view of morality ties into legislative practices. His principle of utility regards "good" as that which produces the greatest amount of pleasure and the minimum amount of pain and "evil" as that which produces the most pain without the pleasure. This concept of pleasure and pain is defined by Bentham as physical as well as spiritual. Bentham writes about this principle as it manifests itself within the legislation of a society. He lays down a set of criteria for measuring the extent of pain or pleasure that a certain decision will create.

The criteria are divided into the categories of intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, productiveness, purity, and extent. Using these measurements, he reviews the concept of punishment and when it should be used as far as whether a punishment will create more pleasure or more pain for a society. He calls for legislators to determine whether punishment creates an even more evil offence. Instead of suppressing the evil acts, Bentham argues that certain unnecessary laws and punishments could ultimately lead to new and more dangerous vices than those being punished to begin with, and calls upon legislators to measure the pleasures and pains associated with any legislation and to form laws in order to create the greatest good for the greatest number. He argues that the concept of the individual pursuing his or her own happiness cannot be necessarily declared "right", because often these individual pursuits can lead to greater pain and less pleasure for a society as a whole. Therefore, the legislation of a society is vital to maintain the maximum pleasure and the minimum degree of pain for the greatest number of people.

Economics[edit]

Defence of usury, 1788
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Bentham's opinions about monetary economics were completely different from those of David Ricardo; however, they had some similarities to those of Henry 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. His work is considered to be an early precursor of modern welfare economics.

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 maximisation principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm and the search for an optimum in welfare economics.[46]

Law reform[edit]
Bentham was the first person to aggressively advocate for the codification of all of the common law into a coherent set of statutes; he was actually the person who coined the verb "to codify" to refer to the process of drafting a legal code.[47] He lobbied hard for the formation of codification commissions in both England and the United States, and went so far as to write to President James Madison in 1811 to volunteer to write a complete legal code for the young country. After he learned more about American law and realized that most of it was state-based, he promptly wrote to the governors of every single state with the same offer.

During his lifetime, Bentham's codification efforts were completely unsuccessful. Even today, they have been completely rejected by almost every common law jurisdiction, including England. However, his writings on the subject laid the foundation for the moderately successful codification work of David Dudley Field II in the United States a generation later.[47]

Animal rights[edit]
Bentham is widely regarded as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights, and has even been hailed as "the first patron saint of animal rights".[48] He argued that the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, should be the benchmark, or what he called the "insuperable line". If reason alone were the criterion by which we judge who ought to have rights, human infants and adults with certain forms of disability might fall short, too.[49] In 1789, alluding to the limited degree of legal protection afforded to slaves in the French West Indies by the Code Noir, he wrote:

The day has been, I am sad to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The 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. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?[50]

Earlier in that paragraph, Bentham makes clear that he accepted that animals could be killed for food, or in defence of human life, provided that the animal was not made to suffer unnecessarily. Bentham did not object to medical experiments on animals, providing that the experiments had in mind a particular goal of benefit to humanity, and had a reasonable chance of achieving that goal. He wrote that otherwise he had a "decided and insuperable objection" to causing pain to animals, in part because of the harmful effects such practices might have on human beings. In a letter to the editor of the Morning Chronicle in March 1825, he wrote:

I never have seen, nor ever can see, any objection to the putting of dogs and other inferior animals to pain, in the way of medical experiment, when that experiment has a determinate object, beneficial to mankind, accompanied with a fair prospect of the accomplishment of it. But I have a decided and insuperable objection to the putting of them to pain without any such view. To my apprehension, every act by which, without prospect of preponderant good, pain is knowingly and willingly produced in any being whatsoever, is an act of cruelty; and, like other bad habits, the more the correspondent habit is indulged in, the stronger it grows, and the more frequently productive of its bad fruit. I am unable to comprehend how it should be, that to him to whom it is a matter of amusement to see a dog or a horse suffer, it should not be matter of like amusement to see a man suffer; seeing, as I do, how much more morality as well as intelligence, an adult quadruped of those and many other species has in him, than any biped has for some months after he has been brought into existence; nor does it appear to me how it should be, that a person to whom the production of pain, either in the one or in the other instance, is a source of amusement, would scruple to give himself that amusement when he could do so under an assurance of impunity.[51]

Gender and sexuality[edit]
Bentham said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist.[52] Bentham spoke for a complete equality between sexes.

The essay Offences Against One's Self,[53] argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexual sex.[54] The essay remained unpublished during his lifetime for fear of offending public morality. It was published for the first time in 1931.[55] Bentham does not believe homosexual acts to be unnatural, describing them merely as "irregularities of the venereal appetite". The essay chastises the society of the time for making a disproportionate response to what Bentham appears to consider a largely private offence – public displays or forced acts being dealt with rightly by other laws. When the essay was published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1978, the "Abstract" stated that Bentham's essay was the "first known argument for homosexual law reform in England".[56]

Privacy[edit]
For Bentham, transparency had moral value. For example, journalism puts power-holders under moral scrutiny. However, Bentham wanted such transparency to apply to everyone. This he describes by picturing the world as a gymnasium in which each "gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible impact on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down".[57] He considered both surveillance and transparency to be useful ways of generating understanding and improvements for people's lives.[58]

Fictional entities[edit]
Bentham distinguished among fictional entities what he called "fabulous entities" like Prince Hamlet or a centaur, from what he termed "fictitious entities", or necessary objects of discourse, similar to Kant's categories,[59] such as nature, custom, or the social contract.[60]

Bentham and University College London[edit]
Bentham is widely associated with the foundation in 1826 of London University (the institution that, in 1836, became University College London), though he was 78 years old when the University opened and played only an indirect role in its establishment. His direct involvement was limited to his buying a single £100 share in the new University, making him just one of over a thousand shareholders.[61]

Henry Tonks' imaginary scene of Bentham approving the building plans of London University
Bentham and his ideas can nonetheless be seen as having inspired several of the actual founders of the University. He 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; in Bentham's time, membership of the Church of England and the capacity to bear considerable expenses were required of students entering the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. As the University of London was the first in England to admit all, regardless of race, creed or political belief, it was largely consistent with Bentham's vision. There is some evidence that, from the sidelines, he played a "more than passive part" in the planning discussions for the new institution, although it is also apparent that "his interest was greater than his influence".[61] He failed in his efforts to see his disciple John Bowring appointed professor of English or History, but he did oversee the appointment of another pupil, John Austin, as the first professor of Jurisprudence in 1829.

The more direct associations between Bentham and UCL – the College's custody of his Auto-icon (see above) and of the majority of his surviving papers – postdate his death by some years: the papers were donated in 1849, and the Auto-icon in 1850. A large painting by Henry Tonks hanging in UCL's Flaxman Gallery depicts Bentham approving the plans of the new university, but it was executed in 1922 and the scene is entirely imaginary. Since 1959 (when the Bentham Committee was first established) UCL has hosted the Bentham Project, which is progressively publishing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings.

UCL now endeavours to acknowledge Bentham's influence on its foundation, while avoiding any suggestion of direct involvement, by describing him as its "spiritual founder".[10]

Bibliography[edit]

Jeremy Bentham House in Bethnal Green, East London; a modernist apartment block named after the philosopher
Bentham was an obsessive writer and reviser, but was constitutionally incapable, except on rare occasions, of bringing his work to completion and publication.[62] Most of what appeared in print in his lifetime (see list of published works online)[63] was prepared for publication by others. Several of his works first appeared in French translation, prepared for the press by Étienne Dumont, for example, Theory of Legislation, Volume 2 (Principles of the Penal Code) 1840, Weeks, Jordan, & Company. Boston. 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.

Publications[edit]

The back of No. 19, York Street (1848). In 1651 John Milton moved into a "pretty garden-house" in Petty France. He lived there until the Restoration. Later it became No. 19 York Street, belonged to Jeremy Bentham (who for a time lived next door), was occupied successively by James Mill and William Hazlitt, and finally demolished in 1877.[64][65]
Works published in Bentham's lifetime include:

Short Review of the Declaration (1776). An attack on the United States Declaration of Independence.[66]
A Fragment on Government (1776).[67] This was an unsparing criticism of some introductory passages relating to political theory in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. The book, published anonymously, was well received and credited to some of the greatest minds of the time. Bentham disagreed with Blackstone's defence of judge-made law, his defence of legal fictions, his theological formulation of the doctrine of mixed government, his appeal to a social contract and his use of the vocabulary of natural law. Bentham's "Fragment" was only a small part of a Commentary on the Commentaries, which remained unpublished until the twentieth century.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed for publication 1780, published 1789).[68][69]
Defence of Usury (1787).[70] Bentham wrote a series of thirteen "Letters" addressed to Adam Smith, published in 1787 as Defence of Usury. Bentham's main argument against the restriction is that "projectors" generate positive externalities. G.K. Chesterton identified Bentham's essay on usury as the very beginning of the "modern world". Bentham's arguments were very influential. "Writers of eminence" moved to abolish the restriction, and repeal was achieved in stages and fully achieved in England in 1854. There is little evidence as to Smith's reaction. He did not revise the offending passages in The Wealth of Nations, but Smith made little or no substantial revisions after the third edition of 1784.[71]
Essay on Political Tactics (1791)[72]
Emancipate your Colonies! (1793)[73]
Anarchical Fallacies (printed 1796, published 1816).[74] An attack on the Declaration of the Rights of Man decreed by the French Revolution, and critique of the natural rights philosophy underlying it.
Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802, edited by Étienne Dumont. 3 vols)
Punishments and Rewards (1811)
Panopticon versus New South Wales: or, the Panopticon Penitentiary System, Compared. Containing, 1. Two Letters to Lord Pelham, Secretary of State, Comparing the two Systems on the Ground of Expediency. 2. Plea for the Constitution: Representing the Illegalities involved in the Penal Colonization System. Anno 1803, printed: now first published (1812)
A Table of the Springs of Action (1815)[75]
"Swear Not At All" (1817)
Parliamentary Reform Catechism (1817)[76]
Church-of-Englandism (printed 1817, published 1818)[77]
Elements of the Art of Packing (1821)[78]
The Influence of Natural Religion upon the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (1822, written with George Grote and published under the pseudonym Philip Beauchamp)
Not Paul But Jesus (1823, published under the pseudonym Gamaliel Smith)
Book of Fallacies (1824)[79]
A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825)[80]
Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827)[81]
Posthumous publications[edit]
On his death, Bentham left manuscripts amounting to an estimated 30 million words, which are now largely held by UCL's Special Collections (c. 60,000 manuscript folios), and the British Library (c.15,000 folios).

Bowring (1838–1843)[edit]
John Bowring, the young radical writer who had been Bentham's intimate friend and disciple, 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 much of his edition on previously published texts (including those of Dumont) rather than Bentham's own manuscripts, and elected not to publish Bentham's works on religion at all. The edition was described by the Edinburgh Review on first publication as "incomplete, incorrect and ill-arranged", and has since been repeatedly criticised both for its omissions and for errors of detail; while Bowring's memoir of Bentham's life included in volumes 10 and 11 was described by Sir Leslie Stephen as "one of the worst biographies in the language".[82] Nevertheless, Bowring's remained the standard edition of most of Bentham's writings for over a century, and is still only partially superseded: it includes such interesting writings on international[83] relations as Bentham's A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace written 1786–89, which forms part IV of the Principles of International Law.

Stark (1952–1954)[edit]
In 1952–1954, Werner 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. Although a significant achievement, the work is considered by scholars to be flawed in many points of detail,[84] and a new edition of the economic writings is currently in preparation by the Bentham Project.

Bentham Project (1968–present)[edit]
Further information: Transcribe Bentham
In 1959, the Bentham Committee was established under the auspices of University College London with the aim of producing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings. It set up the Bentham Project[85] to undertake the task, and the first volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham was published in 1968. The Collected Works are providing many unpublished works, as well as much-improved texts of works already published. To date, 31 volumes have appeared; the complete edition is projected to run to around seventy.[86] In June 2017, Volumes 1-5 were re-published in open access by UCL Press

To assist in this task, the Bentham papers at UCL are being digitised by crowdsourcing their transcription. Transcribe Bentham is an award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, run by University College London's Bentham Project,[87] in partnership with UCL's UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Learning and Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre, and the online community. The project was launched in September 2010 and is making freely available, via a specially designed transcription interface, digital images of UCL's vast Bentham Papers collection – which runs to some 60,000 manuscript folios – to engage the public and recruit volunteers to help transcribe the material. Volunteer-produced transcripts will contribute to the Bentham Project's production of the new edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and will be uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository,[88] widening access to the collection for all and ensuring its long-term preservation. Manuscripts can be viewed and transcribed by signing-up for a transcriber account at the Transcription Desk,[89] via the Transcribe Bentham website.[90]

Legacy[edit]
The Faculty of Laws at University College London occupies Bentham House, next to the main UCL campus.[91]

Bentham's name was adopted by the Australian litigation funder IMF Limited to become Bentham IMF Limited on 28 November 2013, in recognition of Bentham being "among the first to support the utility of litigation funding".[92]

Ivan Vazov, national poet and man of letters of Bulgaria (then recently liberated from Ottoman rule, but divided by the Treaty of Berlin) refers to Bentham in his 1881 poem "Дипломираните" (in English: "People with Diplomas").[93][clarification needed]

See also[edit]
List of civil rights leaders
List of liberal theorists
Philosophy of happiness
Rule according to higher law
Rule of law
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ "Ancestry of Jeremy Bentham - countyhistorian".
Jump up ^ "Bentham, Jeremy". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Jump up ^ "Jeremy Bentham".
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (1977). Burns, J.H; Hart, H.L.A., eds. A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government. London: The Athlone Press. p. 393. ISBN 0485132125.
Jump up ^ Burns, J.H (2005). "Happiness and utility: Jeremy Bentham's equation". Utilitas. 17: 46–61.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy. "Offences Against One's Self", first published in Journal of Homosexuality, v.3:4 (1978), pp. 389–405; continued in v.4:1 (1978).
Also see Boralevi, Lea Campos. Bentham and the Oppressed. Walter de Gruyter, 1984, p. 37.
Jump up ^ Bedau, Hugo Adam (1983). "Bentham's Utilitarian Critique of the Death Penalty". The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 74 (3): 1033–65. doi:10.2307/1143143.
Jump up ^ Sunstein, Cass R. "Introduction: What are Animal Rights?", in Sunstein, Cass R. and Nussbaum, Martha (eds.). Animal Rights. Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 3–4.
Francione, Gary. Animals – Property or Persons", in Sunstein and Nussbaum 2005, p. 139, footnote 78.
Gruen, Lori. "The Moral Status of Animals", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1 July 2003.
Benthall, Jonathan. "Animal liberation and rights", Anthropology Today, volume 23, issue 2, April 2007, p. 1.
Jump up ^ Harrison, Ross (1995). "Jeremy Bentham". In Honderich, Ted. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press. pp. 85–88.
Also see Sweet, William (11 April 2001). "Jeremy Bentham". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
^ Jump up to: a b "UCL Academic Figures". Archived from the original on 18 December 2010.
Jump up ^ "Jeremy Bentham". University College London. Archived from the original on 1 January 2007. Retrieved 4 January 2007.
Jump up ^ Declaring Independence: The Origin and Influence of America's Founding Document. Edited by Christian Y. Dupont and Peter S. Onuf. University of Virginia Library (Charlottesville, VA: 2008) pp. 32–33. ISBN 978-0-9799997-0-3.
Jump up ^ "Short Review of the Declaration" (1776) as found in The Declaration of Independence: A Global History by David Armitage
Jump up ^ See "An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress" (First ed.). London: T. Cadell. 1776. Retrieved 11 December 2012
Jump up ^ "Panopticon".
Jump up ^ Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 200, 249–56. ISBN 9780140137224.
Jump up ^ Schofield 2009, pp. 90–93.
Jump up ^ An Act for the More Effectual Prevention of Depredations on the River Thames (39 & 40 Geo 3 c 87); "Thames Police: History – Thames Magistrates' Court". Retrieved 12 February 2013.
Jump up ^ Everett 1966, pp. 67–69
Jump up ^ Persky, Joseph (2007-01-01). "Retrospectives: From Usury to Interest". The Journal of Economic Perspectives. 21 (1): 228.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy, Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin, and Cyprian Blamires (eds), Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, p. 291.
Jump up ^ 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)
Jump up ^ Bartle 1963
Jump up ^ Everett 1968, p. 94
Jump up ^ St. John Packe, Michael. The Life of John Stuart Mill. 1952, p. 16.
Jump up ^ Asperger’s Syndrome and the Eccentricity and Genius of Jeremy Bentham, By Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran, UCL Bentham Project, Journal of Bentham Studies, vol. 8 (2006)
Jump up ^ James E. Crimmins (1986). Bentham on Religion: Atheism and the Secular Society. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 95. Retrieved 4 May 2013. Bentham was an atheist and in no sense of the word could he be described as a theologian.
Jump up ^ Ana Marta González, ed. (2012). Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law: Natural Law As a Limiting Concept. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 81. ISBN 9781409485667. In sum, with Hume's agnosticism and Bentham's atheism, the fundamental voluntarist thesis about the gulf between the divine and the human mind reaches new depths, and this serves to reinforce and radicalize the rejection, begun by Pufendorf, of Grotian rights-theory as the appropriate means of formulating the conventionalist theory of the moral life.
Jump up ^ James E. Crimmins (1990). Secular Utilitarianism: Social Science and the Critique of Religion in the Thought of Jeremy Bentham. Clarendon Press. p. 283. ISBN 9780198277415. Making allowance for Adams's cautious phrasing, this is a concise statement of Bentham's secular positivism, but it is also important to note the conviction with which Bentham held his atheism.
^ Jump up to: a b c d Rosen, F. (2014) [2004]. "Bentham, Jeremy". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/2153. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
Jump up ^ C.F.A. Marmoy, "The 'Auto-Icon' of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London". University College London. Archived from the original on 10 February 2007. Retrieved 3 March 2007. 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.
Jump up ^ "181-year-old corpse of Jeremy Bentham attends UCL board meeting". Metro. Retrieved 18 July 2013.
Jump up ^ "History – Chemical History of UCL – The Autoicon". University College London. Retrieved 6 July 2007.
Jump up ^ "UCL Bentham Project". University College London. Archived from the original on 12 November 2010. Retrieved 22 July 2011.
Jump up ^ Sarah Knapton (2 October 2017). "Severed head of eccentric Jeremy Bentham to go on display as scientists test DNA to see if he was autistic". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 9 October 2017.
Jump up ^ "Virtual Auto-Icon".
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (1776). A Fragment on Government. London., Preface (2nd para.).
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (1821). On the Liberty of the Press, and Public Discussion. London. p. 24.
Jump up ^ Priestley, Joseph (1768). An Essay on the First Principles of Government. London. p. 17.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (1789). The Principles of Morals and Legislation. p. 1. (Chapter I)
Jump up ^ "Psychological Egoism - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy".
Jump up ^ Crimmins, James E. (1986). "Bentham on Religion: Atheism and the Secular Society". Journal of the History of Ideas. 47: 95.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy. The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) Ch IV.
Jump up ^ Postema, Gerald J. (1986). Bentham and the Common Law Tradition. Oxford. p. 148.
Jump up ^ Kelly, P. J. (1990). Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law. Oxford. p. 81.
Jump up ^ Spiegel (1991). The Growth of Economic Thought, Ed.3. Duke University. ISBN 0-8223-0973-4. pp. 341–43.
^ Jump up to: a b Andrew P. Morriss, Codification and Right Answers, 74 Chic.-Kent L. Rev. 355 (1999).
Jump up ^ Benthall, Jonathan. "Animal Liberation and Rights", Anthropology Today, volume 23, issue 2, April 2007, p. 1.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789. Latest edition: Adamant Media Corporation, 2005.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, second edition, 1823, chapter 17, footnote.
Jump up ^ Bentham, Jeremy (9 March 1825). "To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle". Morning Chronicle. London. p. 2.