Why is jeremy bentham important

He advocated that if the consequences of an action are good, then the act is moral and if the consequences are bad, the act is immoral.

Central to his argument was a belief that it is human nature to desire that which is pleasurable, and to avoid that which is painful. As a self-proclaimed atheist, he wanted to place morality on a firm, secular foundation. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. It is because of this emphasis on pleasure that his theory is known as hedonic utilitarianism.

Bentham defended an objective form of morality that could be measured in a scientific way. It takes into consideration how near or far away the consequence will be, how intense it will be and how long it will last, if it will lead on to further pleasures or pains, and how certain we are that this consequence will result from the action under consideration. There are some practical applications of utilitarianism.

In preparation for this final act, in an unpublished pamphlet written in the year before his death, Auto-Icon; or Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living printed , but not then published , he proposed the display of auto-iconized bodies and heads as a means to public instruction. He requested that his own mummified head and skeleton, dressed in his habitual garments, be displayed, and it can still be viewed today at University College London. In these and other early writings we see Bentham striving to emulate in the moral world the great advances made in physical science.

In the process he consciously allied himself with the more progressive elements of the Enlightenment and made plain the intellectual influences that shaped his thought, notably Bacon, Locke, Hume, and the French philosophes.

Influenced by the empiricism of Bacon and Locke, Bentham held that all knowledge is derived from sensation: the intellect has no material to work with apart from that obtained by the senses.

In the second half of the 17 th century, the Royal Society had emphasized the role of experiment and generally empiricist epistemology in the development of the natural sciences. Suitably impressed by the progress made in this department of knowledge, Bentham carried over into moral science the basic principle that people can only know, in any certain or scientific sense of that term, that which can be observed and verified.

He rejected all forms of idealism in philosophy and insisted that in principle all matter is quantifiable in mathematical terms, and this extends to the pains and pleasures that we experience—the ultimate phenomena to which all human activity and social concepts, such as rights, obligation, and duty could be reduced and explained.

Some fictitious entities are necessary for human discourse, but their meaning can only be revealed through their connection to real entities , n; b, —88, —18 ; if a fictitious entity proves impervious to this paraphrastic technique it is shown to be a meaningless abstraction unrelated to demonstrable reality.

All are dismissed on the grounds that they are merely empty phrases that express nothing beyond the sentiment of the person who advocates them. Not representing verifiable reality, such phrases could not be considered useful. At the beginning of IPML Bentham offered the famous declamation that underscores the primacy of pains and pleasures in utilitarian theory:. There are two forms of hedonism expressed in this seminal passage: 1 psychological hedonism, which states that all motives of action are grounded in the apprehension of pain or the desire for pleasure; and 2 ethical hedonism, which holds that pleasure is the only good and actions are right in so far as they tend to produce pleasure or avoid pain.

As such, pain and pleasure are the final cause of individual action and the efficient cause and means to individual happiness. Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer? But how is the legislator to influence individual actions and gain conformity to his decisions? In effect, there is no such thing as a good or bad motive. When deciding whether to act or which act to undertake, a person must calculate as best as he can the pains and pleasures that may reasonably be expected to accrue to the persons including himself affected by the acts under consideration.

A similar calculation should guide the legislator in formulating laws. However, Bentham recognised that it was not normally feasible for an individual to engage in such a calculation as a preliminary to undertaking every act. For this reason he spoke of the general tendencies of actions to enhance happiness suggested by past experience as a sufficient guide in most situations.

To this end he developed rules to guide the lawmaker in the construction of a penal code, including the elements involved in the calculation of the mischief caused by offences and the appropriate punishments. In general he followed Adam Smith in believing the individual to be the best judge of his or her own interests, but the simplicity of this proposition is deceptive see Engelmann This involves the individual in imagining what will occur if she were to act in a certain manner.

For Bentham, the most important elements of the external environment in which a person imagines outcomes are the penalties and rewards laid down by law and those deriving from other educative and moral institutional arrangements and practices, including the sanction exercised by public opinion. In this sense, law and other agencies may be used to construct interests by providing individuals with the motives to pursue courses of action beneficial to the community.

It is the individual who then must correctly perceive where her interests lie; she must imagine the expected outcomes the legislator has determined. Second, Bentham recognised that explaining action in terms of interest is potentially circular. If we mean, acting to pursue our interest in the widest sense, then the statement is tautological b, 93n. Bentham recognised the possibility of altruistic actions, and frequently alluded to his own philanthropy when recommending schemes to further the public good.

However, if not all action is motivated by self-interest in the narrow or strict meaning of the term, then how far can the self-preference principle be considered a reliable guide for the legislator in constructing motives?

While it is not true that everyone always acts in his or her self-interest, it is best that the legislator design institutions and law as if this were in fact true. Self-interested acts are the norm; altruism is the exception. Third, although individuals may in general be the best judges of their own interests, they may not always judge wisely.

But if people incorrectly perceive their interests, then the legislator may be misled in constructing the appropriate motivation. This means that assessing the value of the constituent elements of interest pains and pleasures is a tricky business for the legislator; he must accurately observe the ways people behave, deduce the motives behind their actions, and encompass this knowledge in the sanctions of law.

The aim is to tell individuals what they should not do, but also to provide them with motives pains and pleasures in prospect sufficient to divert their desires into channels best designed to serve the public interest. In this way government could educate its citizens to make more effective choices, or at least guide them into more appropriate paths to achieve their real interests —43, I, Bentham recognised that neither the individual nor the legislator could strictly follow the process he described.

As is well known, while adhering to the basic Benthamic analysis of motives, in Utilitarianism J. This tended to undermine the aggregative dimension of the theory laid down by Bentham. Bentham occasionally suggested that pains and pleasures might be evaluated in relation to income or wealth, but he was aware of the limitations of this approach. It is in the nature of the case that the amount of increase in happiness will not be as great as the increase in wealth; the addition of equal increments of money will eventually bring successively less of an increase in happiness.

One of its practical consequences for a utilitarian such as Bentham is that, where choices present themselves between giving an additional increment to a rich man or to a poor man, more happiness will result from giving it to the poorer of the two. Also, the analysis underscores why money cannot be a direct measure of utility, since the utility represented by a particular sum of money will vary depending on the relative wealth of the person who receives it.

Moreover, it is evident that diminishing marginal utility is also a feature of the additional increments of pleasure a person may experience beyond a certain point; equal increments of pleasure will not necessarily add to the stockpile of happiness if a person has reached a saturation point. For Bentham, the unhappiness created by the loss of something will usually have a greater impact on a person than the happiness brought about by its gain to someone else —43, I, —7.

Of course, if the loser is a wealthy person and the gainer a poor man, this will not hold. But in the normal run of things, this is why Bentham gave a higher priority to the protection of property by law and why he held that the alleviation of suffering demands more immediate attention than plans to produce wealth —54, III, , Raising public funds through taxation for vital services would be justified by the principle, as would emergency expropriation of property in times of war or famine, usually with compensation paid to the property owner.

For Bentham, the significance of this principle as a practical guide could hardly be overstated. He came to see that such a principle could justify inordinate sacrifices by a minority, however that minority might be composed, in the interest of enhancing the happiness of a majority. He considered this a false conclusion, but one that needed to be addressed. The less the numerical difference between the minority and majority, the more obvious the deficiency in aggregate happiness will be a, Logically, then, the closer we approximate the happiness of all the members of the community, the greater the aggregate of happiness.

The universal interest relates to interests that are shared by everyone, and only when it is impossible for government to contrive policies to achieve this end is a distribution of happiness less than universal or less than equal justified b, However, the number of decisions made by governments that are genuinely of universal reach are relatively few and may be limited to national defence and the framework of individual rights securities.

Beyond that, redistributive policies invariably involve unequal sacrifices and benefits. This means that the legislator must employ a utilitarian calculation in which the pain experienced by the few is reduced to the minimum necessary to produce benefits for the many; only on this basis may pleasures be summed and pains subtracted in order to produce the rationale to justify the best policy. Related to this conception of the universal interest is the egalitarian commitment that in arriving at the appropriate law or policy the interests of each and all must count, and count equally , I, This does not mean that optimal utility is not the goal, but simply stresses that optimal utility will be more likely achieved where there is an approximate equality in the distribution of the basic requirements of happiness Postema Green forward, argue that calculations of total utility fail to respect the distinctiveness of persons and thereby place their interests at perpetual risk Rawls , 22—27; Nozick , 28—35; see the discussions in Ten , 13—37; Rosen , Chs.

If deterrence can be achieved by punishing an innocent bystander when the real culprit cannot be caught or brought to justice, then why should the bystander not be punished? Because public utility would be maximised by making an example of an innocent bystander just as much as by punishing the person who was actually guilty of the offence but who has not been apprehended, it seems the utilitarian ought to support the punishment.

But this is not only intuitively wrong, it is also wrong because there is a real danger that violations of security would lead to other such violations, with no principled basis to cease inflicting them.

Basic securities must be afforded to each and every member of the community, and violations of these vital interests are not justified, whether they be perpetrated by other individuals or government, since they contravene the distributive elements of utilitarian theory. From early on in his utilitarian theorizing, Bentham understood that the achievement of utilitarian objectives in practice required the translation of the utility principle into elements amenable to implementation in ways that the philosophically abstract principle itself could not be.

Concrete manifestations of happiness, for example, could be found in personal security and reduced crime rates, enhanced health and declining death rates, broader opportunities for education, the reduction of diseases caused by sewage pollution, and so on. This deficiency did not, however, prevent him from developing the theoretical apparatus to direct the formulation of such laws. This was more than the Humean observation that utility is embedded in customary rules that have evolved over time.

Where the jurist detects deficiencies, new rules and precepts must be developed that demonstrably accord with the utility principle. The greatest happiness principle sets the over-arching objective and is the critical standard against which existing practices are to be judged. As such, it stands ever ready to be summoned forth whenever new guidelines are needed, subordinate ends conflict, or existing laws require amendment, refinement, or further elaboration.

However, in practice it is the secondary elements of the theory that do the work of producing beneficial outcomes.

In this way, they give practical concreteness to the philosophically abstract end of the greatest happiness. The subordinate ends of civil law are security, subsistence, abundance, and equality, in this order of priority.

This is entirely consistent with the view that, properly understood, the utility principle entails a presumption in favour of an equal distribution, unless there is compelling empirical evidence that utility would not be served by such a policy. However, he refused to countenance the idea that policies to redistribute wealth at the cost of security would be beneficial either to social prosperity or individual wellbeing.

Bentham believed that facilitating individuals in the pursuit of their interests in a free market is what government should do, because this is the proven best way to maximise the public good. Where laissez-faire does not produce the best result, however, the legislator must act in other direct and indirect ways to produce the optimal outcome.

But radical schemes for property re-distribution are ruled out; the axiomatic requirement that each be treated equally, that the happiness of each be counted, justified policies to equalize the distribution of goods only where this could be achieved without disappointing legitimate expectations. Just as the primary purpose of civil law is economic security and national prosperity, so it draws powerful support from the protection afforded persons, property and expectations by the threat of punishment —43, III, To this end, utilitarian penal law is framed in terms of the principal objective of deterrence, but it also embraces the secondary ends of disablement, moral reformation, and compensation see Crimmins b.

The effectiveness of the theory in practice depends on two additional features: offences must be classified solely on the basis of the harm perpetrated, and there must be an appropriate proportion between crimes and punishments.

It is because of its failure to satisfy the first feature that Bentham rejected the prevailing criminalization of consensual sexual acts, and developed the first systematic defence of sexual liberty in the English language. In settling the required proportions of punishment, Bentham recognised he had burdened the legislator with a vastly complex task—the calculation of the correct quantity and type of pain needed to achieve the desired ends, in particular the objective of deterrence.

Bentham first examined the utility of the death penalty in the s when he delineated the principles of penal law —43, I, —50; see also , Ch. In sum, it is a special application of his utilitarian theory of punishment. The framework of analysis is presented as an objective, neutral exercise, by which the benefits and costs of the death penalty in cases of murder are assessed in comparison with life imprisonment with hard labour. All things considered, Bentham believed the weight of the calculation worked against the death penalty on the grounds of deterrence, the fact that it is inequable in its application, falling mainly on the shoulders of the poor, and because it is a form of punishment that is irremissible in the face of judicial error.

By , however, he abandoned the exceptions and argued that no offence warranted capital punishment UC cvii. Subordinate ends are also evident in the design and management of the panopticon prison: security and economy are foremost, but tempered by humanity and accountability. This view of the panopticon has opened up some interesting lines of discourse on the encroaching methods of control and surveillance in contemporary liberal societies Brunon-Ernst The end of economy determined that the panopticon prison should be a private self-sustaining operation not requiring financial assistance from the public purse.

Security determined that the community be protected from convicted criminals, and severity in punishment was to serve the ends of deterrence and reformation. But security also required that the inmate be protected from cruel treatment, and humanity determined that prisoners should be deprived only of liberty not health or life.

Prisoners were to be kept clean and their labour made productive and profitable, including the development of skills that might be useful to them when released. In support of these objectives, Bentham invoked several devices to effect transparency and accountability in prison government. And, just as the panopticon was to be monitored by the publication of regular reports, so reports of government activity were required to keep the democratic polity informed and facilitate the accountability of public officials.

When Bentham turned his thoughts to constitutional law in earnest in the s, partly inspired by constitution-making in parts of southern Europe, it was with the conviction that all states in which the institutions of representative democracy already existed or in which they could be introduced were fertile soil for the utilitarian pannomion.

The administrative, electoral and legislative details of this project occupied much of the last decade of his life, with its core ideas discussed in the pages of a variety of works in addition to the Code , such as Securities Against Misrule , First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code , and Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized.

The subsidiary principles of accountability, efficiency, and economy underpinned the institutional design and procedural operations elaborated in these writings. It is imperative, therefore, to devise mechanisms that will ensure that only by acting in the public interest could they promote their own interests.

Given the extensive powers Bentham envisaged the thirteen ministries of the reformed government would possess—far more power in the areas of public health, education, and relief of the poor and indigent than existed at the time—further safeguards would be required. Intellectual and active aptitude were to be tested through an examination process, though this would come to naught if the appointed official did not possess the appropriate moral aptitude —43, IX, Other devices designed to ensure, encourage, and test the required aptitude of public officials include: 1 the precise definition of responsibilities attached to each office, against which the actions of officials could be judged by either a superordinate official or the public; 2 the principle of subordination, according to which every official was subordinate to another who could punish him for inefficiency in the performance of his tasks; 3 complete exposure to legal prosecution of all officials for wrong-doing; 4 the elimination of the practice of handing out unwarranted titles of honour to party supporters and other favourites; 5 complete publicity of government business and the elimination of secrecy; and 6 freedom of the press, speech and association see Rosen , Ch.

In the first sense of the term it is seemingly impossible for there to be a law that deliberately functions contrary to the will of the legislature. Born in London, Bentham was educated at Oxford, and studied law, for which he developed a profound mistrust. His major preoccupation became the flimsy theoretical foundations of law and the abuses to which the law gives rise. His first important publication, A Fragment on Government , was a small part of his enormous Comment on the Commentaries of the jurist Blackstone, the classic statement of the conservative legal theory that was one of Bentham's principal aversions.

The main theoretical work Bentham published during his lifetime was the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation Bentham was the founder of utilitarianism, and made famous the formula that the proper end of action is to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Much of his work tried to elaborate that doctrine and to show how utilitarianism could be developed into a calculus of pleasures a hedonic or felicific calculus whereby the effects of actions could be judged and right policy thereby identified.

Bentham's concern with law included a far-reaching critique of the abstractions and fictions within which law is often couched, and a penetrating understanding of the ways words force attitudes on the things they denote. He promoted a generally nominalistic and pragmatic theory of language, while his conception of definition by paraphrasis anticipates Frege in holding that the fundamental unit of meaning is not the individual word, but the sentence in which it occurs. He founded the Westminster Review as a counterpoise to the more conservative journals of the time, and was also the founder of University College London, where his embalmed body, topped by a wax head, is still revealed on special occasions.

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