Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, legal theorist and reformer, the founder of modern utilitarianism. He held that the right action or law is the one that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and he spent sixty years applying that test to the laws, prisons, courts, schools and parliament of Britain. A tireless and eccentric writer who published only a fraction of what he wrote, he influenced the reforms of the nineteenth century, and his preserved body still sits in a cabinet at University College London.

Bentham was born on 15 February 1748 in Houndsditch, in the City of London, the son of a prosperous lawyer who hoped he would become Lord Chancellor. He was a famously precocious child, said to have been reading history and starting Latin at three. He was sent to Westminster School and, at twelve, to Queen's College, Oxford, which he found dull and disliked. He then trained as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1769.

He never practised. Attending the lectures of the great jurist William Blackstone at Oxford, he had been struck by how English law was defended as the product of ancient wisdom when, in his view, it was confused, costly and full of fictions that served lawyers rather than the public. He decided instead to devote himself to working out how law ought to be, a project he called censorial jurisprudence, as opposed to merely describing it.

Bentham said he found the phrase "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" in reading Joseph Priestley and the Italian reformer Cesare Beccaria, and he drew on David Hume and the French writer Helvétius. His first book, A Fragment on Government of 1776, attacked Blackstone's praise of the English constitution. His main work of theory, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, was printed in 1780 and published in 1789.

It opens by declaring that nature has placed humanity under two masters, pain and pleasure. People always act to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and pleasure and pain are also the only things that are good or bad in themselves. The right action, or the right law, is therefore the one that produces the largest balance of pleasure over pain for everyone affected, each person counting for one and no one for more than one. To make this practical, Bentham proposed what later writers called the felicific calculus, a method of weighing pleasures and pains by their intensity, duration, certainty, nearness and how far they spread.

The principle was radical in its consequences. It meant that no institution, however old or sacred, was justified simply because it existed; it had to show its usefulness. Punishment, being itself a pain, was justified only if it prevented greater harm, so penalties should be no harsher than necessary to deter crime. Bentham dismissed the idea of natural rights, popular since the French Revolution, as "nonsense upon stilts": rights, for him, were real only when created and enforced by law.

Bentham applied his principle to an extraordinary range of questions. In 1786 and 1787 he visited his brother Samuel, an engineer working for Prince Potemkin in the Russian Empire, and there developed the panopticon, a circular prison in which a single hidden inspector could watch every cell. He spent years and much of his fortune trying to persuade the British government to build one; the scheme was abandoned in 1803, and he was compensated in 1813. The panopticon later became, through the twentieth-century philosopher Michel Foucault, a symbol of modern surveillance.

He wrote on economics, defending the freedom to lend at interest against Adam Smith in his Defence of Usury of 1787, and on poor relief, codification of the law, evidence, education and constitutions. He coined words that are still in use, including "international", "codification" and "maximise". The revolutionary French National Assembly made him an honorary citizen in 1792. Unpublished essays argued for the decriminalisation of sex between men, and he wrote that the question about animals is not whether they can reason or talk, but whether they can suffer.

Bentham began as a reformer who hoped enlightened rulers would adopt his schemes, and he offered legal codes to governments in Europe and the Americas, including Catherine the Great's Russia, the United States and newly independent states in Latin America. Frustrated by the failure of the panopticon, he concluded that the ruling class governed in its own interest, and from around 1809 he became a democrat. He called for annual parliaments, the secret ballot and a vote for nearly all men. Privately he thought the exclusion of women from the vote rested on prejudice, but in public he argued that it should wait until men had won it. His unfinished Constitutional Code set out a model republic.

He gathered around him the Philosophic Radicals, including the economist James Mill and David Ricardo, and in 1823 he funded the Westminster Review as their journal. He was a hero to the founders of University College London, opened in 1826 as a university open to students regardless of religion, though he did not found it himself.

Bentham died in London on 6 June 1832, the day before the Great Reform Act, which partly met his demands, received royal assent. Following his instructions, his body was publicly dissected for the benefit of medical science and his skeleton, dressed in his own clothes and topped with a wax head, was preserved as what he called an auto-icon. His real head, mummified badly, was kept separately. The auto-icon is displayed at University College London.

Bentham's influence was felt through his disciples more than his own often unreadable prose. James Mill's son John Stuart Mill was raised as a Benthamite and later revised the doctrine, arguing that some pleasures are higher than others. Reforms of the criminal law, prisons, public health, the civil service and parliament in nineteenth-century Britain owed much to Benthamite ideas.

Utilitarianism, which grew out of Enlightenment thought, became one of the central schools of nineteenth-century philosophy and remains one of the main theories in moral philosophy, as well as an influence on economics and public policy. Critics have argued from the start that it can justify sacrificing individuals for the general good and that happiness cannot be measured as Bentham hoped, debates that continue today.