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Jeremy Bentham (February 15, 1748–June 6, 1832) was an
English gentleman, jurist, philosopher, eccentric, and legal
and social reformer. He is best known as the founder of utilitarianism.
The life of Jeremy Bentham
Born in Spitalfields, London
into a wealthy Tory family, Bentham was recognised as a child prodigy when discovered as a toddler sitting at his father's desk reading a multi-volume history
of England. He studied Latin from the age of three.
He went to Westminster School, and in 1760 his father sent him to Queen's
College, Oxford, where he took his Bachelor's degree in 1763 and his Master's degree in
1766. Bentham trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1769. A prosperous attorney, his father had decided that Bentham would follow him into the law, and felt quite sure
that his brilliant son would one day be Lord Chancellor of
England.
Soon, however, Bentham became disillusioned with the law, especially after hearing the lectures of the leading authority of
the day, Sir William Blackstone. Deeply frustrated with the
complexity of the English legal code, which he termed the "Demon of Chicane", he decided, instead of practising the law, to write
about it, and he spent his life criticising the existing law and suggesting ways for its improvement. His father's death in
1792 left him financially independent, allowing him to set himself up as a writer in
Westminster. For nearly forty years he lived there quietly, producing between
ten and twenty sheets of manuscript a day, even when he was in his eighties. Among his many proposals for legal and social reform
was a design for a prison building he called the Panopticon. Although it was
never built, the idea had an important influence in later generations of thinkers and influenced the radial design of Pentonville Prison as well as several other prisons.
Bentham is frequently associated with the foundation of the University of London, which was later to become University College London, though this is misguided: Bentham was eighty years old when the
University opened in 1828, and had no part in its establishment. However, Bentham 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, both qualities being required of students by the traditional universities at Oxford and Cambridge. As University College London was the first English university to admit all, regardless
of race, creed or political belief, it was largely consistent with Bentham's vision, and he oversaw the appointment of one of his
pupils, John Austin, as the first
Professor of Jurisprudence in 1829.
After death, Bentham's body was (as requested in his will) preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet, termed his "Auto-Icon",
at University College London. It has occasionally
been brought out of storage at official functions so that the eccentric presence of Bentham would live on. The Auto-Icon has
always had a wax head, as Bentham's head was badly damaged in the preservation process. The real head was displayed in the same
case for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks, being stolen on more than one occasion, and is now locked
away securely.
Utilitarianism
Bentham not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also devised moral principles on which they should be based. This
philosophy, utilitarianism, argued that the right act or policy was
that which would cause the greatest happiness for the greatest number — though he later dropped the second
qualification and embraced what he called "the greatest happiness principle". Bentham also suggested a procedure to mechanically
estimate the moral status of any action, which he called the felicific calculus. Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's more famous disciple, John Stuart Mill. In Mill's hands, "Benthamism" became a major element in
the liberal conception of state policy objectives.
It is often said that Bentham's theory, unlike Mill's, faces the problem of lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a
conception of justice. Thus, some critics object, it would be moral to e.g. 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 forcibly argued in his
book Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law [ISBN 0-19-825418-0], Bentham had a theory of
justice that prevented such undesirable 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". (op. cit., p. 81) They provide security, a precondition for the formation of
expectations. As the felicific 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.
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