JEREMY BENTHAM

AND UTILITARIANISM
AQUINO, MENGORIO, NAPA, PERETE, RABE
 Utilitarianism is a normative ethical
theory that places the locus of right
and wrong solely on the outcomes
(consequences) of choosing one
UTILITARIANIS action/policy over other
actions/policies.
M
As such, it moves beyond the scope of
one’s own interests and takes into
account the interests of others.
LIFE OF
JEREMY JEREMY BENTHAM WAS HE NEVER PRACTICED HE CRITIQUED VARIOUS

BENTHAM AN ENGLISH
PHILOSOPHER AND
POLITICAL RADICAL.
LAW, BUT HE DID WRITE
A GREAT DEAL OF
PHILOSOPHY OF LAW,
NATURAL ACCOUNTS OF
LAW WHICH CLAIM, FOR
EXAMPLE, THAT LIBERTY,
SPENDING MOST OF HIS RIGHTS, AND SO ON
TIME CRITIQUING THE EXIST INDEPENDENT OF
EXISTING LAW AND GOVERNMENT.
STRONGLY ADVOCATING
LEGAL REFORM.
 A leading theorist in Anglo-American
philosophy of law and one of the founders of
utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham was born in
Houndsditch, London on February 15, 1748.

LIFE OF He was the son and grandson of attorneys,

JEREMY and his early family life was colored by a mix

of pious superstition (on his mother's side)
and Enlightenment rationalism (from his
BENTHAM father).

Bentham lived during a time of major social,

political and economic change. The
Industrial Revolution (with the massive
economic and social shifts that it brought in
its wake), the rise of the middle class, and
revolutions in France and America all were
reflected in Bentham's reflections on
existing institutions.
 • In 1760, Bentham entered Queen's College, Oxford and,
LIFE OF upon graduation in 1764, studied law at Lincoln's Inn.

JEREMY Though qualified to practice law, he never did so. Instead,

he devoted most of his life to writing on matters of legal
BENTHAM reform—though, curiously, he made little effort to publish
much of what he wrote.
• His most important theoretical work is the Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), in which
much of his moral theory—which he said reflected "the
greatest happiness principle"—is described and
developed.
• In 1785, he briefly joined his brother Samuel in Russia,
where he pursued his writing with even more than his
usual intensity, and he devised a plan for the now
infamous "Panopticon"—a model prison where all
prisoners would be observable by (unseen) guards at all
times—a project which he had hoped would interest the
Czarina Catherine the Great.
 After his return to
England in 1788,
and for some 20
years thereafter,
Bentham pursued—
At his death in
fruitlessly and at
London, on June 6,
great expense—the
1832, Bentham left
LIFE OF idea of the
panopticon.
literally tens of
thousands of
JEREMY Fortunately, an
inheritance
received in 1796
manuscript pages—
some of which was
BENTHAM provided him with
financial stability.
work only sketched
out, but all of which
he hoped would be
By the late 1790s,
prepared for
Bentham's
publication.
theoretical work
came to have a
more significant
place in political
reform.
 The word “hedonism”, from the Greek
word hedone for pleasure, refers to
several related theories about what is
good for us, how we should behave,
HEDONISM and what motivates us to behave in
the way that we do.

All hedonistic theories identify pleasure

and pain as the only important
elements of whatever phenomena they
are designed to describe.
 Psychological hedonism, in philosophical
psychology, the view that all human
action is ultimately motivated by desires
for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
THEORY OF
PSYCHOLOGICA Psychological hedonists tend to construe
L HEDONISM “pleasure” very broadly, so as to include
all positive feelings or experiences, such
as joy, satisfaction, ecstasy, contentment,
bliss, and so forth. Likewise, “pain” is
typically understood so as to include all
negative feelings or experiences, such as
aches, discomfort, fear, guilt,
anxiousness, regret, and so forth.
• it is implausible to think that all acts
successfully produce pleasure or reduce
pain. People are often mistaken about what
will achieve those results, and, in some
cases, aiming at pleasure is actually
counterproductive (the so-called
paradox of hedonism).
THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY/UTILITARIANISM
The principle of utility or the principle of
utilitarianism :  I ought do that act which
will bring about the greatest happiness
(pleasure) for the greatest number of
persons (the community).
(1) Recognizes the fundamental role of
pain and pleasure in human life, (2)
approves or disapproves of an action on
the basis of the amount of pain or
pleasure brought about i.e,
consequences, (3) equates good with
pleasure and evil with pain, and (4)
asserts that pleasure and pain are
capable of quantification (and hence
'measure’).
• In measuring pleasure and pain, Bentham
introduces the following criteria:
• INTENSITY
• DURATION
• CERTAINTY (or UNCERTAINTY)
• its NEARNESS (or FARNESS).
 1. The pains of privation.
2. The pains of the senses.
3. The pains of awkwardness.
4. The pains of enmity.

12 TYPES OF 5. The pains of an ill name.

PAIN 6. The pains of piety.

7. The pains of benevolence.
8. The pains of malevolence.
9. The pains of the memory.
10. The pains of the imagination.
11. The pains of expectation.
12. The pains dependent on association.*
 1. The pleasures of sense.
2. The pleasures of wealth.
3. The pleasures of skill.
4. The pleasures of amity.
5. The pleasures of a good name.

14 TYPES OF 6. The pleasures of power.

PLEASURE 7. The pleasures of piety.

8. The pleasures of benevolence.
9. The pleasures of malevolence.
10. The pleasures of memory.
11. The pleasures of imagination.
12. The pleasures of expectation.
13. The pleasures dependent on association.
14. The pleasures of relief.
LAWS, LIBERTY, AND GOVERNMENT

The notion of liberty

present in Bentham's
account is what is now
Bentham viewed law as
generally referred to as
"negative.”
"negative" liberty—
freedom from external
restraint or compulsion.

Law, which is by its very

Law is, Bentham
nature a restriction of
recognized, necessary to
liberty and painful to those
social order and good laws
whose freedom is
are clearly essential to
restricted, is a prima
good government.
facie evil.
LAWS, LIBERTY, • Bentham saw the positive role to be played
AND by law and government, particularly in
GOVERNMENT achieving community well-being.
 • Rights are created by the law, and law is simply
a command of the sovereign. The existence of
law and rights, therefore, requires government.
• According to Bentham, then, the term "natural
right" is a "perversion of language.” It is
"ambiguous," "sentimental" and "figurative"
and it has anarchical consequences. At best,
such a "right" may tell us what we ought to do;
RIGHTS it cannot serve as a legal restriction on what we
can or cannot do. 
• The effect of exercising such a universal, natural
"right" would be to extinguish the right
altogether, since "what is every man's right is
no man's right." No legal system could function
with such a broad conception of rights.
 Moreover, the notion of natural rights
is figurative. Properly speaking, there
are no rights anterior to government.

RIGHTS
Here, individuals form a society and
choose a government through the
alienation of certain of their rights.

Governments arise by habit or by

force, and for contracts (and,
specifically, some original contract)
to bind, there must already be a
government in place to enforce them.
 • Finally, the idea of a natural right is "anarchical."
Such a right, Bentham claims, entails a freedom
from all restraint and, in particular, from all legal
restraint. 
• Since a natural right would be anterior to law, it
could not be limited by law, and (since human
RIGHTS beings are motivated by self-interest) if
everyone had such freedom, the result would be
pure anarchy. 
• To have a right in any meaningful sense entails
that others cannot legitimately interfere with
one's rights, and this implies that rights must be
capable of enforcement. 
 • Bentham concludes, therefore, that the term
RIGHTS "natural rights" is "simple nonsense: natural
and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical
nonsense,—nonsense up on stilts.”
• Rights—what Bentham calls "real" rights—
are fundamentally legal rights. All rights
must be legal and specific (that is, having
both a specific object and subject).
• So far as rights exist in law, they are
protected; outside of law, they are at best
"reasons for wishing there were such things
as rights."
RIGHTS

• Nevertheless, Bentham did not

dismiss talk of rights altogether.
There are some services that
are essential to the happiness of
human beings and that cannot
be left to others to fulfill as they
see fit, and so these individuals
must be compelled, on pain of
punishment, to fulfill them. They
must, in other words, respect
the rights of others.
 • Volume 1: Introduction; An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Essay on the Promulgation of
Laws, Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, A Table of the Springs of Action, A
Fragment on Government: or A Comment on the Commentaries; Principles of the Civil Code; Principles of Penal
Law

• Volume 2: Principles of Judicial Procedure, with the outlines of a Procedural Code; The Rationale of
Reward; Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code, for any state; On the Liberty of the Press, and public

BENTHAM’S discussion; The Book of Fallacies, from unfinished papers; Anarchical Fallacies; Principles of International Law; A
Protest Against Law Taxes; Supply without Burden; Tax with Monopoly

WORKS • Volume 3: Defence of Usury; A Manual of Political Economy; Observations on the Restrictive and Prohibitory
Commercial System; A Plan for saving all trouble and expense in the transfer of stock; A General View of a
Complete Code of Laws; Pannomial Fragments; Nomography, or the art of inditing laws; Equal Dispatch Court
Bill; Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the form of a catechism; Radical Reform Bill; Radicalism Not Dangerous

• Volume 4: A View of the Hard Labour Bill; Panopticon, or, the inspection house; Panopticon versus New South
Wales; A Plea for the Constitution; Draught of a Code for the Organisation of Judicial Establishment in
France; Bentham's Draught for the Organisation of Judicial Establishments, compared with that of a national
assembly; Emancipate Your Colonies; Jeremy Bentham to his Fellow Citizens of France, on houses of peers and
Senates; Papers Relative to Codification and Public Instruction; Codification Proposal

• Volume 5: Scotch Reform; Summary View of the Plan of a Judiciary, under the name of the court of lord's
delegates; The Elements of the Art of Packing; "Swear Not At All"; Truth versus Ashhurst; The King against
Edmonds and Others; The King against Sir Charles Wolseley and Joseph Harrison; Optical Aptitude Maximized,
Expense Minimized; A Commentary on Mr Humphreys' Real Property Code; Outline of a Plan of a General
Register of Real Property; Justice and Codification Petitions; Lord Brougham Displayed

• Volume 6: An Introductory View of the Rationale of Evidence; Rationale of Judicial Evidence, specially applied to
English Practice, Books I-IV

• Volume 7: Rationale of Judicial Evidence, specially applied to English Practice, Books V-X

• Volume 8: Chrestomathia; A Fragment on Ontology; Essay on Logic; Essay on Language; Fragments on

Universal Grammar; Tracts on Poor Laws and Pauper Management; Observations on the Poor Bill; Three Tracts
Relative to Spanish and Portuguese Affairs; Letters to Count Toreno, on the proposed penal code; Securities
against Misrule

• Volume 9: The Constitutional Code

• Volume 10: Memoirs of Bentham, Chapters I-XXII

• Volume 11: Memoirs of Bentham, Chapters XXIII-XXVI; Analytical Index

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