Jeremy Bentham
Bentham's Theory Examined the Greatest Good
Sep 18, 2009 Phillip Burghgraef
Jeremy Bentham was a political and social philosopher who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is best known for developing the philosophy of modern utilitarianism which states that good is whatever makes the greatest number of people happy.
He was born in London on February 15, 1748. His mother was of a piously superstitious nature while his father was more a rationalist. In 1760, Bentham entered Queens College, Oxford and later graduated in 1764. He went on to study law in Lincoln’s Inn. However, instead of practicing law, he choose to write on matters of legal reform.
Bentham was an intense writer and while most of his work is theoretical, in some of it, he proposed practical ideas for reforming social institutions. His most important theoretical work is Introduction to The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), where he laid out the groundwork of his moral theory.
Bentham on Human Nature
Other philosophers of the enlightenment period heavily influenced Bentham. His approach emphasized clarity along with deductive argument. Regarding human nature, he believed that human beings could be described without mentioning social relationships. He says that “community is a fictitious body, and it is but “the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.” For Bentham, there is no "self" or "individual" greater than the human individual. A person’s relations to others, even if important, are not really vital and they describe nothing about the essential nature of the being.
Bentham on Morals and Society
Morally speaking, Bentham starts out saying that “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign monsters, pain and pleasure.” He states that the morality of human actions should be determined by whether they increased pleasure or increased pain. This is Bentham's principle of utility. Bentham also believed that all existing systems of morality can be “reduced to the principles of sympathy and antipathy.”
Bentham was further an advocate of equal rights for homosexuals. At the time, homosexuality was a crime punishable by death by hanging in Great Britain. The essay Offenses against One's Self (c.1785) reviews homosexuality in a historical context and makes the argument that it is unjustly and negatively overemphasized.
In his time, Bentham was a strong advocate of political reform. He believed many of the social problems of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England were due to an antiquated land system and to the control of the economy by hereditary landed gentry opposed to modern capitalist institutions. In order to counteract this, Bentham believed in the rational revision of the legal system, judicial reform and a more extensive freedom of contract. In addition he worked to promote wider suffrage and self-government.
Jeremy Bentham
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