Jeremy Bentham · Philosophy
Bentham’s most prophetic idea, tucked into a footnote: that the boundary of moral concern is not reason or language but <em>sentience</em> - the capacity to suffer - so that the pains of animals must enter the moral reckoning, and the moral circle is far wider than his age supposed.
In a footnote near the end of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham dropped a remark that would take almost two centuries to detonate. He was considering who, or what, deserves to have their interests protected by law and morality - where the line of moral concern should be drawn. The traditional answer looked to rationality or language: humans count because they can reason and speak; animals fall outside the moral community because they cannot. Bentham rejected this decisively. The morally relevant question, he argued, is not whether a creature can reason or talk, but whether it can suffer. A being that can feel pain has an interest in not being made to feel it, and that interest makes a claim on us regardless of how clever or articulate the being may be. With one sentence, Bentham shifted the whole foundation of moral status from intellect to sentience.
Bentham pressed his point by comparing the exclusion of animals with another exclusion his contemporaries were beginning to question: the enslavement of human beings on account of their skin. The French, he noted, had begun to recognize that the blackness of a person’s skin is no reason to abandon them to a tormentor. By the same logic, he argued, the number of a creature’s legs, the hairiness of its skin, or the shape of its lower spine are equally poor reasons for abandoning a sentient being to suffering. These are morally irrelevant physical facts; none of them touches the one thing that matters, which is the capacity to feel. Just as it came to be seen that race is an arbitrary basis for denying moral status, so, Bentham suggested, it may one day be seen that species is arbitrary too - and that the tyranny by which we deny animals all consideration will look, to a wiser age, like the other tyrannies we have learned to condemn.
Bentham’s footnote is the logical flowering of his whole system. His utilitarianism was impartial from the start - everybody to count for one - and once the criterion for counting is the capacity to suffer rather than membership in a favoured group, the circle of moral concern cannot be confined to humanity. The same principle that condemned the neglect of the poor and the enslaved, by insisting that their pains counted equally, reaches on its own momentum to every creature that can feel. Bentham did not develop an elaborate theory of animal rights; he made a single, devastating observation and let it stand. But the observation contained a trajectory. It pointed toward an ever-widening moral circle, in which the boundary of who matters is pushed outward as we recognize, one arbitrary exclusion after another, that suffering is suffering whoever undergoes it - a trajectory that moral philosophy has been following, unevenly, ever since.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Bentham located the boundary of moral concern in sentience - the capacity to suffer - rather than in reason or speech, arguing in a famous footnote that ‘the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ and thereby bringing animals into the moral calculus. Explain the a…
Leads to Immanuel Kant.
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