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.
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. E…
Leads to Immanuel Kant.
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