Philosophy
1748 to 1832, London, England
The founder of utilitarianism, who measured right and wrong by the greatest happiness of the greatest number and asked of every law only what good it does.
Start learning Jeremy →Bentham’s founding idea: that pleasure and pain are the only real goods and evils, and that the one rational test of any action or law is whether it tends to increase or diminish happiness - the greatest happiness of th…
Bentham’s attempt to turn morality into a science: if the good is pleasure and the bad is pain, then in principle we can measure them - by intensity, duration, certainty, nearness, fecundity, purity, and extent - and ca…
Bentham’s ferocious rejection of ‘natural’ and ‘imprescriptible’ rights as a fiction, and his demand that law be judged not by its pedigree or its reverence for tradition but strictly by its effects on human happiness.
Bentham’s utilitarian theory of punishment - that all punishment is itself an evil, justified only to prevent a greater evil - and his notorious prison design, the Panopticon, in which the mere possibility of being watc…
Bentham’s most prophetic idea, tucked into a footnote: that the boundary of moral concern is not reason or language but sentience - the capacity to suffer - so that the pains of animals must enter the moral reckoning, a…
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