The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?

His primary concern was with neither psychology nor ethics, nor was it with "political theory", but with the reform of existing laws by means of a science of law... Bentham considered that both the Common Law and the administration that Parliament was supposed to supervise were incoherent and antiquated, and that systematic examination and comprehensive overhaul were just precisely what were required... To a considerable degree Bentham was adopting towards the legal institutions of his own country much the attitude that the rationalist Philosophes were adopting towards the whole of the social institutions of France.

Bentham and his Utilitarians did much to destroy the beliefs which England had in part preserved from the Middle Ages, by their scornful treatment of most of what until then had been the most admired features of the British constitution. And they introduced into Britain what had so far been entirely absent—the desire to remake the whole of the law and institutions on rational principles.

I should emphasise that I am largely neglecting here the long history of this revolt, as well as the different turns it has taken in different lands. Long before Auguste Comte introduced the term 'positivism' for the view that represented a 'demonstrated ethics' (demonstrated by reason, that is) as the only possible alternative to a supernaturally 'revealed ethics' (1854:1, 356), Jeremy Bentham had developed the most consistent foundations of what we now call legal and moral positivism: that is, the constructivistic interpretation of systems of law and morals according to which their validity and meaning are supposed to depend wholly on the will and intention of their designers. Bentham is himself a late figure in this development. This constructivism includes not only the Benthamite tradition, represented and continued by John Stuart Mill and the later English Liberal Party, but also practically all contemporary Americans who call themselves 'liberals' (as opposed to some other very different thinkers, more often found in Europe, who are also called liberals, who are better called `old Whigs', and whose outstanding thinkers were Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton). This constructivist way of thinking becomes virtually inevitable if, as an acute contemporary Swiss analyst suggests, one accepts the prevailing liberal (read 'socialist') philosophy that assumes that man, so far as the distinction between good and bad has any significance for him at all, must, and can, himself deliberately draw the line between them (Kirsch, 1981:17).

Mr. Bentham is very much among philosophers what La Fontaine was among poets:—in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely ever goes out, and sees very little company. The favoured few, who have the privilege of the entrée, are always admitted one by one.

[Bentham] once said his ambition was to be “the most effectively benevolent man who ever lived.” He may well have been so.

The name of Jeremy Bentham, one of the few who have wholly lived for what they held to be the good of the human race, has become even among educated men a byword for what is called his "low view" of human nature. The fact is that, under its most important aspect, he greatly overrated human nature.

It does not seem to me a fantastic assertion that the ideas of one of the great novelists of the last generation may be traced to Bentham... Dickens, who spent his early manhood among the politicians of 1832 trained in Bentham's school, hardly ever wrote a novel without attacking an abuse.

It is perhaps fortunate that Mr. Bentham devoted a much greater share of his time and labour to the subject of legislation, than that of morals; for the mode in which he understood and applied the principle of Utility, appears to me far more conducive to true and valuable results in the former, than in the latter of these two branches of inquiry.

If we were asked to say, in the fewest possible words, what we conceive to be Bentham's place among these great intellectual benefactors of humanity; what he was, and what he was not; what kind of service he did and did not render to truth; we should say—he was not a great philosopher, but a great reformer in philosophy.

The founding utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, were not just armchair philosophers. They were daring social reformers, intensely engaged with the social and political issues of their day. Indeed, many familiar social issues became social issues because Bentham and Mill made them so. Their views were considered radical at the time, but today we take for granted most of the social reforms for which they fought. They were among the earliest opponents of slavery and advocates of free speech, free markets, widely available education, environmental protection, prison reform, women's rights, animal rights, gay rights, workers' rights, the right to divorce, and the separation of church and state.

Here we have Bentham's denunciation of the needless restraints imposed in 1823 upon individual activity. It may be termed the eulogy of laissez faire, but laissez faire, be it noted, was with Bentham and his disciples a totally different thing from easy acquiescence in the existing conditions of life. It was a war-cry. It sounded the attack upon every restriction, not justifiable by some definite and assignable reason of utility, upon the freedom of human existence and the development of individual character. Bentham assaulted restraints imposed by definite laws.

In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says a partizan of this principle) in order to determine which of them are to be marked with the seal of disapprobation, you need but to take counsel of your own feelings: whatever you find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that very reason. For the same reason it is also meet for punishment: in what proportion it is adverse to utility, or whether it be adverse to utility at all, is a matter that makes no difference. In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you hate much, punish much: if you hate little, punish little: punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all: the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

All poetry is misrepresentation

A century ago it was perfectly well known that whoever had one audience of a Master in Chancery was made to pay for three, but no man heeded the enormity until it suggested to a young lawyer that it might be well to question and examine with rigorous suspicion every part of a system in which such things were done. The day on which that gleam lighted up the clear hard mind of Jeremy Bentham is memorable in the political calendar beyond the entire administration of many statesmen.

You will well recollect to have heard me place this man second to no one, ancient or modern, in profound thinking, in logical and analytic reasoning... Mr. Bentham's countenance has all that character of intense thought which you would expect to find; but it is impossible to conceive a physiognomy more strongly marked with ingenuousness and philanthropy. He is about sixty, but cheerful even to playfulness.

The age of Law Reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same. He is the father of the most important of all the branches of Reform, the leading and ruling department of human improvement... He it was who first made the mighty step of trying the whole provisions of our jurisprudence by the test of expediency, fearlessly examining how far each part was connected with the rest; and with a yet more undaunted courage, inquiring how far even its most consistent and symmetrical arrangements were framed according to the principle which should pervade a Code of Laws—their adaptation to the circumstances of society, to the wants of men, and to the promotion of human happiness.Not only was he thus eminently original among the lawyers and the legal philosophers of his own country; he might be said to be the first legal philosopher that had appeared in the world.

Bentham is a denyer, he denies with a loud and universally convincing voice: his fault is that he can affirm nothing, except that money is pleasant in the purse and food in the stomach, and that by this simplest of all Beliefs he can reorganise Society.

Jeremy Bentham opposed Blackstone most bitterly... He made a critical attack on Blackstone's Commentaries in a book called Fragment on Government. He started it, I am sorry to say, when he was staying at my little town of Whitchurch in Hampshire – one of the few bad things to come out of it. But there, I never thought anything of Jeremy Bentham. He was the most pretentious person that ever lived. Like Archimedes in his bath, he cried "Eureka!" (I have found it) in 1768 when he discovered the phrase "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". He regarded that – the philosophy of utilitarianism – as the solution for all legal problems as well as social ones. It solves nothing. He started many books but finished none of them.

Individualism as regards legislation is popularly, and not without reason, connected with the name and the principles of Bentham. The name of one man, it is true, can never adequately summarise a whole school of thought, but from 1825 onwards the teaching of Bentham exercised so potent an influence that to him is fairly ascribed that thorough-going though gradual amendment of the law of England which was one of the main results of the Reform Act.

He found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science: he found the practice of the law an Augean stable, he turned the river into it which is mining and sweeping away mound after mound of its rubbish.

The Benthamic standard of “the greatest happiness” was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like “law of nature,” “right reason,” “the moral sense,” “natural rectitude,” and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham’s principle [of utility] put an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought.

It was the utilitarian radicals who laid the foundations of social improvement in a reasoned creed. With admirable ability, perseverance, unselfishness, and public spirit, Bentham and his disciples had regenerated political opinion, and fought the battle against debt, pauperism, class-privilege, class-monopoly, abusive patronage, a monstrous criminal law, and all the host of sinister interests.

[https://www.utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/jeremy-bentham Jeremy Bentham], biographical profile, including quotes and further resources in [https://www.utilitarianism.net/ Introduction to Utilitarianism: An Online Textbook]

[https://oll.libertyfund.org/person/jeremy-bentham Online Library of Liberty - Jeremy Bentham]

[http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/ The Bentham Project] at University College London. Includes a [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/who/autoicon history] of the Auto-Icon, [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/tools/neologisms Neologisms of Jeremy Bentham] (words he created, including international, maximize and minimize), and details of Bentham's will.

[http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/bentham/ Bentham Index]

[http://utilitarian.net/bentham Jeremy Bentham at Utilitarian.net]

[http://jeromekahn123.tripod.com/utilitarianismtheethicaltheoryforalltimes/id4.html Jeremy Bentham's Life and Impact]

[http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02482b.htm Benthamism in The Catholic Encyclopedia]

[http://www.livingphilosophy.org.uk/philosophy/Jeremy_Bentham/ "Jeremy Bentham at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2007"]

[http://www.ditext.com/bentham/bentham.html "Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights" in Anarchical Fallacies]

[http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/b/bentham.htm Profile in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Bentham impressed upon his countrymen the notion that existing institutions were not to be taken for granted, but to be judged by their results, and perpetually readjusted so as to produce "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He did not invent that useful formula, which he had taken from Priestley, but he drove it into men's minds, and by reiterating it for half a century with a thousand different applications, he undermined the easy acceptance of chartered inefficiency and corruption, characteristic of the eighteenth century. Parliamentary, municipal, scholastic, ecclesiastical, economic reform all sprang from the spirit of Bentham’s perpetual inquiry, "what is the use of it?"—his universal shibboleth, that proved in the end the real English antidote to Jacobinism. The weakness of his system, even in the realm of politics, was the mechanical nature of its psychology, which misrepresented the multiform workings of the human mind.

Here the childlike nature of Bentham’s approach to life, which Mill often stresses, proves valuable: for Bentham understood how powerful pain and pleasure are for children and the child in us. Bentham did not value the emotional elements of the personality in the right way. He simplified them too, lacking all understanding of poetry (as Mill insists) and of love (as we might add). But perhaps it was the very childlike character of Bentham, the man who loved the pleasures of small creatures, who allowed the mice in his study to sit on his lap, that made him able to see something Aristotle did not see, the need that we all have to be held and comforter, the need to escape a terrible loneliness and deadness.

In their time, Bentham's ideas promoted progress, reform, wider democracy, and the amelioration of undesirable social conditions. Bentham lived... when common people, the "labouring poor," had little voice and no vote... Their toil and sacrifices enhanced the power of the nation, the glory of its rulers, the wealth of industrialists and merchants, and the indolent ease of the aristocrats. Yet here was a philosopher who said that people are people regardless of their social position. ...[L]egislators ought actively to augment the total happiness of the community. Instead of the people serving the state, the state should serve the people. ...[H]is slogan for government was "Be quiet." But he did not worship laissez-faire as a principle to be accepted blindly. ...[T]he state should monopolize the issue of paper money, thereby saving interest on its borrowing. It should... operate life and annuity insurance, and tax inheritance, monopolies, [etc.] ...Bentham's idea of diminishing marginal utility of money suggested an argument for the redistribution of income. ...[M]ore happiness will be gained by the poor person than will be lost by the wealthy one. ...Bentham's devotion to the greatest good for the greatest number led him to... advocate for.. democratic reforms. He supported universal (male) suffrage, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments, and the secret ballot. He opposed the monarchy and the , arguing that only in a democracy do the interest of the governors and the governed become identical. ...Bentham urged a system of national education, even for pauper children. Frugality Banks... should... stimulate saving by the poor. should provide jobs for unemployed workers during slack times. ...He designed ...a model prison that would reform criminals rather than punish them. No wonder Bentham and his circle of intellects (including James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Ricardo) were called "philosophic radicals."

The Reformers had been in the unhappy position of not having brains enough for their programme. Bentham supplied them. He classified and (inevitably) systematized the vapourings of Burdett and the nebulous projects of Cartwright. Bentham took the Burdettite catchwords of the day and gave them meaning: he redeemed the cause of democracy by providing it with a basis of reasoned theory. The sole clue to political conduct, he held, was Interest. What wonder, then, if Whigs and Tories were indistinguishable, since their interests were identical? The country was being governed by a minority for the partial interests of a minority: was not that the very definition of corruption? Corruption...was a system, it was a political theory, it was the whole government of England. Aristocracy as a form of government was itself an intolerable grievance... He based his democracy not on political considerations, but on the fundamental tag of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number". He gave Reform an irresistible catchword: he opened up a new and impugnable line of argument... Bentham gave the Reform movement a much-needed intellectual fillip. Through Mill, in the Edinburgh Review, he reached the genteel establishments: through Place, he stiffened the people.

Mr. Bentham did not talk much. He had a benevolence of manner, suited to the philanthropy of his mind. He seemed to be thinking only of the convenience and pleasure of his guests, not as a rule of artificial breeding, as from Chesterfield or Madame Genlis; but from innate feeling.

Jeremy Bentham – the cheerful, improving rationalist whose maxims stroll through the minds of bureaucrats, prompting them to destroy whatever they can find no reason to preserve. For a century and a half the Benthamite mentality has dominated the affairs of state, weighing laws, customs and institutions in the balance of profit, and presumptuously assuming the title to a wisdom which no mortal mind can really claim.

Ethical hedonism was originally tied to psychological hedonism about human motivation. Bentham assumed that all humans are basically and exclusively motivated by the desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain, but it is possible to maintain ethical hedonism while rejecting, as most present utilitarians are inclined to do, psychological hedonism. However, certain later and contemporary versions of utilitarianism broaden the notion of ethical hedonism so that human or personal good is understood to be constituted by whatever satisfies people's desires or preferences or makes people happy.

As time went on this state of the law was severely criticised, especially by Bentham, whose theories upon legal subjects have had a degree of practical influence upon the legislation of his own and various other countries comparable only to those of Adam Smith and his successors upon commerce. His view was that the existing law should be repealed, and that in its place there should be enacted a new code, based upon what he regarded as philosophical principles. He found less difficulty than might have been expected (though he found considerable difficulty) in convincing the public of the defects of the existing state of things, but he found it impossible to persuade them to accept a new code from his hands, or from the hands of his disciples. Highly important steps, however, were taken in his life time in the direction of the changes of which he approved.

When the Queen began to reign there was abroad a spirit of criticism of our legal institutions, a sense of impatience with respect to the eulogies of which they had been so long the subject. A generation had grown up that questioned the wisdom, doubted the virtues, of much which Blackstone pronounced the perfection of human reason. The teaching of Bentham, his assaults on English law and its administrators, renewed with unwearied zeal and abiding conviction throughout a long life, had not been in vain. Some of his disciples held high positions at the Bar; some were about to be raised to the Bench.

It would be difficult to find a better instance of that favourite maxim of our grandfathers that "the pen is mightier than the sword," than the effect upon British institutions of the uneventful life of Jeremy Bentham, a shy recluse of unimpressive speech and appearance, who was so little of a politician that even in 1817 he was not prosecuted for publishing his highly "seditious" Reform Catechism in favour of household suffrage. Born in 1748, and dying in 1832 just when his principles were beginning to invade the seats of power, he was never the man of the moment, but his influence was a force in history during more than a hundred years. As early as 1776...young Bentham's Fragment on Government also appeared. It challenged the legal doctrine of the age, sanctioned by Blackstone himself, that law was a fixed and authoritative science and the British Constitution perfect. Bentham, on the other hand, proclaimed both law and politics to be perpetual experiments in the means of promoting "utility" or happiness.

[http://librivox.org/offences-against-ones-self-paederasty-by-jeremy-bentham/ "Offences Against One's Self: Paederasty", c. 1785, free audiobook from LibriVox]

[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

[P]leasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good: pain is in itself an evil; and, indeed, without exception, the only evil; or else the words good and evil have no meaning. And this is alike true of every sort of pain, and of every sort of pleasure.

[I am] at heart more of a United-States-man than an Englishman.

Figure to yourself the mixture of surprise and delight which has this instant been poured into my mind by the sound of my name, as uttered by you, in the speech just read to me out of the Morning Herald... By one and the same man, not only Parliamentary Reform, but Law Reform advocated. Advocated? and by what man? By one who, in the vulgar sense of profit and loss, has nothing to gain by it... Yes, only from Ireland could such self-sacrifice come; nowhere else: least of all in England, cold, selfish, priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden, soldier-ridden England, could any approach to it be found.

Ah! when will the yoke of Custom—Custom, the blind tyrant, of which all other tyrants make their slave—ah! when will that misery-perpetuating yoke be shaken off?—when, when will Reason be seated on her throne?