- Length
- 400 pagesBurns and Hart, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Oxford, 1996
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
The book that proposed measuring right and wrong, written by a man who spent his life trying to make institutions rational and left his body to be preserved and displayed, where it still is. Its principle is simple enough to state in a sentence and has been argued about ever since.
- Date
- 1789
- Author
- Jeremy Bentham
- Region
- London
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 100 years
The founding statement of utilitarianism and the origin of a reforming tradition that reshaped British law, prisons, poor relief and public health.
What the book says
A book written to supply a rational basis for making laws, which begins by announcing that pleasure and pain govern everything we do and everything we ought to do. The principle of utility approves or disapproves of any action according to whether it increases or diminishes the happiness of those affected, and Bentham insists it is the only principle that can be argued about at all - the alternatives either reduce to it or amount to a person's saying they like a thing and offering that as a reason. He then does something nobody had done: he tries to make the calculation operable. Pleasures and pains are to be measured by their intensity, duration, certainty, nearness, fruitfulness, purity and the number of people affected, and he classifies the kinds of each, the circumstances that make people respond differently, and the motives that produce action. The second half applies all this to law. An offence is an act that produces more harm than good; punishment is itself an evil and is justified only where it prevents a greater one; and Bentham works through the cases where punishment is groundless, inefficacious, unprofitable or needless, which is the most useful part of the book.
What it argues
That the only defensible standard for action and for law is the tendency to increase happiness, and that the standard must be applied by counting rather than by intuition. Bentham's radicalism is in the counting: each person's happiness weighs the same, which in 1789 excluded nobody by rank, and he extended the circle explicitly to animals on the ground that the question is not whether they can reason but whether they can suffer. The theory of law follows directly. Punishment has no value in itself, only in what it prevents, so a legislator must ask in every case whether the harm inflicted is less than the harm averted - and Bentham's list of the cases where it is not is a working critique of the criminal law of his time.
What it answered
Two Treatises of Government 1689John Locke
Natural rights and the common law tradition that Blackstone had made respectable, which Bentham had already attacked in an earlier book. His charge is methodological before it is moral: appeals to natural law, to moral sense, to fitness or to the law of reason are all, in his analysis, ways of avoiding the question by giving a name to one's own approval. Utility is offered as the only principle that can be checked, since it points at something outside the speaker.
What answered it
Mill, from inside, by distinguishing higher from lower pleasures and thereby importing a standard the calculus cannot supply. Rawls, from outside, by arguing that utilitarianism does not take seriously the separateness of persons, since it treats a gain to one as compensating a loss to another as though society were a single person. Williams pressed the objection that a morality of maximising leaves no room for a person's own projects and commitments. Against these the theory has proved unusually resilient, mainly because the alternatives have their own difficulties and because the demand to justify institutions by their effects on people is hard to refuse.
How it argues
By classification. Bentham's method is to divide a subject exhaustively, name the divisions, and subdivide, and the book reads like the specification of a machine - kinds of pleasure, kinds of pain, circumstances influencing sensibility, dimensions of value, classes of offence. The prose is dry and the technical vocabulary is largely his own invention, some of which stuck. What the classification is for is legislation: a code, unlike a moral treatise, has to cover every case, and the exhaustiveness that makes the book hard to read is what a code requires.
The moment
England in the year the French Revolution began, with Bentham a private scholar of independent means who had abandoned the bar in disgust at the state of the law. He wrote continuously for sixty years, mostly unpublished, on codification, prisons, evidence, colonies, poor relief and the franchise, and gathered around him a group of disciples who carried the programme into Parliament. He was made an honorary French citizen in 1792 and attacked the French declaration of rights the same decade.
How it travelled
Into legislation more than into philosophy. Bentham's followers - the philosophic radicals - carried the programme into the reform of criminal law, the prison system, sanitation, the poor law and the franchise, and much of nineteenth-century British administrative change is traceable to it. Philosophically the book was superseded by Mill's shorter and more accommodating version, which is what most people mean by utilitarianism. Bentham's own manuscripts remained largely unpublished for a century and a half, and the critical edition begun in 1959 keeps changing the picture of what he thought.
The strongest objection
That the calculus cannot be run, and that where it can be it gives the wrong answer. Pleasures differ in kind and not only in quantity, and there is no unit in which the intensity of one person's relief can be added to the duration of another's satisfaction; Bentham's seven dimensions look operational and have never been operated. The deeper objection is Rawls': treating aggregate happiness as the standard permits any burden on one person if the sum across others is larger, which is why utilitarianism keeps producing conclusions about punishing the innocent that its defenders have to explain away. Bentham's reply would be that the alternatives cannot even be argued about, which is a fair point and not an answer.
Why read it
The first chapter, which states the principle and the case for it in a few pages and is one of the clearest openings in philosophy, and then chapters thirteen to fifteen on the limits of punishment, which are still used. The classificatory middle is for specialists. The footnote on animals is four sentences and started a discipline.
- First printed
- 1789
- First in English
- 1789
- Digitised
- Yes
Bentham published relatively little himself and left tens of thousands of manuscript pages; the Bentham Project at University College London has been producing the critical edition since 1959 and it is not complete.
Written in English. The 1789 and 1823 texts are public domain.
Where it stands
Live. Utilitarianism in some form is one of the two or three standing positions in ethics, cost-benefit analysis is Bentham's method operating without his name, and the argument about whether the suffering of animals counts equally is now a large field which he opened in a footnote.
The passage
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter I. Public domain, and Bentham's own words.
Contested
How much Bentham's own utilitarianism differs from Mill's, and whether Mill's modifications rescue the theory or abandon it, is argued. Whether the felicific calculus is meant literally as a procedure or as an ideal is disputed. The Panopticon prison design, which he promoted for decades, has coloured his reputation heavily since Foucault made it a symbol of modern discipline, and whether that reading is fair to Bentham's intentions is a live argument. And the ongoing critical edition continues to reveal positions - on sexual liberty, on colonial policy - that the received picture of him did not include.