Jeremy Bentham Quotes

The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?

Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.

...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.

Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.

. . . in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments.

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.

Reputation is the road to power

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

The quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.

Nonsense on stilts

Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.

What other agents then are there, which, at the same time that they are under the influence of man's direction, are susceptible of happiness? They are of two sorts: (1) Other human beings who are styled persons. (2) Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things... But is there any reason why we should be suffered to torment them? Not any that I can see. Are there any why we should not be suffered to torment them? Yes, several. 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 come one day to be recognized, that the number of the 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 the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.

Without publicity, no good is permanent; under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.

happy life and merciful death

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:

Today, we are not just inmates or victims in a foreign-controlled digital panoptic. Originally, the Panoptikum was a prison-like building designed by Jeremy Bentham. The prisoners in the outer ring are guarded by a central surveillance tower. In the digital panoptic, we are not just caught. We are ourselves perpetrators. We are actively involved in the digital panopticon. We even entertain it by cableing ourselves to the body like the millions of quantified self-movements and voluntarily putting our body-related data into the web. The new rule does not silence us. Rather, she is constantly calling on us to communicate, to share, to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences, to tell our lives.

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873), English philosopher, political theorist, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century whose works on liberty justified freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's. He clearly set forth the premises of the scientific method.

If a man happen to take it into his head to assassinate with his own hands, or with the sword of justice, those whom he calls heretics, that is, people who think, or perhaps only speak, differently upon a subject which neither party understands, he will be as much inclined to do this at one time as at another. Fanaticism never sleeps: it is never glutted: it is never stopped by philanthropy; for it makes a merit of trampling on philanthropy: it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service. Avarice, lust, and vengeance, have piety, benevolence, honour; fanaticism has nothing to oppose it.

What is the source of this premature anxiety to establish fundamental laws? It is the old conceit of being wiser than all posterity—wiser than those who will have had more experience,—the old desire of ruling over posterity—the old recipe for enabling the dead to chain down the living

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his “panopticon” in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any time, unawares. The inmate would have no choice but to assume that he was always being watched, and would therefore conform. This idea has been used as a metaphor for mass personal data collection, both on the Internet and off.

At the end of the eighteenth century the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham declared that the supreme good is ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, and concluded that the sole worthy aim of the state, the market and the scientific community is to increase global happiness. Politicians should make peace, business people should foster prosperity and scholars should study nature, not for the greater glory of king, country or God – but so that you and I could enjoy a happier life.

Calling for the humane treatment of animals, seventeenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but rather, ‘Can they suffer?’” The question of sentience—the ability to feel pleasure and pain—has been at the center of arguments surrounding both human and animal welfare.

aliment of philosophic pride: the hope of honour and reputation at the

For the same sentiment of antipathy, if implicitly deferred to, may be, and very frequently is, productive of the very worst effects. Antipathy, therefore, can never be a right ground of action.

Jeremy Bentham argued that 'even in the best of times the great mass of citizens will most probably possess few resources other than their daily labour and, consequently, be always near indigence'. As long as working man was near indigence, hunger would remain an effective tool to goad him to labour. Bentham argued that an important task of government was to ensure conditions of deprivation, thereby guaranteeing that hunger would [be a constant motivation to work].

Jeremy Bentham opened his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation with the famous sentence “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

Bentham was an atheist and in no sense of the word could he be described as a theologian.

If then, merely out of regard to population, it were right that paederasts should be burnt alive, monks ought to be roasted alive over a slow fire. (Offences Against One's Self,

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

Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. [...] The indignant retort to Bentham's statement was that spiritual pleasures are obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those who prefer spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they acknowledge when they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very rare one. The vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and choice preoccupied with material considerations. Their pleasures are material. They look askance at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is why they have attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means merely one who has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show that they are wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose between poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its pleasant alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular game which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and judgement, a good eye and a cool head. If I get the same amount of pleasure out of playing it as you get by looking at Titian's 'Entombment of Christ' in the Louvre, by listening to Beethoven's 'Eroica' or by reading Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday', how are you going to prove that your pleasure is better and more refined than mine? Only, I should say, by manifesting that this gift you have of aesthetic appreciation has a moral effect on your character.

It is a refinement of Jeremy Bentham’s formulation of utilitarianism, the idea that all humans tend to gravitate toward what make them happy, and to stay away from what hurts them. On that account, trekonomics could be seen as the highest form of utilitarianism. The Federation is organized in such a way that every one of its citizens gets a chance to maximize his or her own utility. Since almost nothing is scarce, the necessity to make choices on budgeting and spending is removed from everyday life. The only thing that one really needs to decide upon is how to balance the goal of bettering oneself vis-à-vis the injunction to better humanity. In other words, the biggest challenge for every Federation citizen resides in how to allocate his or her talents, time, and capacity for empathy, and how to best contribute to the common wealth.

He will repeat it boldly (for it has been said before him), truths that form the basis of political and moral science are not to be discovered but by investigations as severe as mathematical ones, and beyond all comparison more intricate and extensive.

Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham have focused intently on individuals. They try to improve the welfare of society by giving individuals what they want. But a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognize that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve. A Durkheimian utilitarianism would be open to the possibility that the binding foundations—Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—have a crucial role to play in a good society.

Democritus was a thorough-going materialist; for him, as we have seen, the soul was composed of atoms, and thought was a physical process. There was no purpose in the universe; there were only atoms governed by mechanical laws. He disbelieved in popular religion* and he argued against the nous of Anaxagoras. In ethics he considered cheerfulness the goal of life, and regarded moderation and culture as the best means to it. He disliked everything violent and passionate; he disapproved of sex, because, he said, it involved the overwhelming of consciousness by pleasure. He valued friendship, but thought ill of women, and did not desire children, because their education interferes with philosophy. In all this, he was very like Jeremy Bentham; he was equally so in his love of what the Greeks called democracy.XI

in modern terminology the major divide is between ‘deontologists’ (such as Kant) and ‘consequentialists’ (including ‘utilitarians’ such as Jeremy Bentham, 1748–1832). Deontology is a fancy name for the belief that morality consists in the obeying of rules. It is literally the science of duty, from the Greek for ‘that which is binding’. Deontology is not quite the same thing as moral absolutism, but for most purposes in a book about religion there is no need to dwell on the distinction. Absolutists believe there are absolutes of right and wrong, imperatives whose rightness makes no reference to their consequences. Consequentialists more pragmatically hold that the morality of an action should be judged by its consequences. One version of consequentialism is utilitarianism, the philosophy associated with Bentham, his friend James Mill (1773–1836) and Mill’s son John Stuart Mill (1806–73). Utilitarianism is often summed up in Bentham’s unfortunately imprecise catchphrase: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation’.

But when I returned from the conference to the house where I live, which is not a bungalow but a two-storey colonial and in which, ever since I moved in, you have occupied the cellar, you were not gone. I expected you to have been dispelled, exorcised: you had become real, you had a wife and three snapshots, and banality is after all the magic antidote for unrequited love. But it was not enough. There you were, in your accustomed place, over by the shelf to the right of the cellar stairs where I kept the preserves, standing dusty and stuffed like Jeremy Bentham in his glass case, looking at me not with your former scorn, it's true, but with reproach, as if I had let it happen, as if it was my fault. Surely you don't want it back, that misery, those decaying buildings, that seductive despair and emptiness, that fear? Surely you don't want to be stuck on that slushy Boston street forever. You should have been more careful. I try to tell you it would have ended badly, that it was not the way you remember, you are deceiving yourself, but you refuse to be consoled. Goodbye, I tell you, waiting for your glance, pensive, regretful. You are supposed to turn and walk away, past the steamer trunks, around the corner into the laundry room, and vanish behind the twinset washer-dryer; but you do not move.

O teto de vidro da felicidade é mantido no lugar por dois pilares sólidos, um psicológico e outro biológico. No nível psicológico, a felicidade depende mais de expectativas do que de condições objetivas. Não ficamos satisfeitos com uma existência pacífica e próspera. Em vez disso, nosso contentamento resulta de a realidade corresponder a nossas expectativas. A má notícia é que, à medida que as condições melhoram, nossas expectativas inflam. Melhoras dramáticas nas condições, como as que a humanidade vem experimentando em décadas recentes, se traduzem em expectativas maiores e não em mais contentamento. Se não fizermos alguma coisa quanto a isso, ficaremos insatisfeitos também com nossas conquistas futuras. No nível biológico, tanto nossas expectativas como nossa felicidade são determinadas mais pela bioquímica do que pela situação econômica, social ou política. Segundo Epicuro, ficamos felizes quando desfrutamos de sensações agradáveis e nos sentimos livres das desagradáveis. Jeremy Bentham, de modo semelhante, sustentava que a natureza deu o domínio sobre o homem a dois senhores — o prazer e a dor — e eles sozinhos determinam tudo o que fazemos, dizemos e pensamos. O sucessor de Bentham, John Stuart Mill, explicou que a felicidade nada é senão o prazer e a libertação da dor e que, para além de um e de outro, não há nem o bem nem o mal. Aquele que buscar deduzir o bem e o mal de algo diferente (como a palavra de Deus ou o interesse nacional) estará tentando enganá-lo, e talvez enganando a si mesmo também.35

By the principle of asceticism I mean that principle, which, like the principle of utility, approves or disapproves of any action, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question; but in an inverse manner: approving of actions in as far as they tend to diminish his happiness; disapproving of them in as far as they tend to augment it.

Where the penal provision, though established, is not conveyed to the notice of the person on whom it seems intended that it should operate. Such is the case where the law has omitted to employ any of the expedients which are necessary, to make sure that every person whatsoever, who is within the reach of the law, be apprised of all the cases whatsoever, in which (being in the station of life he is in) he can be subjected to the penalties of the law.

Those which can be experienced in the present life, can of course, be no others than such as human nature in the course of the present life is susceptible of: and from each of these sources may flow all the pleasures or pains of which, in the course of the present life, human nature is susceptible.

Whetherw happiness be or be not the end to which morality should be referred—that it be referred to an end of some sort, and not left in the dominion of vague feeling or inexplicable internal conviction, that it be made a matter of reason and calculation, and not merely of sentiment, is essential to the very idea of moral philosophy; is, in fact, what renders argument or discussion on moral questions possible. That the morality of actions depends on the consequences which they tend to produce, is the doctrine of rational persons of all schools; that the good or evil of those consequences is measured solely by pleasure or pain, is all of the doctrine of the school of utility, which is peculiar to it.

Man is conceived by Bentham as a being susceptible of pleasures and pains, and governed in all his conduct partly by the different modifications of self-interest, and the passions commonly classed as selfish, partly by sympathies, or occasionally antipathies, towards other beings. And here Bentham’s conception of human nature stops. He does notz exclude religion; the prospect of divine rewards and punishments he includes under the head of “self-regarding interest,” and the devotional feeling under that of sympathy awitha God.[*] But the whole of the impelling or restraining principles, whether of this bor of another worldb , which he recognises, are either self-love, or love or hatred towards other csentientc beings.

else desirable, he confounded all disinterested feelings which he found in himself, with the desire of ggeneralg happiness: just as some religious writers, who loved virtue for its own sake as much perhaps as men could do, habitually confounded their love of virtue with their fear of hell.

The first addresses itself to our reason and conscience; the second to our imagination; the third to our human fellow-feeling. According to the first, we approve or disapprove; according to the second, we admire or despise; according to the third, we love, pity, or dislike. The bmoralityb of an action depends on its foreseeable consequences; its beauty, and its loveableness, or the reverse, depend on the qualities which

one by which he contributed to the elucidation of history: much of which, except so far as this explained it, must have been entirely inexplicable to him. The idea was given him by Helvetius, whose book, De l’Esprit,[*] is one continued and most acute commentary on it; and, together with the other great idea of Helvetius, the influence of circumstances on character, it will make his name live by the side of Rousseau, when omost ofo the other French pmetaphysiciansp of the eighteenth century qwillq be extant as such only in literary history.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

From: REFLECTIONS - "Utopia of any sort is impossible. Humanity is far too complex and dichotomous. The pursuit of one Utopian ideal by one group will inevitably hurt and damage another group. Human endeavour, therefore, has to be a balancing act between achieving the greatest good for the greatest number — to quote the classic Utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham — and preventing tyranny. Tyranny always rises out of utopia. Utopia is a contradiction. I think it is Dystopia

This is pre-eminently the case with Bentham: he both wrote and felt as if the moral standard ought not only to be paramount (which it ought), but to be alone; as if it ought to be the sole master of all our actions, and even of all our sentiments; as if either to admire or like, or despise or dislike a person for any action which neither does good nor harm, or which does not do a good or a harm proportioned to the sentiment entertained, were an injustice and a prejudice.

there does in fact prevail a much greater unanimity among thinking persons, than might be supposed from their diametrical divergence on the great questions of moral metaphysics

man, and from self-interest in this world or in the next. There is a studied abstinence from any of the phrases which, in the mouths of others, import the acknowledgment of such a fact.* If we find the words “Conscience,” “Principle,” “Moral Rectitude,” “Moral Duty,” in his Table of the Springs of Action, it is among the synonymes of the “love of reputation;

Ruler of the Universe; and the popular, which he characteristically calls also the moral sanction, operating through the pains and pleasures arising from the favour or disfavour of our fellow-creatures.[*]

He committed the mistake of supposing that the abusinessa part of human affairs was the whole of them; all at least that the legislator and the moralist had to do with. Not that he disregarded moral influences when he perceived them; but his want of imagination, small experience of human feelings, and ignorance of the filiation and connexion of feelings with one another, made this rarely the case.

or others, unless we take in, as part of the question, its influence on the regulation of our, or their, affections and desires?

Nor is it only the moral part of man’s nature, in the strict sense of the term—the desire of perfection, or the feeling of an approving or of an accusing conscience—that he overlooks; he but faintly recognises, as a fact in human nature, the pursuit of any other ideal end for its own sake. The sense of honour, and personal dignity—that feeling of personal exaltation and degradation which acts independently of other people’s opinion, or even in defiance of it; the love of beauty, the passion of the artist; the love of order, of congruity, of consistency in all things, and conformity to their end; the love of power, not in the limited form of power over other human beings, but abstract power, the power of making our volitions effectual; the love of action, the thirst for movement and activity, a principle scarcely of less influence in human life than its opposite, the love of ease:—

definiteness and precision: details were not to be encountered with generalities, but with details. Nor could any progress be made, on such a subject, by merely showing that existing things were bad; it was necessary also to show how they might be made better. No great man whom we read of was qualified to do this thing except Bentham. He has done it, once and for everp .

and to extinguish all books, all schools, all combinations of individuals for joint action upon society, which may be attempted for the purpose of keeping alive a spirit at variance with its own. Is it, we say, the proper condition of man, in all ages and nations, to be under the despotism of Public Opinion?

this benefit from the Montesquieu of our own times, M. de Tocqueville.

Jefferson in 1778 proposed a “Bill of Proportion in Crimes and Punishments” to the Virginia House of Delegates. Beccaria, he wrote, “had satisfied the reasonable world of the unrightfulness and inefficiency of the punishment of crimes by death.” As a substitute, he put forward a scheme of hard labor on public works. The measure was rejected by one vote, though it passed in a diluted form in 1796. Even though he was too ready to accept the inhuman practice of solitary confinement, which was later to be refined from Beccaria in the penal system proposed by Jeremy Bentham, Jefferson continued to press for a distinction between murder and manslaughter, which was recast as murder in the first and second degree, and to evolve his interest in the notion of the “penitentiary” as a scientific matter, with graduated and appropriate punishments. Again, none of this careful, measured liberalism was to be extended to those of African descent.

INTRODUCTION The term 'international relations' was first used by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, although its Latin equivalent, 'intergentes', was used a century earlier by Rijehare Zouche. Both of them had used the term in the context of what later came to be known as international law. Today, nation states have become highly interdependent, and relations between them, political or economic, have developed into an essential area of knowledge.

seems that modern society has devised other forms of dharma that help to keep violence at bay. Stefano Tomelleri, using Durkheim’s concept of social distance, sees the division of labour as a means of coping with mimetic rivalry through the creation of social distance.12 This is also reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which is a tool to control human behaviour, preventing any form of horizontal communication, meaning any mimetic activity, through an external source of control.13 In both cases the aim is the eradication of violence. How could you envisage a contemporary social order that, although acknowledging the constant presence of violence, tries to cope with it? The division of labour, unlike the caste system, leaves room for the individual, at least in principle. The market may force one to make some choices instead of others, but it is not proper to speak about capitalism, as the Marxists did, in terms of rigidity of social stratification. The division of labour has experienced important changes in the recent years, and I am not sure that I can give a definite explanation to account for this phenomenon. Certainly the organization of labour is particularly relevant for the stability of North American society. When people refer to the so-called ‘American dream’, they certainly exaggerate and overestimate its nature, but it is not entirely deceptive either. If one looks at the nouveaux riches of Silicon Valley, it is true that many of them are really self-made men, and a good percentage are immigrants, mostly from India or China. So, I am not sure I would agree completely that division of labour keeps mimetic rivalry under control, but at the same time it is a very complex subject. There is unquestionably more social mobility in the United States than in Europe. However, we live in a world in which social mobility, although experiencing phases of inhibition and local rigidity, is constantly increasing. Structural injustice, although still present, has been gradually ironed out by Christian ethics, and the market itself asks for a wider circulation of ‘human capital’.

Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, ‘There are two types of people in the world, those who divide people into two types, and those who do not.

On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

Hence we see the emptiness of all those rhapsodies of commonplace morality, which consist in the taking of such names as lust, cruelty, and avarice, and branding them with marks of reprobation: applied to the thing, they are false; applied to the name, they are true indeed, but nugatory.

Ravaillac assassinated one of the best and wisest of sovereigns, at a time when a good and wise sovereign, a blessing at all times so valuable to a state, was particularly precious: and that to the inhabitants of a populous and extensive empire. He is taken, and doomed to the most excruciating tortures. His son, well persuaded of his being a sincere penitent, and that mankind, in case of his being at large, would have nothing more to fear from him, effectuates his escape.

Every law is an infraction of liberty. ― Jeremy Bentham The laws on human rights and freedom of speech are not a breach of liberty; they comply with emancipation in a disciplined way. ― Ehsan Sehgal

The more abstract the proposition is the more liable is it to involve a fallacy." —Jeremy Bentham

more than Hobbes, while his system of government by surveillance is prefigured in the Panopticon, an ideal prison designed by the nineteenth-century British Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Grafted onto a Marxist-Leninist stem, these illiberal Western ideologies underpin Xi’s regime.

or ignore the sheer physical pleasure that exercisers get from moving and activating the body, recognized by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham as ‘the pleasure of health, or, the internal pleasurable feeling or flow of spirits which accompanies a state of full health and vigour’. The gym also gives its members a sense of personal empowerment and agency that might not be available to them in other areas of their lives, as well as a sense of achievement when they accomplish the physical challenges they have set themselves. On the social level it gives them access to a ready-made community of like-minded people who are potential friends and partners. My conclusion, therefore, is that for the convert minority, the gym has once again become a quasi-religious space

He’s not a fan of open-plan offices either, modern panopticons that make everyone feel like they are being watched all the time. Jeremy Bentham had developed the idea in the eighteenth century as a type of architecture suited to prisons, insane asylums, and any other institution where surveillance was necessary. The basic idea was that people who felt they were constantly being watched would self-police and be more productive as a result. Now the whole world is a panopticon, which says all you need to know about modern society.

Although he did not formally break with Jeremy Bentham until the later 1820s, Bolívar had long been sceptical about what he regarded as idealistic, purely rational schemes of government. Bentham was comfortably distanced for the most part from people who were very poor, or uneducated, or violent, and he had the luxury of writing from the security of his study in the centre of an affluent London undamaged by the ravages of war. Bolívar’s own experience was necessarily very different. ‘The cries of the human race on battlefields or in angry demonstrations’, he warned the delegates at Angostura firmly: rail against insensitive or blind legislators who mistakenly believed they could try out whimsical institutions with impunity. Every country on earth has sought freedom … only a few were willing to temper their ambitions, establishing a mode of government appropriate to their means, their spirit, and their circumstances.

Justice is good in its own right and makes life among other people more dependable. Yet Stern accepted long ago that even perfect justice will not change who we are. The law is erected on many fictions and perhaps the falsest one of all is that humans, in the end, are rational. Without doubt, our life--so far as we can tell--is one of cause and effect. That is what science depends on. But our most intimate decisions are rarely based on the kinds of calculations of pluses and minuses Jeremy Bentham, or the free-market economists for that matter, have wanted to believe in. We are fundamentally emotional creatures. In the most consequential matters, we answer faithfully to the heart's cry, not the law's.

The most famous case was that of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the philosopher and jurist. Bentham left instructions in his Will that his body, dressed in his own clothes, be preserved and displayed at University College, London, as an ‘auto icon’, so that he could keep a watchful eye on proceedings at his own college. For years before his death, Bentham even carried around the glass eyes needed for the taxidermy process. In the event, his head deteriorated before it could be preserved and a wax one had to be substituted. The genuine head, so often a target for student pranks, eventually had to be locked away, after being found doing service in a football game, and, on another occasion, discovered in a locker at Aberdeen railway station.

In Europe, it’s a done deal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract is being slowly but surely replaced by a life contract inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and the “panopticon” of his surveillance state.

The judges believed Uber and Lyft to be more powerful than they were willing to admit, but they also conceded that the companies did not have the same power over employees as an old-economy employer like Walmart. “The jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes,” Judge Chhabria wrote. Judge Chen, meanwhile, wondered whether Uber, despite a claim of impotence at the center of the network, exerted a kind of invisible power over drivers that might give them a case. In order to define this new power, he decided to turn where few judges do: the late French philosopher Michel Foucault. In a remarkable passage, Judge Chen compared Uber’s power to that of the guards at the center of the Panopticon, which Foucault famously analyzed in Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon was a design for a circular prison building dreamed up in the eighteenth century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The idea was to empower a solitary guard in the center of the building to watch over a large number of inmates, not because he was actually able to see them all at once, but because the design kept any prisoner from knowing who was being observed at any given moment. Foucault analyzed the nature and working of power in the Panopticon, and the judge found it analogous to Uber’s. He quoted a line about the “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” The judge was suggesting that the various ways in which Uber monitored, tracked, controlled, and gave feedback on the service of its drivers amounted to the “functioning of power,” even if the familiar trappings of power—ownership of assets, control over an employee’s time—were missing. The drivers weren’t like factory workers employed and regimented by a plant, yet they weren’t independent contractors who could do whatever they pleased. They could be fired for small infractions. That is power. It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself. Its posture is not entirely cynical, though. The technology world has long maintained that the tools it creates are inherently leveling and will serve to collapse power divides rather than widen them.

Utilitarianism: A moral and political philosophy that proposes the doctrine of the greatest good/happiness for the greatest number of people. According to one of Utilitarianism’s chief architects, Jeremy Bentham, the basic idea is to find a balance between the individual’s happiness and the happiness of the community, “each counting in an equal way.” In positing happiness as its aim, Utilitarianism is a type of hedonism.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. –

British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century conception of the Panopticon, a building design he believed would allow institutions to effectively control human behavior.

Utilitarianism has its roots in the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73). Bentham held to a hedonistic utilitarianism, which maintains that the most moral acts are those that maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Mill developed his approach away from hedonism and toward a more general concept of maximizing the general happiness or the greatest good for the greatest number. When it was proposed, utilitarianism was a radical theory, since it divorced morality from divine revelation and from any view of nature. According to utilitarianism, moral behavior no longer required faithfulness to divine ordinances and rigid moral rules. Utilitarian modes of moral reasoning are widely applied to many of the currently debated moral issues. Most of the public policy in the United States and Western Europe is still decided on overwhelmingly utilitarian grounds.