Early Life
Born in London on February 15, 1748, Bentham was a remarkable child prodigy. He was noted to have started studying Latin at the age of three and went to the prestigious Westminster School at age seven. By age twelve, he went to Queen’s College in Oxford and graduated in 1763 at the age of fifteen. Bentham’s father, Jeremiah Bentham, tried to push his son to follow his own footsteps and into a career in law.
Bentham was called to the Bar in 1769, but after serving just one case he decided to stop practicing. His time spent studying law made him profoundly disgusted by the English legal code due to the immediate fallacies that he noticed while attending a lecture by Sir William Blackstone, a notable legal educator at the time. During this time, he discovered the utility principle and the related writings of Hume, Helvetius, and other famous philosophers at the time.
Bentham wrote his first book in 1776, A Fragment on Government, a critique of Blackstone. In it he first develops his utilitarianism stating that the “fundamental axiom” that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”, and “the obligation to minister to general happiness, was an obligation paramount to and inclusive of every other”. In the same year, Bentham wrote an essay titled “Short review of the Declaration” for his friend John Lind who had been tasked to write a response to the Declaration of Independence published by the American colonies. In this essay, Bentham attacked and mocked American political philosophy.
IPML and the Panopticon
In 1786, Bentham travelled to Belarus to visit his brother, Samuel, there he wrote A Defense of Usury, in which he rejected Adam Smith’s defence of a legal maximum for interest rates. In addition, he worked with his brother to develop the Panopticon model. Their hypothetical circular prison allowed for a small number of guards to oversee the activities of a large group. While not every inmate could be observed at the same time, the inmates would not know whether or not they were being watched which was to motivate them to act as though they were always being watched.
Later in 1789, Bentham famously articulated his principle of utility in the work An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (IPML). Bentham clarifies the utility as “that property in any object” which “tends to produce benefit, advantage, good or happiness” and the utility principle as “that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question”. From this principle of utility, he concludes that since all punishment involves pain, it should only be used “so far as it promises to exclude some greater evil.”
Later Years
In 1823, Bentham alongside James Mill (the father of John Stuart Mill) founded The Westminster Review, a journal to spread the principles of philosophical radicalism. In the various works later in his life, he would go on to advocate for annual elections, women suffrage, secret ballots, marriage reform to allow for greater freedom for divorce, and animal rights.
Personal Life
While Bentham never married, he always gathered a group of friends and pupils, and his cat which he named “The Reverend Sir John Langbourne”. He was a reclusive figure who spent decades writing thousands of pages on philosophy, law, and reform, much of it unpublished in his lifetime. He was known for his peculiar habits; he followed a strict daily pattern of waking up at 6 am, waking for 2 hours or more, then working until 4 pm.
Bentham passed away on June 6, 1832 at the age of 84. In accordance with his request, his body was dissected in the presence of his friends and the skeleton was then reconstructed and supplied with a wax head and put up for display in the University College London where it is still on display to this day.
References
Crimmins, J. E. (2020). Jeremy Bentham (E. N. Zalta, Ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bentham/#LifWri
Plamenatz, J., & Duignan, B. (2024, April 16). Jeremy Bentham. Www.britannica.com. https://www.britannica.com/money/Jeremy-Bentham
Wikipedia Contributors. (2019, June 30). Jeremy Bentham. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham