Both principles, indubitably, are valid over a certain field; the only controversial question is as to the extent of this field. Bentham and his followers exaggerated the extent of the field in the case of Hartley’s principle, as certain behaviourists have in the case of Pavlov’s principle.
To Bentham, determinism in psychology was important, because
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he wished to establish a code of laws–and, more generally, a social system–which would automatically make men virtuous. His second principle, that of the greatest happiness, became necessary at this point in order to define “virtue.”
Bentham maintained that what is good is pleasure or happinesshe used these words as synonyms–and what is bad is pain. Therefore one state of affairs is better than another if it involves a greater balance of pleasure over pain, or a smaller balance of pain over pleasure. Of all possible states of affairs, that one is best which involves the greatest balance of pleasure over pain.
There is nothing new in this doctrine, which came to be called “utilitarianism.” It had been advocated by Hutcheson as early as 1725. Bentham attributes it to Priestley, who, however, had no special claim to it. It is virtually contained in Locke. Bentham’s merit consisted not in the doctrine, but in his vigorous application of it to various practical problems.
Bentham held not only that the good is happiness in general, but also that each individual always pursues what he believes to be his own happiness. The business of the legislator, therefore, is to produce harmony between public and private interests. It is to the interest of the public that I should abstain from theft, but it is only to my interest where there is an effective criminal law. Thus the criminal law is a method of making the interests of the individual coincide with those of the community; that is its justification.
Men are to be punished by the criminal law in order to prevent crime, not because we hate the criminal. It is more important that the punishment should be certain than that it should be severe. In his day, in England, many quite minor offences were subject to the death penalty, with the result that juries often refused to convict because they thought the penalty excessive. Bentham advocated abolition of the death penalty for all but the worst offences, and before he died the criminal law had been mitigated in this respect.
Civil law, he says, should have four aims: subsistence, abundance, security, and equality. It will be observed that he does not mention liberty. In fact, he cared little for liberty. He admired the benevolent autocrats who preceded the French Revolution–Catherine the Great and the Emperor Francis. He had a great contempt for the doctrine of the rights of man. The rights of man, he said, are plain nonsense;
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the imprescriptible rights of man, nonsense on stilts. When the French revolutionaries made their “Déclaration des droits de l’homme,” Bentham called it “a metaphysical work–the ne plus ultra of metaphysics.” Its articles, he said, could be divided into three classes: (1) Those that are unintelligible, (2) Those that are false, (3) Those that are both.
Bentham’s ideal, like that of Epicurus, was security, not liberty. “Wars and storms are best to read of, but peace and calms are better to endure.”
His gradual evolution towards Radicalism had two sources: on the one hand, a belief in equality, deduced from the calculus of pleasures and pains; on the other hand, an inflexible determination to submit everything to the arbitrament of reason as he understood it. His love of equality early led him to advocate equal division of a man’s property among his children, and to oppose testamentary freedom. In later years it led him to oppose monarchy and hereditary aristocracy, and to advocate complete democracy, including votes for women. His refusal to believe without rational grounds led him to reject religion, including belief in God; it made him keenly critical of absurdities and anomalies in the law, however venerable their historical origin. He would not excuse anything on the ground that it was traditional. From early youth he was opposed to imperialism, whether that of the British in America, or that of other nations; he considered colonies a folly.
It was through the influence of James Mill that Bentham was induced to take sides in practical politics. James Mill was twenty-five years younger than Bentham, and an ardent disciple of his doctrines, but he was also an active Radical. Bentham gave Mill a house (which had belonged to Milton), and assisted him financially while he wrote a history of India. When this history was finished, the East India Company gave James Mill a post, as they did afterwards to his son until their abolition as a sequel to the Mutiny. James Mill greatly admired Condorcet and Helvétius. Like all Radicals of that period, he believed in the omnipotence of education. He practised his theories on his son John Stuart Mill, with results partly good, partly bad. The most important bad result was that John Stuart could never quite shake off his influence, even when he perceived that his father’s outlook had been narrow.
James Mill, like Bentham, considered pleasure the only good and
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pain the only evil. But like Epicurus he valued moderate pleasure most. He thought intellectual enjoyments the best and temperance the chief virtue. “The intense was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation,” says his son, who adds that he objected to the modern stress laid upon feeling. Like the whole utilitarian school, he was utterly opposed to every form of romanticism. He thought politics could be governed by reason, and expected men’s opinions to be determined by the weight of evidence. If opposing sides in a controversy are presented with equal skill, there is a moral certaintyso he held–that the greater number will judge right. His outlook was limited by the poverty of his emotional nature, but within his limitations he had the merits of industry, disinterestedness, and rationality.
His son John Stuart Mill, who was born in 1808, carried on a somewhat softened form of the Benthamite doctrine to the time of his death in 1873.
Throughout the middle portion of the nineteenth century, the influence of the Benthamites on British legislation and policy was astonishingly great, considering their complete absence of emotional appeal.
Bentham advanced various arguments in favour of the view that the general happiness is the summum bonum. Some of these arguments were acute criticisms of other ethical theories. In his treatise on political sophisms he says, in language which seems to anticipate Marx, that sentimental and ascetic moralities serve the interests of the governing class, and are the product of an aristocratic régime. Those who teach the morality of sacrifice, he continues, are not victims of error: they want others to sacrifice to them. The moral order, he says, results from equilibrium of interests. Governing corporations pretend that there is already identity of interests between the governors and the governed, but reformers make it clear that this identity does not yet exist, and try to bring it about. He maintains that only the principle of utility can give a criterion in morals and legislation, and lay the foundation of a social science. His main positive argument in favour of his principle is that it is really implied by apparently different ethical systems. This, however, is only made plausible by a severe restriction of his survey.
There is an obvious lacuna in Bentham’s system. If every man always pursues his own pleasure, how are we to secure that the legis-
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lator shall pursue the pleasure of mankind in general? Bentham’s own instinctive benevolence (which his psychological theories prevented him from noticing) concealed the problem from him. If he had been employed to draw up a code of laws for some country, he would have framed his proposals in what he conceived to be the public interest, not so as to further his own interests or (consciously) the interests of his class. But if he had recognized this fact, he would have had to modify his psychological doctrines. He seems to have thought that, by means of democracy combined with adequate supervision, legislators could be so controlled that they could
