UK, 1748–1832
Jeremy Bentham
English jurist and philosopher who founded modern utilitarianism. Treated pleasure and pain as the master coordinates of morality.
Jeremy Bentham in 9 lines
Every Jeremy Bentham passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”
“Priestley was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth — that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”
“To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?”
“Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.”
“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?”
“Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.”
“Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.”
“Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.”
“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.”
Where Jeremy Bentham lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one.
You are widening the frame beyond self-image. The danger is flattening a human life into a tidy calculation.
A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data.
You are judging the tool by what it lets you do. The risk is ignoring the habits and dependencies it quietly trains.
You were told a secret that is hurting someone else.
You are weighing a broken confidence against a preventable harm. The cost is becoming someone others learn not to tell things to.
A machine can now do the part of your work you were proud of.
You are separating your worth from a particular motion of the hands. The risk is discovering the pride was load-bearing.
You were wrong in public and no one has noticed yet.
You are aiming at the outcome rather than the announcement. The cost is that quiet fixes teach no one anything.
The work is good and you keep finding reasons to hold it.
You are letting contact with the world do what another draft cannot. The risk is confusing speed with courage.
The good you did is only useful to others if they hear about it.
You are treating visibility as part of the good rather than a tax on it. The risk is a habit that starts selecting deeds for their audience.
A stranger needs help and you have somewhere to be.
You are letting the need in front of you outrank the schedule behind you. The risk is a rule that makes every errand negotiable.
The better-paid job is the one that means less to you.
You are funding a future self who will have more room to choose. The risk is that the room arrives and you no longer want it.
You are paid more than someone who does more than you.
You are converting an unfair input into a better output. The danger is private atonement for a public arrangement.
You have started measuring something you used to simply do.
You are letting measurement reveal a pattern that feeling alone would miss. The risk is optimising the measure until it stops describing the thing.
Reading Jeremy Bentham today
Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1748–1832, from UK — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Jeremy Bentham is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 9 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Baruch Spinoza — Netherlands, 1632–1677
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
Argues the same cases
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Buddha, Epictetus, John Stuart Mill take positions on the same dilemmas as Jeremy Bentham, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.