What Jeremy Bentham Actually Said About Action
All 3 Jeremy Bentham passages on action, in full — what each one claims, what holds them together, and who argues the other way.
Jeremy Bentham returns to action three times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. English jurist and philosopher who founded modern utilitarianism. Treated pleasure and pain as the master coordinates of morality.
What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is of its period, but the question underneath is not: what is action for, and what does it ask of you?
Every Jeremy Bentham passage on action
“To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?”
“Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.”
“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.”
What holds these together
Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Jeremy Bentham is not offering three opinions about action; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.
Jeremy Bentham applied to a real decision
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts two such cases to Jeremy Bentham.
You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one.
Argued as utilitarian accounting: 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.
Argued as pragmatic utility: You are judging the tool by what it lets you do. The risk is ignoring the habits and dependencies it quietly trains.
Work through these yourself
- You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one. — argued from utilitarian accounting and several competing positions
- A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data. — argued from pragmatic utility and several competing positions
Who disagrees
Plato, Seneca, Mahatma Gandhi and Lao Tzu all address action too, and they do not converge. Reading Jeremy Bentham alone gives you a coherent position; reading Jeremy Bentham against Plato shows you what the position is actually choosing against.