The Principle of

Morals and Legislation

JEREMY BENTHAM

Prepared by:
Evaristo, Anne
Mialie P.
Gumba, Shaine Eve
Tapia, Princess Mae
L.
Jeremy Whitehorn Bentham
was born on February 15,
1748 and died on June 6,
1832 in Houndsditch
London
went to Westminister
School by the age 7
went to Queens College,
Oxford by the age of 12
had the ideas of
educational reform
 Attended the Court of Kings Bench, Westminster Hall
He returned briefly to Oxford in 17631764 to attend
lectures given by William Blackstone
He passed the Bar by 1769 although his career in the field
became brief
Ideas from the writings of Hume, Helvtius and Beccaria
Launched his career as a legal theorist in 1776
Bentham lived during the time of major social, political and
economic change.
His other writings

A Fragment on Government, that was published

anonymously in 1776. Which was also known as A
Comment on the Commentaries in the 20th century.

A Defense of Usury(1787) Was his first contribution to

economic affairs, written while he and his brother Samuel
was in Russia, in which he rejected Adam Smiths defense
of a legal maximum for interest rates.
 Panopticon; Or, The Inspection House(1791,
Russia)
The panopticon is a building of circular design
intended for any institutional arrangement where
the inmates required constant supervisionsuch
as hospitals, schools, workhouses and poor houses
but the panopticon became most well-known as
a prison for grinding rogues honest and idle men
industrious.
His philosophical foundation

He argued that legal science ought to be built on

the same immovable basis of sensation and
experience as that of medicine, declaring what the
physician is to the natural body, the legislator is to
the political: legislation is the art of medicine
exercised upon a grand scale
Human Nature According to
Bentham

Bentham believed that the nature of the human

person can be adequately described without mention
of social relationships. To begin with, the idea of
"relation" is but a "fictitious entity," though necessary
for "convenience of discourse." And, more specifically,
he remarks that "the community is a fictitious
body," and it is but "the sum of the interests of
the several members who compose it.
The Principle of
Utility
 Utility produce benefits, pleasure, advantage or
happiness to avoid experiencing pain, unhappiness or
evil.
Pleasure and pain are determined by its intensity,
fecundity of a certain thing that is valued that provides
happiness and comfort or mere pain.
"Whose pleasure counts the most?"

Classical utilitarians are altruists to the extent that

they believe that the standard of right or wrong is not
the agent's own greatest happiness, but the greatest
amount of happiness for the greatest number of people.

The purpose of morality is to make life better by

increasing the amount of good things in the world and
decreasing the amount of bad things.
Do what produces the best consequences
1. what things are good and bad

2. whose good we should aim to maximize; and

3. whether actions, policies, etc. are made right or wrong by

their actual consequences or by their foreseeable
consequences
What is good?

Bentham adopted the view calledhedonism.

Where the goods are merely instruments.
Pleasure and happiness, however, are intrinsic
goods, because the meaning that they are good in
themselves and not because they produce some
further valuable thing.
Whose well being?

i. Individual self-interest
ii. Groups
Actual consequences or Foreseeable
Consequences

Utilitarians disagree about whether

judgments of right and wrong should be based
on the actual consequences of actions or their
foreseeable consequences. The issues thus
arises when the actual effects of actions differ
from what we expected.
 Situations
As to how they understand
the theory
As to making the distinction
of the two consequences
As to their views about the
nature of utilitarian theory
As an application, man A
saved the life of a drowning
man, years later the latter
killed millions of people
A.C. Actual Consequences
A.C
It is a criterion of right and
wrong
If predicted reasonably that
things would turn out as a
disaster/chaotic then what is
the sense of bringing it in
action
The option with the highest
expected utility is the best
thing to do
The rescuer did the wrong
thing
F.C. Foreseeable
F.C
A decision-making procedure
They see no reason to make
the moral rightness or
wrongness of actions depend
on facts that might be
unknowable
The action with the highest
expected utility is both the
best thing to do based on
current evidence an the right
action
The rescuer could not
foresee the future bad
effects of saving the
drowning person, what he
did was morally right
What are the causes of human
action?
Pleasure and pain govern not only how human beings act
but also how human beings ought to act

What is the Principle of sympathy and

antipathy?
It is the reliance on feelings for conscience for moral
decisions. We judge an action as right or wrong based on
how we feel about it.

Can pleasure be quantified?

He tried to quantify pleasures. And as a result he found out that
only some of factors are quantifiable such as duration, certainty,
extent but almost all factors are not quantifiable.
 Beauty is as beauty does. Bentham does not think that
motives or intentions are exempted to his result based
theory. Motives can be considered good or bad based on
their results.

By the principle of utility is meant that principle which

approves or disapproves every action whatsoever, according
to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or
diminish the happiness of those party whose interest is in
question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to
promote or to oppose that happiness.
 Bentham also suggests that individuals who reasonably
seek the general happiness simply because the interests
of the others are inextricably bound up with their own,
though he recognized that this is something that is easy
for individuals to ignore.
The principle of utility presupposes that one man is
worth just the same as the other man and so there is a
guarantee that in circulating the greatest happiness each
person count for one and no one for more than one.