On Reading Bentham

Abstract

WE STILL read bits of Bentham today-or anyway expect undergraduates to read them. For we do not look for much illumination there. We understand him so well, we see his defects so clearly, that we need hardly attend to the actual texts. But Bentham does have his uses. His books illustrate pure and simpleminded philosophical positions. And he proves the virtues of the younger Mill, measured by the degree John Stuart broke loose from his Benthamic shackles. Such attitudes may encourage the irrational distortions that we find. If we are Natural Lawyers we tend to see Bentham's distinction between and morality as a lack of healthy moral partisanship. We confuse his insistence upon the reality of law as it with an acceptance of it. On a different plane, we blame Bentham for the ruthless sacrifice by statesmen of whole nations, because these men calculate. We do not ask whether human welfare could justify the means or the ends, as Bentham would have demanded. If this is what Bentham has become to us, why bother with the monumental task of producing a new Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, which now yields the third and fourth' of thirty-eight projected volumes? Well (some may feel), it is there, waiting to be done. The mountain of manuscripts is there, indeed, many never having found their way into print (and some, as we have already found, well worth printing). So is the chaotic jungle of Bentham's actual publications, including the unfortunate Bowring edition of Bentham's Works (published 1838-43). As well as the treacherous bogs and swamps of revisions, redactations, rearrangements, and translations, which obscure not only the sequence and development of Bentham's thought, but even what is Bentham's own among the ideas of his sometimes too helpful collaborators and editors. The editors, quixotically, must expect-or at least hope-that Bentham will be read. I may perhaps be excused, therefore, if I dwell upon the history and talk about the content of these two important books even though they are not now published for the first time. For the history is revealing and the contents are not what we have learned to expect. If we asked Bentham to place his work within the categories now in use among philosophers, he would no doubt choose the label political or legal rather than moral. Mill says as much in his commentaries, but he also seems to condemn Bentham partly for this reason. And yet Bentham's concentration on the law, politics and government might be defended from his own utilitarian point of view. For he conceives primarily as a system of social control whose special features and whose place in human life provide it with the greatest potential for producing positive good but also the capacity for bringing about great evils. Government therefore demands our most serious and sustained attention. Law and politics were accordingly the focus of Bentham's theoretical as well as his practical concerns, and he was more intent upon applying his criterion of utility than with defending it. What he called private ethics never captured much of his attention. But he also saw, quite early, that we need to understand the (and related matters such as human action and motivation) before we can effectively change it-before we can even hope to criticize it accurately. He found himself driven again and again to break new philosophical