J.S. Mill: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

John Stuart Mill is best remembered today as the leading exponent of Utilitarianism, but he did not invent this philosophy or even initiate its wide ranging influence. This was the work of the remarkable Jeremy Bentham.

In his later years John Stuart Mill wrote a perceptive portrait of Bentham: ‘He had neither internal experience, nor external. He never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety; he never had even the experience which sickness gives; he lived from childhood to the age of eighty-five in boyish health. He knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He never felt life a sore and weary burthen. He was a boy to the last.’

Bentham’s family bequeathed him sufficient cash to live on for the rest of his life without working. He put this stroke of fortune to exceptional use. He devoted his entire life to thought. Yet not all this thinking involved philosophy and theoretical matters. The progressive Utilitarian ideal that he founded permeated all his thinking. Bentham sought progress in all fields, from politics to prisons, from philosophy to frozen peas. His most celebrated practical scheme was the Panopticon, a revolutionary new design for a prison. This was laid out like a wheel, with the cells lining the outer rim and the warder’s tower at the axle. This panoptic (all seeing) tower enabled the warden to look into all the cells without going on patrol. Yet the architecture of this efficient prison was not the only novel feature. Bentham proposed that his prison should be run as a profit-making business. In this way it could be self-supporting, and the hard work involved for the prisoners would ‘grind the rogues honest’. But this process would also prove humane – for the governor would feed the prisoners well and keep them in good health, so that they could work harder and earn more money. Bentham became so enamoured of this scheme, and ran up such debts while attempting to persuade the government to adopt it, that he almost ended up in jail himself – as a bankrupt. His acquaintance with the bankruptcy laws (which could still inflict forty-eight hours pillory in the stocks and the cutting off of ears) proved a sobering shock.

Bentham’s other practical schemes ranged from an early form of telephone (involving a network of speaking tubes) to a project for digging a canal across the Panama isthmus to the Pacific, as well as his celebrated scheme for the freezing of vegetables so that peas could be served for Christmas dinner. Other projects included law reform, emancipation of the colonies, the drawing up of a British constitution, the establishment of London University, and, last but not least, a wholescale and radical overhaul of the bankruptcy laws.

Bentham spent much of his life badgering the authorities. But not in person. He was a shy man who preferred to live a secluded life devoted to his schemes and ideas, attended only by his loyal friends and disciples. Among these was James Mill, John Stuart Mill’s father. This group, known as the ‘philosophical radicals’, promoted Bentham’s work in public. Their advocacy of his ideas had widespread effect, especially in Parliament, where Bentham’s allies included David Ricardo, the great classical economist of his day. Even Bentham’s constant stream of pestering letters to the authorities would (sometimes inadvertently) bring about major reforms. In the course of his correspondence with the governor of the Bank of England about an unforgeable banknote that he had recently dreamed up, Bentham happened to inquire precisely how many banknotes were in circulation. The governor realised that he had no idea. Nor did anyone else in the Bank. If it was to persist in any plausible claim to be in control of the currency, the Bank realised that it had better start by finding out how much of this unknown entity there was. In this way Jeremy Bentham can claim responsibility for the introduction of the numbering on English banknotes – as well as the first monetary policy that actually had some idea of what it was talking about.

Yet Bentham was far from merely a brilliant crackpot. All his multifarious schemes and projects were guided by a central principle – his Utilitarian idea. This was built upon the following idea: ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is in them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as what we shall do’. Such an enlightened and humane idea was regarded as radical at the time. The fact that it now appears obvious to us is largely the result of Bentham, James Mill, and his son John Stuart Mill, as well as their Utilitarian colleagues. What we tend to accept as self-evident was far from being so in most societies throughout history and remains so in more than a few today. The implications of Bentham’s Utilitarian ideal would lead directly to the belief in democratic liberalism that permeates free Western society.

Bentham’s Utilitarianism was based upon what he called the ‘sacred truth’. This proclaimed: ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.’ His aim was to make his philosophy, and with it the principles of the social sciences, as rigid as the laws of natural science. He saw Utilitarianism and its pleasure principle as the new gravity of morality, as a result he confidently expected that one day he would be recognised as the Newton of the social sciences and philosophy. His basic argument was based upon the ‘principle of utility’ that he saw as a moral principle. What gives us pleasure is good, what gives us pain is evil. But for such a principle to be moral it must be viewed in social terms. What is right maximises everyone’s pleasure, what is wrong causes an overall increase in pain and suffering. When confronted with difficult decisions, we must weigh up the net pleasure against the net pain.

This brings us to the main difficulty of Utilitarianism. How is it possible to measure pleasure, either on the individual or the collective scale? Bentham tackled this problem in some detail, coming up with his ‘felicific calculus’ for the precise measurement of pleasure. In his analysis he listed seven different dimensions of pleasure, including its duration and the number of individuals affected by it. He also listed fourteen different types of simple pleasures, ranging through those resulting from power, wealth, skill, good name, and, last but not least, malevolence. Likewise he named a dozen ‘simple pains’, ranging from disappointment to desire (a category that would seem to render most of us masochists). But the plain fact is that pleasure, whether solitary or social, remains beyond precise quantification. And this remains so, even now that we can investigate it at the biological level. There is no fixed scale by which intensity of stimulus can be universally related to consequent enjoyment. An Indian fakir may enjoy a curry, or a bed of nails, which a Dane finds intolerable.

Bentham worked closely with James Mill and took a keen interest in his son John Stuart. Soon both would come to see John Stuart

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J.S. Mill: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

J.S. Mill: Philosophy in an Hour

Contents

Introduction