Jeremy Bentham on Organised Religion

Bentham’s attack on organised religion was principally an attack on the ‘Church-of-Englandist’ ruling few, and, in particular, the ecclesiastical establishment. This article will examine Bentham’s argument that the ecclesiastical establishment fostered and exploited religious belief, as well as the hopes and fears associated with popular religiosity, in the pursuit of ‘sinister interest’. Bentham recognised a senior clergy that extorted enormous sums of money from the population, instituted a fraudulent education system that subjugated the children committed to its charge, and took advantage of the corrupt alliance of Church and state in order to advance and protect its worldly power and riches. This article will discuss Bentham’s proposals to sweep away the mischiefs done by organised religion, both to morality and to good government, and will argue that Bentham’s hostility towards the ecclesiastical establishment did not prevent him from recommending that priests be stripped of their power, place and exorbitant wealth as gradually and as painlessly as possible. It will also explain why Bentham thought that liberating religious belief from the coercive control of a self-serving class of men would be more conducive to personal happiness than prohibiting religion altogether.

Bentham: Punishment and the Utilitarian Use of Persons as Means

One of the main barriers against a Utilitarian justification of punishment is a widespread criticism that if punishment is evil justified by the good it can achieve, then the state could use persons as a means to an end in pursuing this good. This opens the door, at a theoretical level, for the potential punishment of innocents, disproportionate punishment and failure to respect persons as rational and responsible agents. Further, critics argue that any considerations of security or utility guard against the perceived risks contingently, without intrinsic commitment to respecting persons as ends in themselves. This article addresses the criticism fundamentally by returning to Bentham’s original writings and demonstrating that a principle of equality is embedded in the greatest happiness as an end of government. The principle of equality can theoretically be developed using the tools of Bentham’s political theory, including his commitments to democracy, to the elimination of pain and to the differentiation between real and fictitious entities, to ensure that a Utilitarian theory of punishment, as part of its premise, would be constrained from using persons as mere means. Further, building on the equality of happiness, the article proposes an individualistic justification of punishment that responds to the traditional accusations of innocents’ punishment and excessive punishment, and ensures the respect of persons as rational and responsible agents.

Bentham’s Theory of Evidence: Setting a Context

Bentham’s massive writings on evidence, procedure and judicial organisation (EPJ) survive in over 13,000 pages of manuscript in addition to 15–20 published works, for some of which full manuscripts no longer survive. These are all quite closely linked. In order to start to understand the Rationale of Judicial Evidence it is useful to consider it in three broad contexts: Bentham’s other works in addition to those on EPJ, especially those works on the pannomion and the constitutional writings; attempts to construct a ‘theory of (judicial) evidence’ in the Anglo-American tradition of common law, especially those of J. B. Thayer and J. H. Wigmore; and recent efforts at UCL and elsewhere to develop evidence as a distinct multi-disciplinary field.

Speech, truth and liberty: Bentham to John Stuart Mill

Bentham’s Utilitarianism transforms earlier free speech doctrine in the service of the pursuit of truth and the control of government, preserving the distinction between statements of opinion and of fact and awarding the latter a lesser degree of protection. The work of James Mill and the early writings of John Stuart Mill retain this distinction, but their accounts are weighed down by the problems of a direct Utilitarian approach, in their consequentialist balancing of different values against each other, and in their dependence on a majoritarian epistemology and their commitment to a naive progressive optimism. Mill goes on in On Liberty to address and resolve these problems on the basis of a new justification for free speech as free deliberative thought. I argue that, contrary to most interpretations, his new justification leaves untouched the basic distinction between absolutely protected expressions of opinion and only functionally and contingently protected assertions of fact, leaving room for restrictions on factual statements, especially when untrue.

Hedonism Before Bentham

The hedonistic theories of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are both widely known. Hedonism before Bentham, however, is much less known and, hitherto, no systematic presentation of hedonism’s early history has been written. In this paper I seek to fill this gap in the literature by providing an overview of hedonism in early Indian and ancient Greek thought (Sections 1-4), in Roman and Medieval thought (Section 5), and from the Renaissance until the Enlightenment (Section 6).

José del Valle: a Benthamite in Central America

This paper examines the relationship between Jeremy Bentham and José Cecilio del Valle, one of the most important leaders of Central America’s independence process. Since this relationship has received little attention from those studying the links between Bentham and Spanish American politicians, with the exception of Miriam Williford 1 , we consider that is very important to explore the influence of the utilitarian philosophy in Central America. With this purpose in mind, we will examine the ideas expressed in some of Valle´s writings and government projects throughout his political career dated between 1810 and 1834 in Guatemala.

An ‘Opportunistic Interpretation’ of Bentham’s Panopticon writings

In line with Bentham, who states that no one deserves punishment, not even the offender, this article argues for the development goal of criminal justice systems genuinely to achieve ‘justice’ for the greatest good of society and the offender. To this end, this article offers an ‘opportunistic interpretation’ of Bentham’s Panopticon writings.