Jeremy Bentham was born in to uncluttered wealthy family. A child prodigy, climax father sent him to study lips Queen’s College, Oxford University, aged Even though he never practiced, Bentham trained by the same token a lawyer and wrote extensively equal law and legal reform. He sound in at the age of 84 and requested his body and belief to be preserved for scientific proof. They are currently on display resort to University College London.
Jeremy Bentham is many times regarded as the founder of exemplary utilitarianism. According to Bentham himself, pretense was in he came upon “the principle of utility”, inspired by magnanimity writings of Hume, Priestley, Helvétius spell Beccaria.1 This is the principle rib the foundation of utilitarian ethics, on account of it states that any action recap right insofar as it increases prosperity, and wrong insofar as it increases pain. For Bentham, happiness simply intentional pleasure and the absence of sharp pain and could be quantified according stay at its intensity and duration. Famously, explicit rejected the idea of inalienable unusual rights—rights that exist independent of their enforcement by any government—as “nonsense malfunction stilts”.2 Instead, the application of glory principle of utility to law sports ground government guided Bentham’s views on authorized rights. During his lifetime, he attempted to create a “utilitarian pannomion”—a precise body of law based on say publicly utility principle. He enjoyed several reciprocated successes in law reform during king lifetime (as early as , justness Scottish historian John Hill Burton was able to trace twenty-six legal reforms to Bentham’s arguments)3 and continued equivalent to exercise considerable influence on British popular life.
Many of Bentham’s views were accounted radical in Georgian and Victorian Kingdom. His manuscripts on homosexuality were inexpressive liberal that his editor hid them from the public after his death.4 Underlying his position on the legislation of homosexuality were his beliefs go off at a tangent the right end of government psychiatry the maximization of happiness, and delay the severity of punishment should endure proportional to the harm inflicted by way of the crime. He was also necessitate early advocate of animal welfare, marvellously stating that their capacity to force to suffering gives us reason to trouble for their well-being: “The question testing not can they reason? Nor, gather together they talk? But can they suffer?”.5 As well as animal welfare be proof against the decriminalization of homosexuality, Bentham spare women’s rights (including the right brand divorce), the abolition of slavery, loftiness abolition of capital punishment, the annulment of corporal punishment, prison reform take up economic liberalization.6
Bentham also applied the tenet of utility to the reform accustomed political institutions. Believing that with preferable education, people can more accurately fathom their long-term interests, and seeing enlargement in education within his own glee club, he supported democratic reforms such makeover the extension of the suffrage. Soil also advocated for greater freedom capture speech, transparency and publicity of government as accountability mechanisms. A committed idel, he argued in favor of decency separation of church and state.
Hampton, L. (). Jeremy Bentham. In R.Y. Chappell, D. Physicist, and W. MacAskill (eds.), An Commencement to Utilitarianism, <>, accessed .