Jeremy Bentham was born in London in 1748,
son of a prosperous lawyer.
He was such a bright child that he went to Oxford University at the age of 12,
where he studied law then became an active publicist and political radical.
His pamphlet, "A Fragment on Government," which he wrote in 1776,
he formulated the principle for government and that it
should aim for the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Number happiness, just to get it right,
he meant the predominance of pleasure over pain,
both physical and spiritual.
However, in measuring pleasure and pain,
every single person had to be considered equal.
There has been no favoring of the interests of the wealthy,
the powerful or the well-endowed.
The Later Work.
An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation written in 1789,
he encapsulated this idea into a concept of utility and he drafted a set of
measures for governments to consider in
balancing pleasure and pain when drafting legislation.
For him, if a law did no good, it was no good.
Perhaps surprisingly, he was against physical punishment and the death penalty.
You would have thought that the execution of a criminal to
protect the lives of others and the property of others,
and therefore to allow society to derive pleasure from these,
would have been perfectly acceptable, but for Bentham,
that pain wasn't suffered by one person but suffered spiritually by
all society and any such punishment
might call forth more evil than it was trying to prevent.
On the other hand, he was opposed to any concept of universal rights.
He argued that the right of an individual had to be measured against the needs,
the pleasure of the rest of society.
Many of Bentham's ideas were taken up in
the work of an infinitely more and well-known political philosopher,
John Stuart Mill, but Bentham deserves to be remembered if only for one other thing.
He believed that after death,
one should preserve the body as a sort of auto-icon so that you
could continue to enjoy the company of family and friends after your demise.
He arranged to have his own body stripped down to
a skeleton and to have his head preserved intact.
His skeleton was padded out in hay,
clothed and placed surmounted by his head in a special box.
It's still there at University College London today.
Unfortunately, the preservation of the head didn't go
entirely to plan so it's been replaced by a wax replica and the real head,
for a time, was placed in a hat box underneath his chair.
Since that proved too much temptation for young undergraduates,
it's since been taken away and locked up safely elsewhere.
Interestingly, on the 150th anniversary of University College London,
he actually attended the celebratory meeting.
He was registered in the minutes of having been present but not voting.