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Michael Quinn. Bentham
Table of Contents
Guide
Pages
Classic Thinkers series
Bentham
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
A Word on Sources
1 Life and Logic: What Matters, and Why?
§ 1. Life and Work
§ 2. Logic and Language
Conclusion
Notes
2 The Principle of Utility: Raising the Fabric of Felicity by the Hands of Reason and Law
§ 1. Psychology
§ 2. Morality
§ 3. Competing Principles
§ 4. Measuring Pleasures and Pains
Conclusion
Notes
3 Direct Legislation: Bentham and Penal Law
§ 1. Law and Direct Legislation
§ 2. Ends of Punishment
§ 3. What to Punish, and What not to Punish
§ 4. How Much to Punish
§ 5. How to Punish: Properties Desirable in Punishments
Conclusion
Notes
4 Indirect Legislation
§ 1. Acting on Will
§ 2. Acting on Power
§ 3. Acting on Knowledge
§ 4. Indirect Legislation, Behavioural Economics and Libertarian Paternalism
§ 5. The Moral and Religious Sanctions
§ 6. Fooling the Public?
Conclusion
Notes
5 Civil Law and Political Economy
§ 1. Subordinate Ends of Legislation
Subordinate Ends as Universal Human Interests. Subsistence
Security
Abundance
Equality
§ 2. Political Economy
Departures from Smithian Orthodoxy. 1. Defence of a Maximum
2. Paper Money
Conclusion: Smith and Bentham – the Politics of Political Economy
Notes
6 Principals, Agents and Institutional Design (I): Panoptic Architecture and Management
§ 1. The Inspection–Architecture Principle
§ 2. Complementing Architecture: ‘Book-keeping’, Contract-Management and Public Scrutiny
Acting on Knowledge and Power
Acting on Will
§ 3. Foucault, Panopticism and Governmentality
Conclusion
Notes
7 Principals, Agents and Institutional Design (II): The Prevention of Misrule
§ 1. Early Indifference
§ 2. 1789 and After
§ 3. Bentham’s Journey to Political Radicalism
§ 4. Bentham’s Democratic Polity
Supreme Constitutive and the Public Opinion Tribunal
Supreme Operative: Legislature, Administrative and Judicatory
Conclusion: Two Issues
Notes
8 International Law, the World Next Door
§ 1. International ‘Law’
§ 2. Bentham on Colonies
Notes
9 Jeremy Bentham: Why Bother?
How should we be governed?3
Climate Change
Notes
References. Manuscript Sources
Print Sources
Index
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Michael Quinn
Over the years, many Bentham scholars have been generous with their time and energy in discussion, and in reading and commenting on arguments, and I can only hope that I have been equally obliging. Singling out individuals is always invidious, but I would like to express particular thanks to Jean-Pierre Cléro, Doug Long, Stephen Engelmann, David Lieberman and Peter Niesen. Xiaobo Zhai deserves special thanks for asking too many questions to which I had no convincing answers, and obliging me to think anew. The public policy focus of the book has been present since the beginning, but developed considerably in exhaustive discussions with Malik Bozzo-Rey and Angela Marciniak in 2019. I am very grateful to both, and I hope they are not too disappointed with the result.
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The moment language, a construction of the human mind for the formation, recording and transmission of thought, evolved beyond declaration of desire or aversion towards particular real objects, it necessarily ascribed existence to things that had none. It was impossible for all but the most basic language to mirror the world, while to demand that it should was to demand the reduction of human capacity to communicate to the level of animals unable to form abstract concepts. In short, Bentham asserted that all language that deployed the names of anything other than really existing entities is figurative, or metaphorical (UC cii. 466 (1843: viii. 331)). The propositions it contains are fictitious; that is, they are strictly speaking falsehoods, asserting the existence of things that possess no independent existence.
Bentham was less clear than might be wished in delineating the category of real entities, but generally he regarded two sorts of things as real entities, namely particular physical substances or bodies on one hand, and certain psychical entities (that is sensations, impressions and ideas) on the other (1983c: 271n; 2016b: 424; UC ci. 341 (1843: viii. 262); UC ci. 347 (1843: viii. 267); UC ci. 417). All knowledge of external reality came through the mediation of sensory experience and reflection on it. Encounters with physical real entities deposited impressions via our sense organs, while the images or ideas created by those impressions could be recalled at leisure. Since all experience of the world came through our senses, the psychical entities, sensations, impressions and ideas were the direct objects of that experience, so that the existence of the external world was, properly speaking, inferential (1997: 180 (UC cii. 15); 1983c: 271n): we conclude that the wall before us exists because we make highly plausible inferences from the sensory data delivered by sight and touch.
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