Jeremy Bentham

1748-1832 · English · Jurisprudence, Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Law

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.

A child prodigy sent to Oxford at twelve and called to the bar he never practiced, Jeremy Bentham took one look at English law and decided it was an instrument of plunder operated by lawyers for their own profit. In 1769 he found his life's purpose: to subject law and morals to a single rational standard. His lifelong enemy was the jurist William Blackstone, whose celebration of the common law Bentham spent decades demolishing, beginning with A Fragment on Government in 1776.

Topics Jeremy Bentham addresses

• the principle of utility
• the greatest happiness principle
• pleasure and pain as the two sovereign masters
• the felicific calculus
• psychological hedonism
• real and fictitious entities
• paraphrasis and phraseoplerosis
• nonsense upon stilts
• the critique of natural rights
• legal positivism
• law as it is versus law as it ought to be
• the expositor and the censor
• the four sanctions
• the sub-ends of utility
• subsistence, abundance, security, and equality
• the critique of the common law
• the critique of Blackstone
• the pannomion and codification
• securities against misrule
• sinister interest
• the theory of punishment
• the theory of reward
• the rationale of judicial evidence
• the Panopticon

Converse with Jeremy Bentham on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Jeremy Bentham's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.