Jeremy Bentham

Just to kind of reiterate, I'm wearing this Fitbit thing, you know.

So let's, may I jump in? So let's situate ourselves in the literature again on this, okay? I'm going to quickly cite Jeremy Bentham, okay?

That old crusty white man.

His mummified body can be found in the University College of London.

Yeah, like a book to the library.

Yeah.

So Bentham had the prison panopticon, you know, where he assisted in, I don't know if he assisted in the actual architecture, you know, the design.

of this idea but the the concept of the the panopticon in a prison um i believe came from bentham's thinking and work and that and that was this idea of a subject being observable at all times from a central location and not having knowledge of being observed okay So that's how the prison panopticon design came to be where you could have a guard in a tower centralized in the middle of the prison and the actual design of the prison is round, you know, like a sphere.

He says it's in fact a veritable Eden of human rights.

The things that reign exclusively are freedom, equality, property, and Bentham.

Freedom because only the free wills of the buyers and sellers of a commodity, for example, labor power, determine how these figures act.

Okay, contractual freedom, treat each other as equals as commodity owners.

Okay.

Everybody owns their own shit.

So freedom, equality, property, and Bentham, because everyone cares only about themselves.

Everybody acts just like the bourgeois economists would have it, out of self-interest and for personal gain.

That is saying that rehabilitation is possible, but not having a plausible account of how you rehabilitate it.

And the problem with every single account of rehabilitation from Plato through Thomas More through Bentham to the present is nothing works.

And the nothing works, that's a title of a famous book by James Q. Wilson, the person who came up with broken windows policing.

is if nothing works, then okay, rehabilitation's out, deterrence may be still in, and leaves obviously retributive theories on the ground.

I've personally never heard of him.

But his name is Jeremy Bentham.

And he left that school, that teaching hospital school there, multi-millions of dollars for their... expansion and for their future, only under these conditions, only if he could sit on the board of directors as long as the school, the teaching hospital school lasted.

That was in his will.

It would, however, be easy to show that whatever steadiness or consistency these moral beliefs have attained has been mainly due to the tacit influence of a standard not recognized.

Although the non-existence of an acknowledged first principle has made ethics not so much a guide as a consecration of men's actual sentiments, still, as men's sentiments, both of favor and of aversion, are greatly influenced by what they suppose to be the effects of things upon their happiness, the principle of utility, or, as Bentham latterly called it, the greatest happiness principle, has had a large share in forming the moral doctrines even of those who most scornfully reject its authority.

Nor is there any school of thought which refuses to admit that the influence of actions on happiness is a most material and even predominant consideration in many of the details of morals, however unwilling to acknowledge it as the fundamental principle of morality and the source of moral obligation.

I might go much further, and say that, to all those a priori moralists who deem it necessary to argue at all, utilitarian arguments are indispensable.

him.

Mr. Davies, by an oversight too common not to be quite venial, has in this case confounded the very different ideas of motive and intention.

There is no point which utilitarian thinkers, and Bentham, pre-eminently, have taken more pains to illustrate than this.

The morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention, that is, upon what the agent wills to do, but the motive, that is, the feeling which makes him will so to do, if it makes no difference in the act, makes none in the morality, though it makes a great difference in our moral estimation of the agent, especially if it indicates a good or a bad

It makes it hard for me to know exactly how seriously to take her specific invocations of specific people.

She has this long diatribe against utilitarianism and Bentham.

She comes to the

EAs at the end.