Benthamite Utilitarianism
Benthamite Utilitarianism
| Right | Section | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| Freedom of Association | Philosophical Origins | Bentham approached freedom of association as he did free expression: as a means of political advocacy and dissent. In Chapter IV Section 24 of A Fragment on Government, he advocates for “the liberty of public association; or the security with which malecontents may communicate their sentiments, concert their plans, and practise every mode of opposition short of actual revolt, before the executive power can be legally justified in disturbing them.”
References: A Fragment on Government: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_fragment_on_government/Chapter_4 |
| Freedom of Expression | Philosophical Origins | To Bentham, the purpose of free expression, especially press, is to identify and censure government abuses, which Bentham believed would have more positive than negative consequences. Like other liberties in Bentham’s thought, it is an instrumental right, not an intrinsic right (Niesen 2019, 4). He worried that a chilling effect would prevent the press from serving its purpose, and he opposed censoring of “bad sentiments” (something Blackstone supported) because he did not trust society’s ability to identify them. Bentham not only advocated for the protection of true statements, but of false ones, provided they were not “‘groundless’ and made with ‘wilful mendacity, accompanied with the consciousness of its falsity, or else with culpable rashness” (Niesen 5). A “wilful mendacity” standard resembles the “actual malice” standard of contemporary American jurisprudence on libel of a public figure.
References: Niesen, P. ‘Speech, truth and liberty: Bentham to John Stuart Mill.’ Journal of Bentham Studies, 2019, 18(1), pp. 1–19. DOI: https://doi. org/10.14324/111.2045-757X.046. |
| Freedom of the Press | Philosophical Origins | Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English philosopher whose work would prove foundational to the development of modern liberalism, as both a moral and a political vision. Bentham’s unique brand of liberalism is most strongly associated with his guiding principle of utilitarianism: that what is best is what brings the most utility to the greatest number of people. Despite what might today be recognized as problematic implications of an absolute adherence to this principle, Bentham’s utilitarianism made him a strong advocate of social and political freedoms, under the reasoning that these freedoms are a net good to society.
Bentham defines his utilitarian philosophy in his 1781 tract An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. By his central concept of utility, he means “that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing), or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered” (Bentham 1781, 14-15). Notably, he insists that utility can only accrue to the individual: “The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. … The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting, as it were, its members. The interest of the community then is, what is it? —the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it” (Bentham 1781, 15). Therefore, a good government is one that acts in the ultimate interests of its individual constituents, and not for some vague notion of the good of the community or the state. Presaging his protege John Stuart Mill, Bentham seeks to defend press freedom through the lens of his utilitarian ideal. Bentham identifies an unfettered press as the essential guarantor against what he terms misrule, by ensuring protection against government oppression and the accountability of leaders to the people they represent. This is perhaps best seen in his commentary on the suppression of liberal movements in Spain, and by extension in his native England as well. Referring to a report of a Madrid newspaper editor being prosecuted for his work, Bentham declares that “whatsoever evil can ever result from this liberty [of the press], is everywhere, and at all times, greatly outweighed by the good” (Bentham 1820). This is because the liberty of the press “operates as a check upon the conduct of the ruling few; and in that character constitutes a controlling power, indispensably necessary to the maintenance of good government” (Bentham 1820). To Bentham, the benefits of good government are “plainly infinite” (Bentham 1820). Bentham does not further elaborate on these benefits in his letter on the situation in Spain, but elsewhere in his work he consistently identifies good governance with participatory democracy, with the ability of the people to impact their government, and consequently with freedom in the broadest sense. For Bentham, “in the late stages of his long career nothing was more important to ‘good politics’ than the influence of public opinion on those with political power” (Cutler 1999, 322). He even wrote of an (allegorical) Public Opinion Tribunal that would issue “judgments” of politicians, to ensure that politics takes the people’s unfiltered and all-inclusive sentiments into account: “No one can know her interests better than herself. Thus, if a utilitarian public policy is to emerge from an aggregation of those interests, the constitution should provide the institutions that permit all persons to communicate their interests to government equally” (Cutler 1999, 324). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bentham places such high value on government by and for the people, that he insists that the government has a duty to be responsive to the people even when public opinion is misguided. He was not naïve; to him, “[self-determination] does not require certainty in [the people’s] judgments of prospective utility … The institutions of government, therefore, ought to allow the public to react to what their government is doing, constantly steering closer and closer to providing for their interests” (Cutler 1999, 324). When it comes to the purported harms of a free press, Bentham points out that prosecutions for criticizing the government are traditionally justified as a response to an insult to the honor of the state or its functionaries, and that this is regarded as a threat to the integrity of the state (Bentham 1820). Indeed, rulers have historically tended to punish defamation of the government or its representatives more harshly than defamation of private individuals, and to treat aspersions cast on the government as a whole or on a higher ranked official as more serious than those cast on a lower ranked official. Bentham considers this nonsensical: he argues that the harms to a discrete number of high-profile individuals who may find themselves maligned are far eclipsed by the much greater benefits that a free press brings to a much wider range of people. He even notes that public figures who find themselves unfairly targeted by the press have a built-in remedy commensurate with the rank of their position, since their status affords them distinct advantages in rebutting any allegations, which a private person does not have (Bentham 1820). Moreover, far from handicapping the function of the state by impugning its reputation, a free press actually does the opposite. For a real world illustration of his reasoning, Bentham points to the United States, where the freedom of journalists to speak against the government is not only constitutionally protected but considered inalienable from public life, but which he nevertheless considers better governed than even his own country; he even calls the young nation the only country that truly has good governance. Thus, Bentham elucidates a utilitarian account of freedom of the press: the cumulative benefit to individuals is far greater than the cumulative harm. Put another way, in an ideal government where one can feel assured that the laws are just, a good citizen’s aim should be “to obey punctually; to censure freely” (Schofield 2019, 43). Bentham does recognize narrow circumstances where the press can be censured for defamation, but he holds that this punishment should be applied in the reverse of how it has typically been: defamation of a private person should be treated as more severe than defamation of a state official. In fact, Bentham lays out a standard of proof for defamation of a public figure that is remarkably similar to the actual malice standard laid out by the US Supreme Court more than a century later: namely, the statement in question must be not just untrue but “the result of willful mendacity, accompanied with the consciousness of its falsity, or else with culpable rashness” (Schofield 2019, 45). Presumably, he would likewise support the modern jurisprudence that mere negligence of the falsity of a statement is sufficient proof in the case of a non-public figure. Benthamite utilitarianism, it must be said, does not necessarily anticipate all the problems with today’s mass media and its role in guiding the reins of government. For one thing, Bentham does not consider that the press does not just report public opinion but shapes it (often quite intentionally); he also does not ask how public policy should incorporate the views of experts when they conflict with the public mood, or how it should protect the right of minority views to also be heard and compete for influence. Nonetheless, Bentham’s work offers a straightforward and persuasive account of the value of a press free from state interference, giving a highly compelling defense of this fundamental human right at a time of conservative retrenchment and reaction throughout Europe. References: Bentham, Jeremy. 1781. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Kitchener, Ontario, Canada: Batoche Books Limited, 2000. Bentham, Jeremy. October 7, 1820. “To the Spanish People: Letter I.” Classical Utilitarianism Website, University of Texas, September 24, 2003, https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/bentham/bsp/bsp.l01.html Cutler, Fred. “Jeremy Bentham and the Public Opinion Tribunal.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 63, no. 3 (1999): 321-346, https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/63/3/321/1902496?redirectedFrom=fulltext#no-access-message Schofield, Philip. “Jeremy Bentham on Freedom of the Press, Public Opinion, and Good Government.” Scandinavica, 58, no. 2 (2019): 39-57, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10105424/1/13223-jeremy-bentham-on-freedom-of-the-press-public-opinion-and-good-government.pdf |
| Freedom of Religion | Philosophical Origins | Bentham’s utilitarianism was often fervently anti-religious; as Jake E. Crimmins writes, “ always the aim in view was to test the institutions, practices, rituals, doctrines, and beliefs of religion against the standard of utility. The results of this test were invariably negative and stand as a compelling testimony to Bentham's unmitigated atheism and to his desire to sweep away all religion in order to construct society anew according to the principles of his secular utilitarianism” (1986, 96). Bentham’s writings support greater religious freedom. For example, he argued in favor of a law tolerating Unitarianism, against blasphemy laws and laws criminalizing religious dissent, and against citizens being forced to take religious oaths (96). He argued that the state should recuse itself from all matters of religion, arguing unambiguously for both the separation of church and state and universal free exercise. In his Constitutional Code, Bentham writes that in his ideal state, the following would be true:
“For the business of religion, there is no department: there is no Minister. Of no opinion on the subject of religion, does this Constitution take any cognizance. It allows not of reward in any shape for the professing or advocating of any particular opinion on the subject of religion. It allows not of punishment in any shape for the professing or advocating of any particular opinion on the subject of religion. It leaves to each individual, after hearing any such arguments as he chooses to hear, to decide for himself on each occasion, what opinion has the truth on its side” (Bowring). References: Bowing: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bentham-the-works-of-jeremy-bentham-vol-9-constitutional-code Crimmins, James E. “Bentham on Religion: Atheism and the Secular Society.” Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 1 (1986): 95–110. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709597. |
| Voting Rights and Suffrage | Philosophical Origins | Often called the father of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham posited the foundational form of the philosophy, which had a focus on the quantity of pleasures that would result from an action. In practice, this would qualify an act as “ethical” if it brought pleasure to a relatively large number of people. Individuals obtain pleasure in the context of suffrage when they are able to freely exercise their right to vote, and even more so when their favored candidate wins. Theoretically, the more people that are able to cast a vote, the more people can access the pleasures associated with suffrage. Following this logic, a Utilitarian such as Bentham would be expected to support widespread voting rights and robust legal protections for them. Speaking on the right of the public to criticize government officials, Bentham writes:
Every man is at liberty to express as well by visible as by audible signs, and in any way and to any extent to make public, whatsoever in his judgment it will be contributory to the greatest happiness of the greatest number to be informed of: and this although disapprobation be thereby expressed towards persons in authority, or any of them, whether on account of the general tenor of their conduct, or on account of their conduct on this or that occasion in particular (Bentham 1838, p.584). Government accountability and public scrutiny are recurring themes in Bentham’s writing. In discussing the role of citizens, he writes: “Operating thus as judges, the members of this same community may, in their aggregate capacity, be considered as constituting a sort of judicatory or tribunal” (Ibid., p.561). Voting rights make this public tribunal effective by giving citizens the power to make officials responsive to their needs. Bentham elaborates on the makeup of this electorate in saying: “Taken in its utmost latitude, this tribunal would include all of them without exception. But, of no question, on any occasion, can any such multitude, in such their capacity, by physical possibility, actually take cognizance. Those less than a certain age, and the infirm, for example, not to mention any other classes, cannot but be excepted” (Ibid., p.561). Bentham expresses no desire to restrict political participation to a certain class of citizens based on gender or race. Instead, he simply weighs the practical considerations of who can and cannot vote based on age and physical or mental capacity. Bentham’s writing seems to indicate his support for universal suffrage with some clarity. References: Bentham, Jeremy. 1838. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by John Bowring. Vol. 8. 11 vols. Edinburgh: William Tait. |