 | CHAPTER VI BENTHAM'S DOCTRINE The English Utilitarians (Vol.1) |  |
Notes
Essay, bk, ii, ch. xxi, section 39 - section 44. The will, says Locke, is determined by the 'uneasiness of desire'. What moves desire? Happiness, and that alone. Happiness is pleasure, and misery pain. What produces pleasure we call good; and what produces paine we call evil. Locke, however, was not a consistent Utiliarian.
Works, ('Morals and Legislation'), i, 6-10. Mill quotes this passage in his essay on Bentham in the first volume of his Dissertations. This essay, excellent in itself, must be specially noticed as an exposition by an authoritarian disciple.
Ibid., ('Morals and Legislation') i, 14, etc; Ibid., vi, 260. In Ibid. ('Evidence') vii, 116 'humanity, and in 'Logical Arrangement', Ibid. ii, 290, 'sympathy' appears as a fifth sanction. Another modification is suggested in Ibid., i, 14n.
Here Bentham coincides with Horne Tooke, to whose 'discoveries' he refers in the Chrestomathia (Works, viii, 120, 185, 188).
Helvétius adds to this that the only real pains and pleasures are the physical, but Bentham does not follow him here. See Helvétius Œuvres (1781), ii, 121, etc.
Works, i, 205; and Dumont's Traités (1820), i, xxv, xxvi. The word 'springs of action' perhaps come from the marginal note to the above-mentioned passage of Locke (bk. ii, chap. xxvi, section 41, 42).
See 'Codification Proposal' (Works, iv, 540), where Bentham takes money as representing pleasure, and shows how the present value may be calculated like that of a sum put out to interest. The same assumption is often made by Political Economists in regard to 'utilities'.
It is not worth while to consider this at length; but I give the following conjectural account of the list as it appears in the Morals and Legislation above. In classifying pain or pleasure, Bentham is, I think, following the clue suggested by his 'sanctions'. He is realy classifying according to their causes or the way in which they are 'annexed'. Thus pleasure may or may not be dependent upon other persons, or if upon other persons, may be indirectly or directly caused by their pleasures or pains. Pleasures not caused by persons correspond to the 'physical sanction', and are those (1) of the 'senses', (2) of wealth, i.e., caused by the possession of things, and (3) of 'skill', i.e., caused by our ability to use things. Pleasures caused by persons indirectly correspond first to the 'popular or moral sanction,' and are pleasures (4) of 'amity', caused by the goodwill of individuals, and (5) of a 'good name', caused by the goodwill of people in general; secondly, to 'political sanction,' namely (6) pleasures of 'power'; and thirdly, to the 'religious sanction,' or (7) pleasures of 'piety'. All these are 'self-regarding pleasures.' The pleasures caused directly by the pleasures of others are those (8) of 'benevolence', and (9) of malevolence. We then have what is really a cross division of classes of 'deriviative' pleasures; these being due to (10) memory, (11) imagination, (12) expectation, (13) association. To each class of pleasures corresponds a class of pains, except that there are no pains corresponding to the pleasures of wealth or power. We have, however, a general class of pains of 'privation', which might include pairs of poverty or weakness: and to these are opposed (14) pleasures of 'relief', i.e., of the privation of pains. In the Table, as separately published, Bentham modified this by dividing pleasures of 'curiosity' for pleasures of 'skill', by suppressing pleasures of relief and pains of privation; and by adding, as a class of 'pains' without corresponding pleasures, pains (1) of labour, (2) of 'death, and bodily pains in general.' These changes seem to have been introduced in the course of writing his Introduction, where they are partly assumed. Another class is added to include all classes of 'self-regarding pleasures or pains.' He is trying to give a list of all 'synomyms' for various pains and pleasures, and has therefore to admit classes corresponding to general names which include other classes.
Works, i, 210, where he speaks of pleasures of the 'ball-rooms', the 'theatre',and the 'fine arts' as derivable from the 'simple and elementary' pleasures.
Here Bentham lays down the rule that punishment should rise with the strength of the temptation, a theory which leads to some curious casuistical problems. He does not fully discuss, and I cannot here consider, them. I will only note that it may conceivably be necessary to increase the severity of punishment, instead of removing the temptation or strengthening the preventive action. If so, the law becomes immoral in the sense of punishing more severly as the crime has more moral excuse. This was often true of the old criminal law, which punished offences cruelly because it had no effective system of police. Bentham would of course have agreed that the principle in this case was a bad one.
Bentham's nephew, George, who died when approaching his eighty-fourth birthday, devoted the last twenty-five years of his life with equal assiduity to his Genera Plantarum. See a curious anecdote of his persistence in the Dictionary of National Biography.
The theory, as Mill reminds us, had been very pointed anticipated by Helvétius. Bentham's practical experience, however, had forced it upon his attention.
Justice, p. 264; so Price, in his Observations on Liberty, lays it down that government is never to entrench upon private liberty, 'except so far as private liberty entrenches on the liberty of others.'
Hobbes, in the Leviathan (chap. xiii), has in the same way to argue for the de facto equality of men.
I remark by anticipation that this expression implies a reference to Mill's Ethology, of which I shall have to speak.
Works, 'Civil Code' (from Dumont) i, 302, 305; Ibid. ('Principles of Constitutional Code') ii, 271; Ibid. ('Constitutional Code') ix, 15-18.
See, e.g., i, 83, where sympathy seems to be taken as an ultimate pleasure, and ii, 133, where he says 'dream not that men will move their little finger to serve you unless their advantage in so doing be obvious to them.' See also the apologue of 'Walter Wise', who becomes Lord Mayor, and 'Timothy Thoughtless' who ends at Botany Bay (i, 118), giving the lowest kind of prudential morality. The manuscript of the Deontology, now in University College, London, seems to prove that Bentham was substantially the author, though the Mills seem to have suspected Bowring of adulterating the true doctrine. He appears to have been an honest if not very intelligent editor; though the rewriting, necessary in all Bentham's works, was damaging in this case; and he is probably responsible for some rhetorical amplification, especially in the later part.
| CHAPTER VI BENTHAM'S DOCTRINE The English Utilitarians (Vol.1) | |