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Updated: June 15, 2025
My commission is to regain possession of a paper which was stolen either from the person of Morris Barnes or from amongst his effects, on that night." Wrayson looked up eagerly. "The motive at last!" he exclaimed. "What was the nature of this paper, sir?" Mr. Bentham's eyebrows were slowly raised. "That," he said, "we need not enter into for the moment.
And to say that mankind OUGHT to act so as to produce their greatest happiness, is to say that the greatest happiness is the greatest happiness and this is all! Does Mr Bentham's principle tend to make any man wish for anything for which he would not have wished, or do anything which he would not have done, if the principle had never been heard of? If not, it is an utterly useless principle.
They were due partly to his personal character, and partly to the intellectual and special atmosphere in which he was brought up. But it is more important to recognise the immense real value of his doctrine. Briefly, I should say, that there is hardly an argument in Bentham's voluminous writings which is not to the purpose so far as it goes.
MS. in University College, London, quoted by Halévy, La Jeunesse de Bentham, pp. 289-290. Bentham's standard of 'pleasure and pain' constituted in many ways an important advance upon 'natural right. It was in the first place founded upon a universally accepted fact; all men obviously do feel both pleasure and pain. That fact was to a certain extent measurable.
He is content to take for granted as an ultimate fact that the self-interest principle in the long run coincides with the greatest 'happiness' principle, and leaves the problem to his successors. There we shall meet it again. Finally, Bentham's view of religion requires a word.
To Bentham's general view of the construction of a body of law I was not altogether a stranger, having read with attention that admirable compendium, my father's article on Jurisprudence: but I had read it with little profit, and scarcely any interest, no doubt from its extremely general and abstract character, and also because it concerned the form more than the substance of the corpus juris, the logic rather than the ethics of law.
It is the economic equivalent of the 'utility' of Bentham's 'felicific calculus. It means the 'lot of pleasure' which causes a thing to be desirable. If we could tell how many units of utility it contained we could infer the rate of exchange for other things.
He had devoted them to a task which was necessary to fill a gap in the Utilitarian scheme. Hitherto the school had assumed, rather than attempted to establish, a philosophical basis of its teaching. Bentham's fragmentary writings about the Chrestomathic school supplied all that could by courtesy be called a philosophy. Mill, however, had been from the first interested in philosophical questions.
Mill himself has pointed out in his analysis of Bentham's character, that its author was almost entirely wanting in sympathy and imagination. A very large proportion of the springs of human action were unknown or incomprehensible to him.
It must be admitted, too, that Bentham's theory represents a vigorous embodiment and unflinching application of doctrines which since his time have spread and gained more general authority. Mill says that granting one assumption, the Constitutional Code is 'admirable. That assumption is that it is for the good of mankind to be under the absolute authority of a majority.
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