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Updated: April 30, 2025
The 'law, according to Bentham, is a rule enforced by a 'sanction. The imposer of the rule in the phrase which Hobbes had made famous is the 'sovereign. Hobbes was a favourite author, indeed, of the later Utilitarians, though Bentham does not appear to have studied him. The relation is one of natural affinity.
Not only did Whigs and Tories agree in condemning him, but the Utilitarians hated and despised him, and his old friends, Burnett and Hunt, were alienated from him, and reviled by him. His actual followers were a small and insignificant remnant. Yet Cobbett, like Owen, represented in a crude fashion blind instincts of no small importance in the coming years.
Yet intelligent Tories were being driven to find some reasons for their creed, which the Utilitarians might have considered more carefully. A famous man of letters represents certain tendencies more clearly than the average politician. He was attacked by Mill himself, and savagely denounced by Byron and Hazlitt.
Bloom field, appearing to renew her youth; or, Eve, with her sweet simplicity, and highly cultivated mind and improved tastes, seemed like a highly-polished mirror, to throw back the flashes of thought and memory, that so constantly gleamed before both; it was all lost on these thoroughly matter-of-fact utilitarians. Mr.
Utilitarians are quite aware that there are other desirable possessions and qualities besides virtue, and are perfectly willing to allow to all of them their full worth. They are also aware that a right action does not necessarily indicate a virtuous character, and that actions which are blameable often proceed from qualities entitled to praise.
They were systematically reticent as to their religious views: they left to popular orators the public advocacy of their favourite political measures; and the credit of finally passing such of those measures as were adopted fell chiefly to the hands of the great political leaders. The Utilitarians are ignored in the orthodox Whig legend.
I have given some details as to Stewart's suffering under an English proselyte of Kant in my Studies of a Biographer. Jeremy Bentham, the patriarch of the English Utilitarians, sprang from the class imbued most thoroughly with the typical English prejudices.
The fact is that you have predetermined that scientific research is a better thing than such physical pleasure, and then you bring out your calculation of pleasure so as to agree with that foregone conclusion. And that is what the Utilitarians always do. Being ordinary decent people they accept the same values as the rest of the world, and on the same grounds as the rest of the world.
It shows also that the analogy between the positive and the moral law is treacherous. The exclusion of motive justifiable in law may take all meaning out of morality. The Utilitarians, as we shall see, were too much disposed to overlook the difference, and attempt to apply purely legal doctrine in the totally uncongenial sphere of ethical speculation.
In questions of foreign policy, of law reform, of political economy, and of religious tests, the Utilitarians thus saw the gradual approximation to their most characteristic views on the part of the Whigs, and a strong infiltration of the same views among the less obstructive Tories.
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