June 6 marks major life events of two eminent British philosophers, Jeremy Bentham’s death* (1832) and Isaiah Berlin’s birth (1909).
Bentham was known as a “philosophical radical” and a major influence on the British utilitarian tradition. He authored numerous books, including Defence of Usury (1787) and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Bentham started out advocating for laissez faire, became obsessed with his own specially designed prison design, the Panopticon, and argued for feminism and animal rights in public but kept his defense of homosexual rights private, to be published long after his death. His treatise on ethics, Deontology: Or, the Science of Morality, in Which the Harmony and Co-incidence of Duty and Self-Interest, Virtue and Felicity, Prudence and Benevolence, Are Explained and Exemplified, was published from his manuscripts two years after his death.
Berlin was best known for several dozen brilliant essays, including the famous, much-quoted “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (a study of Leo Tolstoy) and “Two Concepts of Liberty.”
* Pictured is his remains as housed in a special “closet” in the London Academy. Bentham specified this in his will, and he called this manner of posthumous presentation an “auto-icon.”
1 reply on “Two Philosophers, Many Concepts”
The image on the left is most of Bentham’s remains, but the head is wax. He wanted his preserved head to be part of the display, but the preservation process did not work very well. I don’t think that those of delicate dispositions should look at images of the result.
Bentham’s utilitarianism, like so much thinking about morality, presumes that personal well-being does not merely correspond to a quantity, but that some one of the quantifications is commensurable across persons. That seemingly simple presumption is founded upon multiple assumptions. Some of those assumptions would merely be unlikely; at least one of them has been empirically falsified by evidence available to virtually everyone.