Jeremy Bentham 1748 – 1832

Jeremy Bentham was an 18th and 19th-century English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer, the founder of modern utilitarian ethics. His 1789 work An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation set out the principle of utility as the foundation of morality and legislation, holding that the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He developed the felicific calculus, a method of calculating the moral value of an action by quantifying the pleasures and pains it produces. His proposals for prison reform, including the Panopticon, and his radical critique of the English legal system anticipated subsequent reform movements. His will requested that his preserved body be displayed at University College London, where the Auto-Icon remains on public view to this day.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was the founding figure of modern utilitarianism and one of the most influential philosophical reformers in modern history. The son of a London attorney, he trained at Oxford and Lincoln's Inn but never practiced law, devoting his life instead to the systematic critique of English legal and political institutions through the principle of utility.

Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed 1780, published 1789) is the foundational document of modern utilitarianism. The principle of utility — that an action is right insofar as it tends to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number — provides a single calculative standard for evaluating laws, institutions, and individual acts. Bentham's felicific calculus enumerates the dimensions along which pleasures and pains are to be measured: intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, extent.

Bentham was a tireless reformer. His proposals for prison reform — the panopticon — for codification of the law, for parliamentary reform, for the abolition of slavery, for animal welfare, and for the decriminalization of homosexuality were ahead of his age. His followers, the Philosophical Radicals, shaped nineteenth-century English political reform decisively. He left his body to be preserved as an Auto-Icon at University College London, where it remains. James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill carried the utilitarian tradition forward, with John Stuart's important refinements distinguishing higher from lower pleasures.