Jeremy Bentham Quotes on Justice
Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarian ethics, measured justice by a single standard, and the quotes gathered here present it. For Bentham the criterion of right and wrong is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and he applied it without regard for traditional boundaries, most famously to animals, asking not whether they can reason or talk but, decisively, whether they can suffer. Bentham was scornful of justice grounded in supposed natural rights, dismissing the idea, in a phrase marked here as attributed, as nonsense upon stilts. He also observed, ruefully, that the rarest of all human qualities is consistency, the very quality his felicific calculus demanded. Drawn from his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation and his other writings, these passages present justice as the impartial maximisation of happiness.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jeremy Bentham:
“It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”
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Attributed to Jeremy Bentham:
“The question is not, can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?”
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Attributed to Jeremy Bentham:
“Natural rights is simple nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts.”
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Attributed to Jeremy Bentham:
“The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”
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Attributed to Jeremy Bentham:
“Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty.”
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“[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.”
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation(1789; 1823) | Ch. 1: Of the Principle of Utility