Analysis of The Principles of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill

Jeremy Bentham was born in London in 1748. He went to Westminster and Oxford and in 1769 he was called to the Bar. In response to the enigma of the law and the mayhem associated with it, Bentham challenged the entire composition of the law and wished to exchange it with a perfectly rational system. Like other philosophers of the Enlightenment period, he took hold of the idea of amelioration through erudition, on the ascendency of rationality over superstition and of orderliness over disorder. In spite of living in the post-revolutionary era, his initial thought was that if there was enlightenment, the world would become more desirable. His goal was to create a world the way it ought to be instead of living in a world full of corruptness and bias. His main issue was with the act of law-making, after being let down with the condition of English law. He was also encouraged by the works of Helvetius and Beccaria, who argued that there must have been some kind of way to warrant the sufficiency of laws already put in place.

After an unsuccessful consultation with Catherine the Great, he was unable to exert his influence further amongst more influential individuals. After this, he understood that the law, the Church and the Parliament amongst other institutions would prove to be a barrier to his goals. He decided that to carry on with his aims, the ruling class would have to be controlled through a change in politics.

The dawning point for his entire project was his early comprehension for the significance of language. He deduced that in any areas of study, people utilize confounding language and make topics incomprehensible as well as incredibly subjective. There was no way, he thought, that there could be improvement without language that is more easy to perceive.

He explained that nouns consist of two beings. The first one can be directly perceived by the five senses, examples include pain and pleasure. The second one is a fictitious entity, which need further explanations to give them meaning. Examples of this could be duty, right or power. While the second type of nouns are imaginary, they still rely heavily on language and vice versa. Bentham argues that just because they do not exist within themselves does not mean they are pointless. To discern fictitious entities from those simply spewing nonsense, translation of these unreal entities to real entities at the same time is carried out, giving a basis for accepting or denying those existences unable of comprehension in this way. Bentham discovered paraphrasis, the only mode of exposition for phrases that had no similar characteristics with other expressions; for a term like this, the Aristotelian method of definition would not fit. To compare one fictitious entity with another to define it proved futile, so it was decided that elucidation was necessary in terms of the real parts. To do this, Bentham translates one sentence in which the fictitious entity exists into an identical one, but replaces the imaginary part with a real entity. This provided simple clarity to the sentence.

Bentham intended to combine the discovery of new principles with detailed attention to their practical uses. He compared the work of a natural scientist with his own work, even though the latter information was not gathered through the use of investigation. His faith in the necessity of understandable vocabulary was the foundation of his early optimism that reason once employed would be the vehicle of both accurate exposition of the law as it was and enlightened criticism of the law as it ought to be.

Bentham’s best known venture of explaining his new method was The Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He stated that “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standards of right and wrong, and on the other the chain of causes and effects are fastened to their throne.” He believes that the idea of what is has to be kept separate from the idea of what ought to be. Here, he makes two claims: a factual one and then a normative one. The former is that individuals are convinced what they seek is pleasure and the latter states that every action is deemed either right or wrong. The normative principle indicates what ought to happen, the conclusion or the goal in achieving said conclusion. On the other hand, the descriptive talks about the material and the barriers in place that keep the legislator in achieving the aim. The two aspects must be uniform; the chasing of pleasure by a person as a natural action should be reconcilable with the gaining of happiness of the community. The natural statement is a form of self indulgence, and it says that anything an individual does is related to their main goal of obtaining pleasure or pain. Using this approach, every human activity can be further simplified to being influenced by one of the two, hence making the scientific approach a usable method. For this, pleasure and pain would become the units of measurement, classification and the like.

Through the scientific approach, Bentham believed that one could offer quantitative data to make their ideas seem more clear. The belief in people as they are and society as it ought to be is the foundation of his scrutinization of the principles of law and how they can be utilized in everyday life. His plan was to use his findings to bring about change, and not simply shed light on the matter.

Looking at the relation between rulers and the ruled, we see that once a state is split up, each district is to agree upon a representative or multiple, making up their own sub-legislatures. Electors choose the representatives and they dismiss them; mistrust is built into the system and the power of the people is preserved. Bentham argues, to take away democratic control, there should be open government. He claims that one major way of subduing threatening power from government officials is through the use of the population. While people aren’t necessarily ruling, their opinions and their voices are still heard and they are very much a part of all legal actions being taken to some degree.

He also thinks that his suggested plan of action, would protect the people within a state from exploitation by powerful figures. In some ways, the entire constitutional system is made to stop influential people from misusing their authority using responsibility and accountability. Bentham says that the good of a community can only be maintained through a stratification of behaviours ranging from very acceptable to not acceptable, and this will enable people to distinguish what is allowed or disallowed. By using the categorization of such behaviours, security, which is the main goal of the law, will be assured. He further continues on to say that punishment is used to make individuals refrain from certain behaviours in the future, and not as a means of responding to someone’s misdoings. There are four restrictions to punishment in his opinion: groundlessness, inefficaciousness, unprofitableness and needlessness. In that order, they mean, there being no rebelliousness to prevent, the punishment not having the proper means to stop the act, where the cost of halting the behaviour is much larger than the return and where other measures would work just as well.

His stress on individual judgement and control alongside his worry for free elections, free speech and the freedom of the press steered modern commentators into the idea that maybe instead of looking at Bentham as a threat to individual freedom, they should see him as a liberal utilitarian. There are four priorities of the law: safeguarding from intentional crime, general happiness via subsistence, abundance and equality. In some way or another, each of these find their way into the power of lawmaking and law enforcement. Bentham’s argument is that when there is a diminishing marginal utility of a good, equality will follow. The main objective has always been security for the realization of happiness, but where suffering and pain can be clearly removed by the use of government intervention; this is an evident responsibility the government must undertake.

The majority of Bentham’s writings related to making refinements of social institutions. Once morality is tasked with working alongside Nature, it will help create a probable cure for social illnesses. Bentham’s entire mindset - reforming the law to reform the whole structure of political arrangements - was motivated by the work of James Mill, who brought to the utilitarian cause not only a sharp and persuasive literary propaganda, but also a democratic hostility to the establishment and a rigorous reforming programme in different fields of study.

James Mill was born in 1773 and he studied Divinity before becoming a preacher in the Church of Scotland. After the publishing of the History of India, he was chosen to become a part of the East India Company where he excelled and was named Chief Examiner in 1830. His connection to Bentham’s cause was not that of a simple follower, but of an individual who brought to it a systematic philosophy already formed. Later on, he was introduced to the work of Reid, who spoke of induction and deduction, favouring the former and arguing against the latter.

For Mill, questions into the rules of governing human behaviour stemmed from laws of psychology, which could be found out using the observation of the study of mental phenomena. What followed was Mill’s idea that the mind perceives the external world through the five senses and once the sensation is over, ideas remain. Knowledge is the result of frequency of conjunctions and to an extent frequency and strength is such that ideas cannot be separated and this is what gives us our belief in the external world. We educate ourselves about the world we live in by correlating different actions with sensations.

Mill’s approach was more optimistic of the beneficial effects of education in developing the right associations between one’s own pleasure and the good of others, whereas Bentham relied on sanctions in order to bring duty and interest into harmony. One of Mill’s popular articles, Government, spoke about the connection between utilitarianism and radicalism, which made clear his importance to the school of philosophical radicals. He stated that labour provided for a person’s wealth or ability to afford basic necessities and men, being savages, would not hold back from obtaining whatever it was that they desired had there not been a government in place. However, most unfortunately, men in said government may also feel no remorse in persecuting fellow men, therefore, the need for an organization of this sort must be joined by a way to protect from oppression.

While Mill takes up a deductive method, Bentham prefers including more factual data that can be proven using statistics or actual observations. Because of this, Mill believes that representation can itself achieve an identity of interests between the leaders and followers using recurrent elections as the main basis. He supports his statement by saying that detailed inductive arguments are the backbone of proper deductive ones, but Macaulay rejects this and further argues that Mill simply assumes particular concepts of human nature and by utilizing these false claims in his work, Macaulay states that he’s ignoring the actual history and practice of the rulers throughout the years.

Now that the idea of a good government’s establishment has been addressed, the question arises of it’s duties. According to Mill, the law gives the foundation for organized life and it created offences if there is any discrepancy. He posits that while freedom should be held back if there is a violation, individuals cannot assume that any sort of violation will be harmful enough to require legal attention. Where Bentham spoke about groundlessness, inefficacious and so on, Mill’s restrictions to punishment is that unless the bad outweighs the good, there is no need for it. Mill is under the impression that once there is utility brought by democratic reform, the poor will do what is best for themselves and try to safeguard private property and individual rights. However, others assume that the poor will instead be selfish and endanger the security of the people and their properties. Here we see, Mill’s utilitarianism tone is much more high-minded than that of Bentham’s.

In my opinion, Jeremy Bentham’s principle of utilitarianism is unjust to an extent. It calls for evaluating actions based on consequences, and the consequences are whether it brings about pleasure or not. In other words, it argues that morality consists in bringing about the best state of affairs and according to the theory, the best state of affairs is the state with the most happiness. Just because something makes someone feel good does not mean that it is the right action to take. For serial killers, the aspect of murder brings them happiness and a sense of fullfilment, thus according to Bentham’s theory, they are acting justifiably, but we must also look at the aftermath from the eyes of all those who may be involved. Killing someone means they will never exist again and entire group of people will lose someone they love, so can we really say that the killer’s motives were fine?

No, I do not think we can. Mill’s thoughts were all very optimistic and he often did not dwell much on the negative sides. He believed that people would act out of the goodness of their heart once given the chance even after being told they would not. He had too much faith in the positive sides to human beings and he forgot that most people that have existed will go to any means to get what they want or think they need. There was a lot of assuming going on between these two, especially Mill. The two utilitarians had good ideas, but they were quite reductionist by just taking a few aspects to determine something as holistic as deciding whether something is moral or if it is not.