mill essay on bentham

A Note on the Text

Source of the text.

The essay ``Bentham'' orginally appeared in the London and Westminster Review in the August 1838 issue, and was revised by Mill for inclusion in the first edition (1859) of Dissertations and Discussion .

• Section 0 [Bentham and Coleridge]
• Section 1 [Bentham's Method]
• Section 2 [Limits of Bentham's Method]
• Section 3 [Critique of Bentham's Theory of Life]
• Section 4 [Bentham's Philosophy of Law, Government, and Utility]

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James Mill (1773–1836) was a Scots-born political philosopher, historian, psychologist, educational theorist, economist, and legal, political and penal reformer. Well-known and highly regarded in his day, he is now all but forgotten. Mill’s reputation now rests mainly on two biographical facts. The first is that his first-born son was John Stuart Mill, who became even more eminent than his father. The second is that the elder Mill was the collaborator and ally of Jeremy Bentham, whose subsequent reputation also eclipsed the elder Mill’s. Our aim here is to try, insofar as possible, to remove Mill from these two large shadows and to reconsider him as a formidable thinker in his own right.

Mill’s range of interests was remarkably wide, extending from education and psychology in his two-volume Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829a), to political economy (he persuaded his friend David Ricardo to write on that subject, as Mill himself did in his Elements of Political Economy , 1821), to penology and prison reform, to the law and history, and, not least, to political philosophy. On these and other subjects he wrote five books and more than a thousand essays and reviews. It is with Mill the political philosopher and educational theorist that the present article is principally concerned.

1. Biography

2. alliance with bentham, 3. mill’s writings, 4.1 mill on representation, 4.2 the meritocratic “middle rank”, 4.3 the reception of government, 4.4 macaulay’s “famous attack”, 5. other related writings, 6.1 mill on the “human mind”, 6.2 the formation of character, 6.3 education, power and liberty of the press, 6.4 education and happiness, 7. conclusion: mill’s legacy, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

Unlike his famous first-born son, James Mill never wrote an autobiography or even a sketch of his early life, the details of which remained unknown even to his children. What we do know is this. James Mill was born on 6 April 1773 at Northwater Bridge in the county of Forfarshire in the parish of Logie Pert in Scotland. His father, James Milne, was a shoemaker and small farmer of modest means who was quiet, mild-mannered, and devout. His mother, Isabel Fenton Milne, was a more forceful figure. Determined that her first-born son should get ahead in the world, she changed the family name from the Scottish “Milne” to the more English-sounding “Mill,” and kept young James away from other children, demanding that he spend most of his waking hours immersed in study. His “sole occupation,” as his biographer Alexander Bain remarks, “was study” (Bain 1882, 7). (A regimen rather like that imposed by his mother upon her eldest son was later to be imposed upon his first-born son, John Stuart Mill.) In this occupation young James clearly excelled. Before the age of seven he had shown a talent for elocution, composition, and arithmetic, as well as Latin and Greek. The local minister saw to it that James received special attention at the parish school. At age ten or eleven, he was sent to Montrose Academy, where his teachers “were always overflowing with the praises of Mill’s cleverness and perseverance” (Bain 1882, 8). Before leaving Montrose Academy at the age of seventeen, Mill was persuaded by the parish minister and his mother to study for the ministry. Mill’s decision evidently pleased Lady Jane Stuart, wife of Sir John Stuart of Fettercairn, who headed a local charity founded for the purpose of educating poor but bright boys for the Presbyterian ministry. Mill, eminently qualified in both respects, became the recipient of Lady Jane’s largesse. As it happened, she and Sir John were just then looking for a tutor for their fourteen-year old daughter Wilhelmina. They offered the job to James Mill; he accepted; and when the Stuart family moved to Edinburgh, he accompanied them.

In 1790, Mill enrolled in the University of Edinburgh, where by day he pursued a full course of studies and in the evenings tutored young Wilhelmina. Each experience left its mark. The Scottish universities at Edinburgh and Glasgow (and to a lesser extent Aberdeen and St. Andrews) had earlier been the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment and were still the premier universities in Britain. They had numbered among their faculty such luminaries as Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and—had the orthodox town council of Edinburgh not forbade his admission—would have included David Hume as well. At Edinburgh Mill took particular delight in the tutelage of Dugald Stewart, who carried on the tradition of Scottish moral philosophy. In addition to moral philosophy, Mill’s course of studies included history, political economy, and the classics, including Mill’s favorite philosopher, Plato (Loizides 2013a, ch. 3; Loizides 2013b). Mill’s mind never lost the stamp of his Scottish education (Cumming 1962). As his eldest son was later to remark, James Mill was “the last survivor of this great school” (J.S. Mill 1843, 566).

From 1790 to 1794 Mill served young Wilhelmina Stuart not only as a teacher but as a companion and confidant. Her admiration for her tutor quite likely turned to love, and the feeling was apparently reciprocated. But, however promising his prospects, Mill was no aristocrat, a social fact which he was not allowed to forget. In 1797 Wilhelmina married a member of her own class, Sir William Forbes (to the disappointment of Walter Scott, not least). Wilhelmina died in 1810, soon after the birth of her second son. She was said to have called out Mill’s name “with her last breath.” Mill never forgot her; he spoke of her always with wistful affection and named his first-born daughter after her in 1809. But this was not the only incident worthy of note in the Mill-Forbes family affair. In July 1806, soon after the birth of John Stuart Mill (named in honor of Mill’s Scottish patron), the first of nine children, Mill challenged Forbes to “a fair race … in the education of a son.” The “contest” would be decided “twenty years hence.” Should Mill’s be "the most accomplished & virtuous young man" of the two first-born sons, the proud father confessed, “I shall not envy you that you can have yours the richest” (Mill to Forbes, 1806). Ironically, twenty years later, the virtuous son would fall in a state of dejection, forcing him to question the efficacy of the father’s scheme of education.

After completing his first degree in 1794, Mill began studying for the ministry. For the next four years he supported himself by tutoring the sons and daughters of several noble families. One such family even set up a small pension which complemented Mill’s income for years (Lazenby 1972, 309). Yet, the experience was not a happy one. For repeatedly forgetting his “place” in “polite society” he suffered one insult after another. He harbored ever after an abiding hatred for an hereditary aristocracy.

By the time he was licensed to preach in 1798 Mill had apparently begun to lose his faith and had by the early 1800s become restless and disillusioned. In 1802, at age twenty-nine, he left for London in hopes of improving his situation. For some years thereafter he worked as an independent author, journalist and editor. From 1802 until his appointment as an assistant examiner of correspondence at the East India Company in 1819 Mill’s literary labors were prodigious. Besides some 1,400 editorials, he wrote hundreds of substantial articles and reviews, as well as several books, including his History of British India in three large volumes. Although some of these were doubtless labors of love, most were labors of necessity, for Mill had to support himself and his wife Harriet, whom he married in 1805, and a fast-growing family.

In late 1807 or early 1808 James Mill met Jeremy Bentham, with whom he soon formed a political and philosophical alliance. The two were in some respects kindred spirits. Both wished and worked for religious toleration and legal reform; both favored freedom of speech and press; both feared that the failure to reform the British political system—by, among other things, eliminating rotten boroughs and extending the franchise—would give rise to reactionary intransigence on the one hand, and revolutionary excess on the other. But the two men were of vastly different temperaments and backgrounds. Bentham, a wealthy bachelor, was an eccentric genius and closet philosopher. The poor, harried and hard-working Mill was the more practical and worldly partner in that peculiar partnership. He was also a much clearer writer and more persuasive propagandist for the Utilitarian cause.

Bentham believed that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the twin aims of all human action. His philosophy, Utilitarianism, held that self-interest—understood as pleasure or happiness—should be “maximized” and pain “minimized” (Bentham, incidentally, coined both terms). And, as with individual self-interest, so too with the public interest. According to Bentham, the aim of legislation and public policy was to promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Mill agreed, after a fashion. Formerly a dour Scots Presbyterian and still something of a Platonist, he took a dim view of unalloyed hedonism. Like Plato, he ranked the pleasures in a hierarchy, with the sensual pleasures subordinated to the intellectual ones.

Despite their differences, Mill proved to be Bentham’s most valuable ally. A better writer and abler advocate, Mill helped to make Bentham’s ideas and schemes more palatable and popular than they might otherwise have been. But he also influenced Bentham’s ideas in a number of ways. For one, Mill led Bentham to appreciate the importance of economic factors in explaining and changing social life and political institutions; for another, he turned Bentham away from advocating aristocratic “top-down” reform into a more popular or “democratic” direction. For a time their partnership proved fruitful. With Mill’s energy and Bentham’s ideas and financial backing, Utilitarian schemes for legal, political, penal, and educational reform gained an ever wider audience and circle of adherents. This circle included, among others, Francis Place (“the radical tailor of Charing Cross”), the Genevan Etienne Dumont, the historian George Grote, the stockbroker-turned-economist David Ricardo, and—certainly not least—the young John Stuart Mill. Each in his own way enlisted in the Utilitarian cause. The cause was furthered by the founding of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and, later, by the launching of the Westminster Review and the founding of University College London (where Bentham’s body, stuffed and mounted in a glass case, can still be seen today). This small band of “philosophic radicals” worked tirelessly for political changes, several of which were later incorporated into the Reform Act of 1832. But Bentham and Mill became increasingly estranged. Bentham was irascible and difficult to work with, and Mill on more than one occasion swallowed his pride by accepting financial support and suffering personal rebuke from his senior partner.

In 1818, after twelve years’ work, Mill’s massive History of British India was published. Early in the following year he was appointed Assistant Examiner at the East India Company. His financial future finally secured, Mill no longer needed Bentham’s largesse. The two men saw less and less of each other. Their political alliance continued even as their personal relationship cooled. Their uneasy friendship effectively ended some years before Bentham’s death in 1832.

Besides being a tireless reformer and prolific writer, James Mill supplied his son John with one of the most strenuous educations ever recorded in the annals of pedagogy. The elder Mill gave young John daily lessons in Latin, Greek, French, history, philosophy, and political economy. Literature and poetry were also taught, although with less enthusiasm (James Mill, like Plato, distrusted poets and poetry). John was in turn expected to tutor his younger brothers and sisters in these subjects. Each was examined rigorously and regularly by their unforgiving father, and the nine children, like their mother, lived with in fear of his rebuke. As John Stuart Mill later wrote, “I … grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear” (J.S. Mill 1873, 612).

Mill’s strained relations with his wife and children stand in stark contrast with his warm and cordial relations with others, and most especially the young men who sought him out for the pleasure of his company and the vigor of his conversation. As John Black, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, recalled on the occasion of Mill’s death in 1836:

Mr. Mill was eloquent and impressive in conversation. He had a great command of language, which bore the stamp of his earnest and energetic character. Young men were particularly fond of his society … No man could enjoy his society without catching a portion of his elevated enthusiasm … His conversation was so energetic and complete in thought, so succinct, and exact … in expression, that, if reported as uttered, his colloquial observations or arguments would have been perfect compositions (quoted in Bain 1882, 457).

Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Mill’s writings, which tend to be both dry and didactic.

James Mill always attempted to write, he said, with “manly plainness,” and in that endeavor he certainly succeeded. The reader is never at a loss to know just what his views are or where his sympathies lie. Mill’s manly plainness is especially evident in his massive three-volume History of British India , which begins with a remarkable preface in which he asserts that his objectivity is guaranteed by the fact that he has never visited India. His is, he says, a “critical, or judging history,” and his judgments on Hindu customs and practices are particularly harsh (Mill 1818, I, x). He denounces their “rude” and “backward” culture for its cultivation of ignorance and its veneration of superstition, and leaves no doubt that he favors a strong dose of Utilitarian rationalism as an antidote. Although his History is in part a Utilitarian treatise and in part a defense of British intervention in Indian affairs, it is more than the sum of those two parts. Mill’s History shows, perhaps more clearly than any of his other works, the continuing influence of his Scottish education (Rendall, 1982). The criteria according to which Mill judges and criticizes Indian practices and customs derive from the view of historical progress that he had learned from Dugald Stewart and John Millar, amongst others. According to this view “man is a progressive being” and education is the chief engine of progress. And this in turn helps to explain not only Mill’s harsh judgments on the Hindus but his continually reiterated emphasis on education (Mill 1992, 139–84).

Virtually everything that James Mill ever wrote had a pedagogical purpose. He was a relentlessly didactic writer whose most important essays— Government and Education , in particular—take the form of clipped, concise, deductive arguments (De Marchi 1983). It is a style which his contemporaries either admired or detested, as can be seen for instance in F. D. Maurice’s novel Eustace Conway . When the Benthamite Morton discovers Eustace reading Mill’s Essay on Government , he asks his opinion of Mill. Eustace replies:

“I think him nearly the most wonderful prose-writer in our language.” “That do not I,” says Morton. “I approve the matter of his treatises exceedingly, but the style seems to me detestable.” “Oh!,” says Eustace, “I cannot separate matter and style … My reason for delighting in this book is, that it gives such a fixedness and reality to all that was most vaguely brilliant in my speculations—it converts dreams into demonstrations” (quoted in Thomas 1969, 255–56).

Many of Mill’s readers were not so gentle. Thomas Babington Macaulay criticized Mill and his fellow Utilitarians for “affect[ing] a quakerly plainness, or rather a cynical negligence and impurity of style.” In so doing,

they surrender their understandings … to the meanest and most abject sophisms, provided those sophisms come before them disguised with the externals of demonstration. They do not seem to know that logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric,—that a fallacy may lurk in a syllogism as well as in a metaphor (Macaulay 1992, 272–73).

But if Mill’s style of reasoning and writing was plain and unadorned, it was at least clear and cogent. And that, surely, is a virtue too often lacking among political theorists.

And indeed James Mill regarded himself as a theorist, which was, for him, a title to be worn proudly. Theory, he wrote, gives a “commanding view” of its subject and serves as a guide for improving practice. Theory precedes practice or “experience” and is not simply derived from it. Amidst the often contradictory welter of appearance, theory functions a priori , serving as a reliable weather vane and guide (Mill 1992, 141). This view of theory is much in evidence in all his writings, and in his political essays in particular. The most important of these—and the most controversial—is Government .

4. The Essay on Government

Whether justly or not, Mill’s modern reputation as a political theorist rests on a single essay. The Essay on Government, Mill later wrote, was meant to serve as a “comprehensive outline” or “skeleton map” with whose aid one could find one’s way across the vast, varied, and ofttimes confusing and dangerous terrain of politics (Mill 1820). Government, Mill maintains, is merely a means to an end, viz. the happiness of the whole community and the individuals composing it. We should begin by assuming that every human being is motivated by a desire to experience pleasure and to avoid pain. Pleasures and pains come from two sources, our fellow human beings and nature. Government is concerned directly with the first and indirectly with the second: “Its business is to increase to the utmost the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the pains, which men derive from one another.” Yet, “the primary cause of government” is to be found in nature itself, since humans must wrest from nature “the scanty materials of happiness” (Mill 1992, 4–5). Nature and human nature combine to make government necessary. It is man’s nature not only to desire happiness but to satisfy that desire by investing as little effort as possible. Labor being the means of obtaining happiness, and our own labor being painful to us, we will, if permitted, live off the labor of others. To the degree that others enjoy the fruits of my labor, my primary incentive for working—namely my own happiness—is diminished if not destroyed.

Therefore, Mill continues, the primary problem in designing workable political institutions is to maximize the happiness of the community by minimizing the extent to which some of its members may encroach upon, and enjoy, the fruits of other people’s labor. This cannot happen, Mill maintains, in a monarchy (wherein a single ruler exploits his subjects) or in an aristocracy (wherein a ruling elite exploits the common people). Nor can communal happiness be maximized in a direct democracy, since the time and effort required for ruling would be subtracted from that available for engaging in productive labor (Mill 1992, 7–9). The only system that serves as a means to the end of individual and communal happiness is representative democracy, wherein citizens elect representatives to deliberate and legislate on their behalf and in their interest. The problem immediately arises, however, as to how representatives can be made to rule on the people’s behalf rather than their own. Mill’s answer is that frequent elections and short terms in office make it unlikely that elected representatives will legislate only for their own benefit. After all, representatives are drawn from the ranks of the people to which they can, after their term in office ends, expect to return. Given what we might nowadays call the incentive structure of representative government, representatives have every reason to promote the people’s interests instead of their own. Indeed, in a properly structured system, there will be an “identity of interests” between representatives and the electorate (Mill 1992, 22).

Mill’s views on representation stand mid-way between two opposing views. On the one side are Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other “participatory” theorists who argue that to allow anyone to represent you or your interests is tantamount to forfeiting your liberty. On the other side are assorted Whig defenders of “virtual representation”—including Edmund Burke and, later, Mill’s contemporaries Sir James Mackintosh and T. B. Macaulay—who contend that representatives elected by the few may best represent the interests of the many. On their view, one need not have a voice—or a vote—to be well represented in Parliament.

Against Rousseau and other opponents of representation tout court Mill maintains that representative government is “the grand discovery of modern times,” inasmuch as it allows the interests of the many to be represented efficiently and expeditiously by the few—so long, that is, as the many have the vote in order to register their views and can moreover hold the few strictly accountable for their actions while in office. Properly structured, such a system serves to enhance liberty, since it frees most people from the burdensome and time-consuming business of governing, thereby allowing them to get on with their more productive individual pursuits and, most especially, their productive labors (Mill 1992, 21).

But it was against Tory and Whigs who defended “virtual representation” and advocated slow and piecemeal reform of the representative system that Mill’s main arguments were directed. He holds that the very idea of virtual representation is a recipe for misgovernment, corruption, and the triumph of the aristocratic or “sinister interests” of the few at the expense of the many. The public interest can be represented only in so far as the public, or a considerably enlarged portion thereof, has the vote. Mill is a radical individualist in that he insists that each person is the best, perhaps indeed the only, judge of what his own interests are. And if—as he also insists—the public interest is the sum of all individual non-sinister interests, it follows that the wider the franchise, the more truly representative the government. Mill deemed any defense of a greatly restricted franchise and virtual representation to be arguments against representative government itself. Pace Ricardo, Mill had not really managed to avoid giving Government “the appearance of an essay on Reform of Parliament” (Ricardo 1820, 211).

Mill’s view that each individual is the best judge of his own interests appears to stand in stark contrast with his praise and apparent privileging of one particular collectivity—the “middle rank, … that intelligent, that virtuous rank … which gives to science, to art, and to legislation itself, their most distinguished ornaments, and is the chief source of all that has exalted and refined human nature…” It is to this middle rank—the forerunner of the modern “meritocracy”—that common laborers look for advice and guidance, especially in moral and political matters (Mill 1992, 41–42). Although such remarks have struck many modern commentators as a militant defense of middle class power and privilege, it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Mill rarely uses the phrase “middle class,” preferring instead the more archaic “middle rank.” And this, once again, underscores the continuing importance of Mill’s Scottish education. The notion of “ranks,” as analyzed at length in John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1806), had left a deep impression. Millar’s (and Mill’s) “ranks” are not (quite) “classes” in our modern sense—that is, purely descriptive, fairly distinct, and normatively neutral socio-economic entities—but are instead meant to pick out people of particular intellectual merit and to mark gradations of moral and civic influence.

Mill is quite careful to distinguish between a “class” and a “rank.” The members of a “class” are united by shared (and usually selfish or “sinister”) interests. Members of the “middle rank,” by contrast, are marked more by their education, intellect, and public-spiritedness than by their wealth or any other social or economic characteristics. They are “universally described as both the most wise and the most virtuous part of the community which”—Mill adds acidulously—“is not the Aristocratical [class]” (Mill 1992, 41). Members of the middle rank owe their position not to accident of birth but to “the present state of education, and the diffusion of knowledge” among those anxious to acquire it. By these lights the “radical tailor” Francis Place, the stockbroker David Ricardo, the wealthy philanthropist Jeremy Bentham, the Quaker editor William Allen, and even James Mill himself—although not all “middle class” by modern standards—belonged to the esteemed middle rank. Clearly, then, the idea of a middle rank cuts across the kinds of class divisions with which we are familiar today. Hence any attempt to classify Mill as an apologist for “the middle-class” simpliciter is anachronistic and rather wide of the mark. He is instead an early defender, avant la lettre , of the idea of a meritocracy whose members are drawn from all classes and walks of life.

The idea that Mill was an apologist for middle-class interests was, of course, a later development. But what of his contemporaries’ views of the Essay on Government ? For so short an essay, Mill’s Government proved to be remarkably controversial in his own day. Tories and Whigs thought its message wildly and even dangerously democratic, while many of Mill’s fellow Utilitarians—including Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and William Thompson—believed that he did not go nearly far enough in advocating an extension of the franchise. Although more “democratic” in private discussion, Mill publicly advocated extending the franchise to include all male heads of household over the age of forty, leaving them to speak for and represent the interests of younger men and all women:

One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose interests are indisputably included in those of other individuals, may be struck off without inconvenience. In this light may be viewed all children, up to a certain age, whose interests are involved in those of their parents. In this light, also, women may be regarded, the interest of almost all of whom is involved either in that of their fathers or in that of their husbands (Mill 1992, 27).

This, his eldest son later remarked, was “the worst [paragraph] he ever wrote” (J.S. Mill 1961, 98). Most of Mill’s critics were quick to seize upon it, if only because its conclusion contradicts two of Mill’s oft-stated premises, namely that each of us is the best judge of our own interests and that anyone having unchecked power is bound to abuse it. As William Thompson argued in Appeal of One Half the Human Race (1825), Mill’s premises pointed to the widest possible extension of the franchise, and not to the exclusion of “one half the human race,” viz. all women.

Always the critic, Mill was himself a frequent target of criticism, much of which came from quarters hostile to the kinds of sweeping reforms favored by Bentham and the philosophic radicals. Mill’s Essay on Government first appeared in 1820, and was subsequently reprinted in editions of his Essays in 1823, 1825, and 1828, which reached an ever wider audience, including (Mill boasted) “the young men of the Cambridge Union.” Fearing that the cause of moderate reform was in danger from Mill and the philosophic radicals, Whig polemicists weighed in against Mill. One of them, Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), was an old Whig stalwart with a plodding and ofttimes pompous prose style. The other, T. B. Macaulay (1800–1859), was a much younger and altogether more formidable foe.

Macaulay’s “Mill on Government,” published in the March 1829 issue of The Edinburgh Review , is a remarkable mixture of logical criticism, irony, mordant wit, and droll parody. That Mill’s Essay on Government is remembered at all today doubtless owes something to Macaulay’s memorable critique. The most remarkable feature of Macaulay’s critique is that it seems to be largely aloof from particular political issues, focusing instead on what we would nowadays call methodological matters. Against his older adversary the twenty-eight-year-old Macaulay defends the “historical” or “inductive” approach to the study of politics against Mill’s abstract, ahistorical, and “deductive” method. Macaulay maintains that we learn more from “experience” than from “theory,” and had best beware of the simplifications and “sophisms” to be found in Mill’s Essay on Government . The most pernicious of these is the “law” that men act always on the basis of self-interest. This law, Macaulay counters, is either trivially true (because logically circular) or patently false; in either case it hardly suffices as a foundation upon which to erect an argument for radical reform, much less a comprehensive theory of politics. And if Mill’s deductive logic fails, the entire edifice—including his supposedly “scientific” arguments in favor of radical reform—collapses with it (Macaulay 1992).

That James Mill, fierce polemicist that he was, did not respond quickly and with no holds barred seems surprising, to say the least. His eldest son offers one possible explanation. In his Autobiography J. S. Mill remarks that “I was not at all satisfied with the mode in which my father met the criticisms of Macaulay. He did not, as I thought he ought to have done, justify himself by saying, ‘I was not writing a scientific treatise on polities. I was writing an article for parliamentary reform’. He treated Macaulay’s argument as simply irrational; an attack upon the reasoning faculty; an example of the saying of Hobbes, that when reason is against a man, a man will be against reason (J.S. Mill 1873, 165, 167).”

Yet the younger Mill’s account of his father’s reaction to Macaulay’s “famous attack” (as the son later described it) is misleading in at least two respects. In the first place, James Mill did not, and given his own premises could not, distinguish between a “scientific treatise on politics” and a coherent and compelling argument for “parliamentary reform.” For he believed that any reforms that were workable and worth having could be based only on an adequately scientific theory of politics. The Essay on Government was intended to be both, if only in brief outline. Moreover, the younger Mill leaves the impression that his father, although angered by the attack, never replied to Macaulay. But this is untrue.

For a time James Mill tried, without success, to persuade his friend and fellow Benthamite Etienne Dumont to reply to “the curly-headed coxcomb, who only abuses what he does not understand” (Mill to Dumont, 1829b). In the meantime there appeared Sir James Mackintosh’s Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy (1830) in which Mill’s Essay on Government was singled out for special censure. There was nothing new in this; but what caught Mill’s eye was that Mackintosh’s mode and manner of argument was borrowed, as the author acknowledged, from “the writer of a late criticism on Mr. Mill’s Essay.—See Edinburgh Review, No. 97, March 1829.” “This,” says Mill with evident relish, “is convenient; because the answer, which does for Sir James, will answer the same purpose with the Edinburgh Review” (Mill 1992, 305). Of course, the “writer of a late criticism” to whom Mackintosh refers was none other than Macaulay, whom the elder Mill then proceeds to answer in the guise of replying to Mackintosh.

In his reply Mill reiterates and defends the arguments advanced in his Essay on Government : all men—including rulers and representatives—are moved mainly if not exclusively by considerations of self-interest, and therefore the only security for good government is to be found in making the interests of representatives identical with those of their constituents. But, unlike the cool, detached, and ostensibly deductive Essay on Government , Mill’s reply contains a good deal of vitriol. He writes like a schoolmaster who, having lost all patience with a slow-witted pupil, is content to ridicule him before his cleverer classmates. The sight is not a pretty one, and shows James Mill at his polemical worst. Whether, or to what extent, such a splenetic rejoinder could suffice as a refutation is surely questionable.

Although none of Mill’s other essays—save, perhaps, “The Church, and Its Reform” (1835)—proved so controversial, each expands upon points made in passing in the Essay on Government . Jurisprudence deals extensively with rights—what they are, by whom they are defined, and how they are best protected. In a similar vein and in a way that anticipates (and arguably influenced) the younger Mill’s On Liberty (1859) Liberty of the Press defends the right of free speech and discussion against arguments in favor of restriction and censorship. Free government requires the free communication of ideas and opinions, and good government requires an informed and critical citizenry. For both, a free press is an indispensable instrument.

In the essay on Education Mill describes the conditions most conducive to creating good men and, more particularly, good citizens. Civic or “political education,” he says, is “the key-stone of the arch; the strength of the whole depends upon it” (Mill 1992, 193). Mill was fond of quoting Helvetius’s dictum l’éducation peut tout (“education makes everything possible”). And certainly no other political thinker, save perhaps Plato and Thomas Jefferson, set greater store by education than did James Mill. As we discuss in Section 6, by “education” Mill meant not only domestic education or formal schooling, but all the influences that go into forming one’s character and outlook, including the influence of social and political instituions.

In Prisons and Prison Discipline Mill applies his theory of education to penal reform. Just as one’s character can be well moulded by a good education, so too may one’s character be badly moulded through miseducation. The latter, Mill maintains, is especially evident in the criminal class. Criminals commit crimes and are sent to prison because they have been badly educated. Punishment, properly understood, is a kind of remedial education, and prison, properly structured, presents the opportunity to re-mould inmates’ misshapen characters. Prisons and Prison Discipline delineates the types of punishments likely to deter offenders or, failing that, to re-mould and re-educate criminals to be productive members of society. In these and other respects Mill’s theory of punishment mirrors Plato’s. Like Plato, Mill draws a sharp distinction between punishing someone and harming him. The purpose of punishment is to reform (literally re-form) the soul or character of the inmate so that he may be released into society without fear that he will harm others. But to harm someone is to make him worse, and an even greater danger to society (Ball 1995, ch. 7).

Mill envisaged a society inhabited by active citizens, always on their guard against rulers or representatives who would violate their rights and deprive them of their liberties. This, after all, is the central theme of the Essay on Government , and the thrust of the argument of Mill’s article The Ballot , published in 1830 as a contribution to the public debate preceding the passage of the 1832 Reform Act. Mixing logical acuity with withering ridicule, Mill restates and refutes arguments against extending the franchise and introducing the secret ballot. Only those with sinister interests could oppose such reform.

6. The Essay on Education

The early nineteenth century in Britain was an age increasingly preoccupied with education, especially the public, though not state, provision of education for the lower ranks. Mill’s educational activism in establishing schools for all commenced with his association with Bentham and Place (Burston 1973, ch. 3). For the next two decades, Mill and associates (including William Allen, Edward Wakefield, and Zachary Macaulay – the father of Mill’s famous critic – as well as James Mackintosh – the recipient of Mill’s 1835 harsh criticism) promoted the cause of public education at all levels, from Robert Owen’s infant school to the projected Chrestomathic School in Bentham’s garden and, famously, the University of London – that “godless school," the “infidel College in Gower street” ( The Standard , 19 June 1828 (issue 340), p. 2). And though Mill kept a low public profile in all these endeavors, “it was always to him that recourse was had, when difficulties came” (Bain 1882, 86).

Mill had put his pen to good use in Edinburgh Review , the Philanthropist and the Eclectic Review throughout the 1810s in the debate over the monitorial systems of Joseph Lancaster (in London endorsed by Mill and associates) and Andrew Bell (backed by the Church of England). However, his Essay on Education (originally published in 1819) bears no mark of that bitter controversy. Not only was Education , like Government , written in a deductive or synthetic style. But also, the abstract, theoretical treatment had important concrete, practical implications for social policy – implications at which, like Government , Mill only hinted rather than explicitly draw. There are further similarities between Education and Government . For example, even though Mill aimed at a comprehensive view of education, he confined himself “to a skeleton” (Mill 1992, 141). He also began his analysis by defining the subject-matter in connection to the pursuit of happiness. The end of education, he asserted, “is to render the individual, as much as possible, an instrument of happiness, first to himself, and next to other beings” (Mill 1992, 139). What’s more, like Government , Education chose to underplay its Benthamite, radical or utilitarian pedigree. It was quite out of character, for a staunch Benthamite, to point out that wherein happiness “consists, [is] not yet determined” (Mill 1992, 156), especially since happiness was identified as the end to which education aims.

Education , like Government , however, fooled no one where its author’s loyalties lay. Twice Mill contrasted two “classes of philosophers”: “Hartley and his followers in England, Condillac and his followers in France” and “Dr Reid and his followers in this country, Kant and the German school of metaphysicians in general on the Continent.” The first disagreement between these two sets of philosophers involved the range of what Mill called “simple feelings.” The first thought impressions and ideas the only simple or original feelings. Though often difficult to analyze a “complex feeling” to its constituent simple feelings, for this class of philosophers, perception came in advance of conception. The second class of philosophers did not think impressions and ideas the only “original feelings,” incapable of further analysis. They added a third category: “those [feelings] which correspond to the words remember, believe, judge , space , time , &c.” For Mill, the third category of “original feelings” complicated analysis, and, consequently, education by blurring the lines (and order) between perception and conception (Mill 1992, 144). The second disagreement between these two sets of philosophers came up at the attempt to analyze the end of education. The first, Mill claimed, admitted a humble or corporeal origin of happiness, tracing happiness back to simple sensations and their transformation into ideas. For them, combinations of these simple feelings make up all the intellectual and moral phenomena of human nature. The second, Mill argued, go after happiness at a higher plane than “the grosser elements of sense.” For these philosophers, the mind recognizes truth and right and wrong independently of human experience, “without the aid of the senses” (Mill 1992, 157). It was clear that Mill sided with the former philosophical group. However, for his purposes in Education the “divide” between the a posteriori and a priori schools on this issue mattered little. It was sufficient that his readers assented to the link between happiness and education.

The Essay on Education outlines and anticipates the main themes of Mill’s Analysis , his most comprehensive inquiry into what his son would later call “ethology, or the science of character formation” ( A System of Logic , Book VI; Ball 2010). Since John Stuart Mill situated his father’s Analysis in the debate between the “a priori view of human knowledge, and of the knowing faculties” and its “opposite doctrine—that which derives all knowledge from experience, and all moral and intellectual qualities principally from the direction given to the associations,” let’s for a moment focus on this work. For the younger Mill, much like his own A System of Logic , his father’s Analysis tried to combat a philosophical theory which made “every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, […] into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification” (J.S. Mill 1873, 233). In 1869, John Stuart Mill published a second edition of this essay with extended comments by himself, Alexander Bain, George Grote and Andrew Findlater, a noted philologist.

For James Mill, knowledge comes from sense experience. There are two kinds of sensations, he argued. The first kind is experienced when the object of sense is present. The sources of this kind of experience are the senses and the experience of those sensations which accompany muscle and digestive activity. The second kind is experienced when the object of sense is no longer present. Even after the sensation is gone, some sensory content, a “bare fact,” remains: “a copy, an image, of the sensation, sometimes a representation, or trace, of the sensation," i.e. its idea (Mill 1829a, I.40–41). “[D]uring the whole of our lives,” James Mill argued, “a series of those two states of consciousness, called sensations, and ideas, is constantly going on.” He highlighted that ideas do not derive from objects but from sensations. And as sensations are either synchronous or successive, “[o]ur ideas spring up, or exist, in the order in which the sensations existed,” in space (simultaneous existence) and/or in time (antecedent and consequent existence) (Mill 1829a, I.52, 55–56).

Association Psychology, as thus expounded, examines the links between experience as registered by a conscious mind and the ideas, or trains of ideas, which registered experience springs up. The strength or weakness of associations between a sensation and an idea or between ideas varies, depending on how permanent or vivid they are. Some associations are so firm and constant that they become indissoluble or inseparable, fusing the different aspects of the complex experience into a single cluster of associations. The vividness of a part of the cluster might engross the attention of the conscious mind. Sometimes the cluster is dominated by a sensation, sometimes by an idea. Generally speaking, Mill noted, sensations are more vivid than ideas, the painful or pleasurable sensations or ideas are more vivid than indifferent ones, and the more recent are more vivid than less recent ones (Mill 1829a, I.60–63). The perceiving mind attends only to a part of the sense experience, both at the moment of sensation and, consequently, in its copy, image or representation. In History of British India , Mill used this “law” of human nature to explain how a philosophic historian never had to set foot in a foreign country to write its history:

In a cursory survey, it is understood, that the mind, unable to attend to the whole of an infinite number of objects, attaches itself to a few; and overlooks the multitude that remain. But what, then, are the objects to which the mind, in such a situation, is in preference attracted? Those which fall in with the current of its own thoughts; those which accord with its former impressions; those which confirm its previous ideas.

Sifting through different testimonies of the same phenomenon, as a judge, one might thus compound a more comprehensive idea of it rather than by being an actual eye witness (Mill 1818, I.xii-xiv; Loizides 2019b).

For James Mill, the individual maintains some command over sensations (i.e. in a controlled environment) as they derive from sensible objects. However, one cannot recall ideas or trains of ideas at will, Mill pointed out: “Thoughts come into the mind unbidden.” But ideas can be linked with sensible objects, such as sounds, smells, sights, and so on. Language thus provides signs, e.g. audible and visible, which mark sensations and recall ideas (Mill 1829a, I.86–89). This way knowledge acquired from the past can be used to guide the future. For example, certain words recall certain ideas and trains of ideas. These ideas or trains of ideas, with or without additional links, might lead to certain behavioral responses, e.g. thoughts, emotions, actions. Analyses of chains of associations identify the links between elicited responses (last step) and actual experience (first step). This is almost impossible to do in cases of indissoluble association, as sensations, ideas and trains of ideas are fused together indiscriminately. Hence, even though most children associate darkness with ghosts, Mill offered an example, “[i]n some this association is soon dissolved,” in others “it continues for life,” especially come the night (Mill 1829a, I.60, 286–87). Even a mind like Bentham’s had failed to dissolve such an association.

Mill’s Education (and Analysis ) was criticized for blending together two different projects: epistemology and psychology. The confusion, Wyndham Hedley Burston argued, was due to Mill’s failure to acknowledge the synthetic/analytic or conceptual/empirical distinction (Burston 1973, chs. 5–6; Wilson 1990, ch. 4), a critique which was also levelled at his son’s A System of Logic . However, given that epistemology concerns itself, not only with what knowledge is, but also with questions such as how it can be attained and with which cognitive processes do actually allow the attainment of knowledge, James Mill’s enterprise in both Education and Analysis might not appear as suspect as on first glance from a philosophical point of view. Still, Mill’s interest laid indeed primarily in the shaping of the mind, the beliefs, and the behavior of the “knowing subject.” His fundamental doctrine in psychology, his son reported, “was the formation of all human character by circumstances, through the universal Principle of Association, and the consequent unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual condition of mankind by education” (J.S. Mill 1873, 109, 111). For James Mill, education was all-powerful: “if education does not perform every thing, there is hardly anything which it does not perform” (Mill 1992, 160).

Mill’s argument was straightforward: both individual and social wellbeing depends upon individual action. Actions depend upon one’s feelings and thoughts (the last step in the chain of association prior to action). Education must thus be structured upon the “knowledge of the sequences which take place in the human feelings or thought.” Such knowledge enables the preceptor “to make certain feelings or thoughts take place instead of others” in the student. The kinds of mental succession, upon which education works, Mill urged, make “all the difference between the extreme of madness and of wickedness, and the greatest attainable heights of wisdom and virtue” (Mill 1992, 147; Mill 1813a, 98). As one’s bent of mind is revealed in the sequences of its ideas, the object of education is “to provide for the constant production of certain sequences, rather than others,” either through repetition and the inculcation of certain habits, or through association with ideas of pleasure or pain, including those of praise and blame (Mill 1992, 151).

The Essay on Education identified two sorts of circumstances that form character: physical and moral. Unlike moral circumstances, not all physical circumstances were amenable to human will. Still, Mill pointed out, the most important of them were: “all education is impotent” unless nutrition and labor (and, consequently, health) are of appropriate quality and quantity. He pressed on the point that “nature herself forbids that you shall make a wise and virtuous people, out of a starving” or an over-worked people (Mill 1992, 172–174). Especially as regards the latter, Mill painted a strikingly Platonic picture in 1813, discussing the influence of labor upon factory workers:

Shut up for almost the whole of that period of time which they pass without sleep, with their eyes and all their faculties exclusively fastened day after day upon one and the same narrow circle of objects and operations, their minds are accessible to a smaller number of ideas, and get less of any thing which can be called mental exercise, than any other set of human being, even than the savages in the forest (Mill 1813a, 94).

The “effects of their situation upon their minds are, if possible, still more deplorable” than upon their body, he argued. "[U]nless care is taken," he highlighted in Education, "by means of the other instruments of education, to counteract" these dreadful effects of economic progress, the minds "of the great body of the people are in danger of really degenerating, while the other elements of civilization are advancing" (Mill 1992, 173).

As far as the moral circumstances were concerned, rather than waste time debating final ends, Mill focused on accepted middle principles. The stable production of those mental sequences which fulfil the ends of education, he argued, depends upon cultivating four virtues: intelligence, temperance, justice and generosity. The first two promote individual well-being. Intelligence referred to "bringing within our ken what is capable, and what is not capable of being used as means," but also "seizing and combining, at the proper moment, whatever is the fittest as means to each particular end." More generally, rational practice requires a collection of observations of past acts, with a justified expectation (i.e. that similar causes produce similar effects) for specific results. Temperance entailed the ability of controlling one’s appetites and desires, preventing them from leading to a "hurtful direction," allowing the constant pursuit of what one "deliberately approves." The latter two cardinal virtues, justice and generosity, promote social wellbeing, by avoiding doing harm and by doing positive good to others (i.e. acting supererogatorily) respectively. Of course, Mill insisted, that "[i]n reality, as the happiness of the individual is bound up with that of his species, that which affects the happiness of the one, must also, in general, affect that of the other (Mill 1992, 154–156, 179; Loizides 2019c).

In short, Mill thought character depends on “the direction given to the desires and passions of men.” To this effect, the “business of good education” is to associate the “grand objects of desire” – e.g., wealth, power, dignity – with “admirable qualities” in individuals (e.g. “great intelligence, perfect self-command, and over-ruling benevolence”), not wicked ones (e.g. “flattery, back-biting, treachery”) (Mill 1992, 193; Mill 1829a, II.245). Since the political (and legal) arrangements in a society are very powerful in solidifying such associations through various institutions and practices, “Political Education” is “the key-stone of the arch” (Mill 1992, 193). Not only is government responsible for fostering proper habits and associations with good laws, justice and the eradication of corruption, according to Mill; but also, government should be held accountable when it failed to do so.

Given that “our opinions are the fathers of our actions,” Mill argued amidst the debate on parliamentary representation, it is vital that individuals do not take the opinions of others upon trust or let others choose for them what is in their interest to pursue. It was thus quite an important educational task to foster habits of examining the evidence which grounds opinions (Mill 1826, 10–11, 13–14; Mill 1992, 122, 126–130). Inattention to evidence made the detection of fallacious thinking, lying underneath a host of prejudices, impossible. Especially since those “who stand on the vantage ground of power,” Mill warned, had made an art of defending power through, what he called, “the logic of power”: the misrepresentation of facts, suppression of evidence, begging the question, argument from authority, appealing to fear, and inter alia, ridicule (Mill 1824, 465). Due to the ever-present danger that political, legal and social institutions might foster “habits of servility and toleration of arbitrary power,” the “Liberty of the Press” is a vital counteracting social influence, and, for that reason, “an inestimable blessing” to good government (Mill 1813b, 211–212, Mill 1992, 117–123; Grint 2017). The press functions thus as a sort of “high and constant observer” of government acts (Mill 1992, 107) through apt diffusion of praise and blame to public functionaries.

James Mill thought that “of all the circumstances which affect the happiness, the beauty, and order, and well-being of society, by far the most important” is individual character (Mill 1813a, 97). The shaping of character was no simple matter. From the domestic to the political sphere, many institutions played a part in the “elevation of the people”: elevation “above ignorance, above swinishness, above prostitute servility, above oppression, above delusion religious or political, above grovelling vice, above subjection to the irrational passions” (Mill 1813c, 345; Plassart 2008 and 2019). To adapt a famous Stoic idea, as we move from the inner to the outer concentric circles of affection and concern for one's self and for others, it becomes increasingly difficult (impossible even without conducive physical and moral circumstances), to abstain from doing harm or do positive good to others. As we saw, without strong associations, the knowing subject’s mind hardly takes cognizance of the interests or even the existence of others outside the narrow circle of one's self, family, friends and associates.

The effects of misguided associations, Mill urged, require “the greatest attention in Education, and Morals”: the “love of our Fellow-creatures” is “completely impotent” against the “love of Wealth, or of Power.” Good education strengthens virtuous motives so that they do not “give way, habitually, whenever they are opposed by any other motive even of moderate strength” (Mill 1829a, II.241). As he put it:

When the grand sources of felicity are formed into the leading and governing Ideas, each in its due and relative strength, Education has then performed its most perfect work; and thus the individual becomes, to the greatest degree, the source of utility to others, and of happiness to himself (Mill 1829a, II.303).

Only when one cares enough to sacrifice that “part of the self which the good of our species requires” (Mill 1818 , V.527) can individual exertion be directed towards the pursuit of social happiness. But it was a pursuit neither for the narrow-minded nor for the faint-hearted. For this reason, Mill thought that no great public good could “rest with safety on any thing so precarious, as the chance of extraordinary virtue in particular men” (Mill 1816, 248). “Is it according to the experience of human nature, that men with the powers of government in their hands are angels and have never any propensity to oppress?”, he wondered (Mill 1813d, 464).

In 1822, James Mackintosh found much that was admirable in Mill’s essays on government and education. However, Mackintosh protested, they were founded on an erroneous method (Mackintosh to Napier, 1822). Less than a decade later, Macaulay devastatingly drew out the implications of that method for Mill’s “utilitarian logic and politics.” In  reviewing the quarrel between Mill and Macaulay today, the modern reader may well experience a sense of déjà vu , not because the question of parliamentary reform remains relevant and timely, but because the epistemological and methodological questions raised by this debate are with us still. What is the nature of political knowledge, and how is it to be obtained? What sort of “science” can “political science” aspire to be? What is the connection between political theory and the practice of politics? Mill’s answers rather resemble those of modern “rational choice” theorists, and Macaulay’s those of their empirically minded critics. After all, Mill maintains that any scientific theory worthy of the name must proceed from a finite set of assumptions about human nature, with the self-interest axiom at their center. From these one can deduce conclusions about the ways in which rational political actors will (or at any rate ought to) behave. Macaulay, by contrast, claims that people act for all sorts of reasons, including—but by no means limited to—considerations of self-interest.

Mill’s Essay on Government —and Macaulay’s attack—earned for its author an unenviable reputation as an egregious simplifier of complex matters. Yet Mill remained unrepentant since such simplification was, in his view, the very purpose and point of theorizing. After all, to theorize is to simplify. But, as his critics were quick to note, it is one thing to simplify and quite another to oversimplify. In a modern echo of Macaulay’s estimate, Joseph Schumpeter contrasts Mill’s “monumental, and indeed path-breaking, History of British India ” with the Essay on Government , which “can be described only as unrelieved nonsense” because of its simplistic assumptions and its equally simplistic conclusions (Schumpeter 1954, 254). A more charitable estimate is provided by Brian Barry. Barry observes:

The results [of Mill’s reasoning] may appear somewhat crude, and yet it seems to me a serious question whether James Mill’s political theory is any more of an oversimplification than, say, Ricardo’s economics. The difference is, of course, that Ricardo’s ideas were refined by subsequent theorists, whereas James Mill’s Essay on Government had no successors until the last decade or so (Barry 1970, 11).

These successors, on Barry’s telling, include such rational choice theorists as Mancur Olson and Anthony Downs, amongst others. Alan Ryan concurs. Although “an eminently dislikable document,” Ryan writes, Mill’s Essay on Government “has virtues that ought not to be neglected.” One of these is that it “stands at the head of a line of thought extending down to Joseph Schumpeter and Anthony Downs, a line of thought that provides many of the explicit or implicit assumptions with the aid of which we still practice political science” (Ryan 1972, 82–83).

Although right in one respect, Barry’s and Ryan’s reassessments are rather wide of the mark in another. It is true that there is, methodologically speaking, a family resemblance between Mill’s axiomatic deductive reasoning in Government and, say, Anthony Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957). But it is important to note that Mill, unlike Downs and other ostensible successors of the rational choice school, was never content to interpret interests as wants, desires or “revealed preferences.” On the contrary, Mill was concerned with distinguishing between sinister and non-sinister interests, supplying causal explanations of their origins and development, rendering judgments about them, and attempting to alter the conditions that shape (or more often misshape) men’s and women’s characters. Hence his abiding interest in law, education, punishment, penology, psychology, and other avenues of “character-formation.” Mill’s aims were not only explanatory but critical, educative, and, by his lights, emancipatory. The point of almost everything he wrote—from his massive “critical, or judging” History of British India to the shortest essay—was, to borrow a phrase from Marx, not merely to understand the world but to change it. Not for Mill the vaunted “value-neutrality” of modern social and political science.

James Mill’s works

• (1806) Letter to William Forbes, 7 July 1806, in Anna J. Mill, 1976. ‘The Education of John—Further evidence’, Mill Newsletter 11 (1): 10–14 at 10–11.
• (1813a) “Essays on the Formation of Human Character,” Philanthropist 3 (10): 93–119.
• (1813b) “Education of the Poor,” Edinburgh Review 21 (41): 207–19.
• (1813c) “Lancasterian Institutions,” Philanthropist 3 (12): 344–58.
• (1813d) “Grant on the India Trade and Government,” Eclectic Review 9 (May): 453–471.
• (1816) “Beggar,” in Macvey Napier (ed.), 1824. Supplement to the IV, V, and VI Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , 6 vols., Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., vol. II (1): 231–248.
• (1818) The History of British India , 3 rd ed. 1826, 3 vols., London: Baldwin, Craddock and Joy.
• (1821) Elements of Political Economy , London: Baldwin, Craddock and Joy.
• (1824) “Periodical Literature: Quarterly Review, ” Westminster Review 2 (4): 463–503.
• (1826) “Formation of Opinions,” Westminster Review 6 (2): 1–23.

Government Jurisprudence Liberty of the Press Prisons and Prison Discipline Colonies Law of Nations Education

London: J. Innes [all except Colonies and Law of Nations are reprinted in Mill 1992]

• (1829a) Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind , 2 vols., London: Baldwin and Cradock.
• (1829b) James Mill to Etienne Dumont, 13 July 1829, MS Dumont, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Geneva, MS 76, fos 30–31 at 31.
• (1835) A Fragment on Mackintosh , London: Baldwin and Cradock
• (1992) James Mill: Political Writings , Terence Ball (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Other primary sources

• Macaulay,Thomas Babington, 1829. “Mill on Government,” Edinburgh Review 49 (97): 159–189, repr. in Mill 1992, 271–303.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1843. Letter to Auguste Comte, 28 January 1843, in John M. Robson (gen. ed.), 1963–91. Collected works of John Stuart Mill , 33 vols., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. XIII, p. 566.
• –––, 1873. Autobiography , in Collected Works , vol. I.
• –––, 1961. The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography , Jack Stillinger (ed.), Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Mackintosh, James, 1822. Letter to Macvey Napier, 8 January 1822, in M. Napier (ed.), 1879. Selection from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier , London: Macmillan, 34.
• Ricardo, David, 1820. Letter to James Mill, 27 July 1820, in Piero Sraffa (ed.) 2004. The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo , 11 vols., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund (or. ed. 1951–1977), vol. 8, p. 2119.
• Bain, Alexander, 1882. James Mill: A Biography , London: Longmans Green & Co.
• Ball, Terence, 1995. Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2010. “Competing Theories of Character Formation: James vs. John Stuart Mill,” in Georgios Varouxakis and Paul Kelly (eds.), John Stuart Mill – Thought and Influence; The Saint of Rationalism . New York and London: Routledge: 35–56.
• Barry, Brian, 1970. Sociologists, Economists and Democracy , London: Collier-Macmillan.
• Burston, Wyndham Hedley, 1973. James Mill on Philosophy and Education , London: Athlone Press.
• Carr, Wendell Robert, 1971. “James Mill’s Politics Reconsidered: Parliamentary Reform and the Triumph of Truth,” Historical Journal 14 (3): 553–580.
• Chen, Jeng-Guo, 2000. James Mill’s History of British India in its Intellectual Context , Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, PhD Thesis.
• Cumming, Ian, 1962. “The Scottish Education of James Mill,” History of Education Quarterly 2 (3): 152–167.
• De Marchi, Neil, 1983. “The Case for James Mill”. In: Coats, Alfred William (ed) Methodological Controversy in Economics: historical essays in honor of T.W. Hutchinson , London: Jai Press, 155–184.
• Fenn, Robert A., 1987. James Mill’s Political Thought , New York and London: Garland Publishing.
• Grint, Kristopher, 2013. James Mill’s Common Place Books and their Intellectual Context, 1773–1836 , Sussex: University of Sussex, PhD Thesis.
• –––, 2017. “The Freedom of the Press in James Mill’s Political Thought,” Historical Journal 60 (2): 363–383.
• Haakonsen, Knud, 1985. “James Mill and Scottish Moral Philosophy,” Political Studies 33 (4): 628–636.
• Halévy, Elie, 1955. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism , Boston: Beacon Press.
• Hamburger, Joseph, 1965. James Mill and the Art of Revolution , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Lazenby, Arthur L., 1972. James Mill: The Formation of a Scottish Émigré Writer , Sussex: University of Sussex, PhD Thesis.
• Lively, Jack; Rees, John Collwyn (eds.), 1978. Utilitarian Logic and Politics: James Mill’s “Essay on government,” Macaulay’s critique, and the ensuing debate , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Loizides, Antis, 2013a. John Stuart Mill’s Platonic Heritage: Happiness through Character , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• –––, 2013b. “Taking their Cue from Plato: James and John Stuart Mill,” History of European Ideas 39 (1): 121–40.
• –––, 2019a. James Mill’s Utilitarian Logic and Politics , London and New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2019b. “Utility, Reason and Rhetoric: James Mill’s Metaphor of the Historian as Judge,” Utilitas 31 (4): 431–49.
• –––, 2019c. “James Mill on Happiness,” in G. Varouxakis and M. Philp (eds.) Happiness and Utility: Essays Presented to Frederick Rosen , London: UCL Press: 161–83.
• Majeed, Javed, 1992. Ungoverned Imaginings, James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• McInerney, David J., 2002. James Mill and the End of Civilization , Canberra: Australian National University, PhD Thesis.
• Plamenatz, John, 1966. The English Utilitarians , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Plassart, Anna, 2008. “James Mill’s treatment of religion and the History of British India,” History of European Ideas 34 (4): 526–37.
• –––, 2019. “James Mill, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Problem of Civil Religion,” Modern Intellectual History 16 (3): 679–711.
• Rendall, Jane, 1982. “Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill,” Historical Journal 25 (1): 43–69.
• Ripoli, Mariangela, 1998. “The Return of James Mill,” Utilitas 10 (1): 105–21.
• Ryan, Alan, 1972. “Two Concepts of Politics and Democracy: James and John Stuart Mill,” in Martin Fleisher (ed.), Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought , pp. 76–113, New York: Atheneum.
• Schumpeter, Joseph, 1954. History of Economic Analysis , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Stimson, Shannon C., and Murray Milgate, 1993. “Utility, Property, and Political Participation: James Mill on Democratic Reform,” American Political Science Review 87 (4): 901–911.
• Thomas, William, 1969. “James Mill’s Politics: The ‘Essay on Government’ and the Movement for Reform,” Historical Journal 12 (2): 249–84.
• –––, 1979. The Philosophical Radicals , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wilson, Fred, 1990. Psychological Analysis and the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Woodcock, Michael Bernard, 1980. “Educational Principles and Political Thought: The Case of James Mill,” History of Political Thought 1 (3): 475–97.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Works of James Mill , available at Online Library of Liberty (oll.libertyfund.org).
• Elements of Political Economy , 3rd edition, 1844.

Bentham, Jeremy | consequentialism | democracy | liberalism | Mill, John Stuart | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century

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17 Jeremy Bentham and James Mill

Philip Schofield is Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought and Director of the Bentham Project at University College London.

• Published: 01 April 2014
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Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and James Mill (1773–1836) first came into contact in 1808 or 1809, and, despite their very different backgrounds, joined forces to create the movement that has become known as philosophic radicalism. Both Bentham and Mill accepted that human beings, and sentient creatures generally, were motivated by a desire for pleasure and an aversion to pain, and that happiness consisted in a balance of pleasure over pain. In their view, the only right and proper actions were those which contributed to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. From this utilitarian perspective, they condemned the existing British political, legal, and ecclesiastical establishments, and developed proposals in favour of radical parliamentary reform, which would see a democratic House of Commons counterbalance the sinister interest of monarch and aristocracy. By 1818 Bentham had become a republican, and went on to develop even more radical proposals for political reform. Bentham argued that only under a representative democracy could the interests of rulers be identified with those of subjects, and hence the happiness of the community as a whole effectively pursued.

1. Introduction: A Meeting of Minds

It is unclear precisely when Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and James Mill (1773–1836) became acquainted. The earliest surviving letter between them, sent by Mill on 27 April 1809, indicates that they were already in regular contact, with Mill taking a keen interest in Bentham’s Elements of the Art of Packing as applied to Special Juries (printed 1810, published 1820), 1 which he was composing at the time ( Bentham 1988 : 25–6). A few days earlier on 8 April 1809 Étienne Dumont, Bentham’s Genevan friend and editor, had drawn Bentham’s attention to a favourable notice, written anonymously, of his Scotch Reform (1808) that had appeared in the Annual Review ( Bentham 1988 : 21–2). The author was Mill, though it is unclear whether Dumont was aware of this. The received view is that Bentham and Mill had met some time in 1808 ( Bain 1882 : 72), soon became intimate friends, and that Mill thereupon converted Bentham to political radicalism ( Dinwiddy 1975 : 684–5). As Robert Fenn (1987 : 126–7 n.) has pointed out, however, there is no more evidence that Mill converted Bentham to political radicalism than that Bentham converted Mill. The fact is that by early 1809 Bentham had already concluded that sinister interest pervaded the whole of the British state and that wholesale reform was necessary. In Mill he found a like-minded collaborator. Together they provided the intellectual and practical leadership to the movement that became known as philosophic radicalism, 2 and which had a significant impact on political, legal, and ecclesiastical reform in Britain in the 1830s and beyond, while their brand of classical utilitarianism continues to have an enduring impact on moral, political, and legal philosophy.

At the time of their meeting, the contrast between Bentham’s and Mill’s respective situations in life was stark. Bentham, educated at Westminster School and Queen’s College, Oxford, a qualified barrister, was a wealthy gentleman, owning a large house and enormous garden in Westminster, with a substantial property portfolio inherited from his father Jeremiah, a successful attorney who had practised in the City of London. He had been on familiar terms with the Marquess of Lansdowne, who (as Earl of Shelburne) had been leader of the administration in 1782–3, and had access to almost any social circle that he might have cared to join. His international reputation as a philosopher of law had been secured by the appearance of Traités de législation civile et pénale , a French recension of his works, edited by Dumont, and published at Paris in 1802. His ambitions had, however, suffered a major setback when in 1803 the government had effectively quashed his panopticon prison scheme, an enterprise to which he had devoted more than a decade of his life ( Semple 1993 ). He had then turned to work on judicial evidence and procedure, where he produced a systematic account of ‘sinister interest’, a phrase he had first used in the 1790s in relation to the aristocratic landowners who, because of the blight they expected a panopticon prison to cast upon their neighbouring estates, had opposed its construction. Bentham argued that sinister interest infected the judicial establishment: the confusion, obscurity, and expense that characterized English law was a product of the sinister interest of lawyers, who thereby extorted large amounts of money from their clients, and denied legal redress to all but the rich. He then recognized that the political establishment was in collusion with the lawyers, and formed part of the same sinister interest that linked rulers in an alliance against the people in general. When Bentham turned to his attention to parliamentary reform in the summer of 1809, the ground for his radical critique of the British political system had already been laid ( Schofield 2006 : 109–36).

James Mill’s father was a shoemaker in a village in Forfar, Scotland. His precocious intellect had brought him to the attention of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart of Fettercairn, who had supported him through his studies at the University of Edinburgh. He had been licensed to preach in the Church of Scotland, but having failed to obtain a parish had moved to London in 1802, where he set to work as an author, editor, reviewer, and commentator ( Bain 1882 : 1–23, 36–8). At the time he met Bentham, with a young and ever-expanding family to provide for, he was struggling to make ends meet. It would not be until the publication of History of British India (1817) and his subsequent appointment as an assistant examiner at the East India Company in 1819 that he would become financially secure ( Bain 1882 : 185). For several years Bentham allowed Mill to stay at a reduced rent in one of his properties, a stone’s throw from his own house ( Bain 1882 : 72–4). Mill was forceful, energetic, determined to translate theory into practice and hence involved in a whole range of practical initiatives, and inspired a younger generation of radically inclined politicians and writers ( Bain 1882 : 180–3). Bentham was jovial, contented, devoted much of his day to writing (though his self-portrayal as a reclusive ‘hermit’ should not be accepted at face value), but similarly determined to have a practical impact. It proved to be a powerful alliance. One of Mill’s first activities was to edit Bentham’s writings on judicial evidence, which led to the partial printing of ‘An Introduction to the Rationale of Judicial Evidence’. 3 He became Bentham’s companion at his country retreats, initially at a farmhouse near Oxted in Surrey, and later, between 1814 and 1817, after Bentham had received £23,000 in government compensation for his expenditure on the rejected panopticon prison scheme, at the stately Ford Abbey, near Chard in Devon. They enjoyed a close and stimulating relationship at Ford Abbey, going on daily walks (or ‘circumgyrations’ as Bentham termed them), and discussing a range of topics, but with religion and the Church high on the agenda ( Fuller 2004 ). 4 Bentham then lost money in a scheme to build Vauxhall Bridge and had to give up the Abbey. Mill’s articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica , first published in 1816–23, were in large measure a distillation of Bentham ideas, presented with a directness and simplicity of style that has not always been considered to be a characteristic of Bentham’s prose. 5 Both men, however, attempted to be clear, systematic, and intellectually rigorous, and rejected as nonsense any so-called knowledge based on supernatural or metaphysical insight. Their relationship was less intense in the 1820s when Mill came to regret the influence that John Bowring, a merchant, linguist, and poet, came to have over Bentham and his affairs ( John Stuart Mill 1981 : 93, 135). Nevertheless their joint commitment to the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the basis for radical political reform never wavered, and while Bentham drew up his codes of law, founded the Westminster Review in 1824 as a radical alternative to the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Tory Quarterly Review , and immersed himself in law reform, Mill mentored not only his eldest son John Stuart but also the rising generation of young radicals—including George Grote, John and Charles Austin, Charles Buller, and John Arthur Roebuck, 6 took a major role in the founding of the University of London (now University College London), 7 and published the seminal Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) . At the same time, Mill continued to play a major role in the affairs of the East India Company where in 1830 he was eventually promoted to the position of chief Examiner.

2. Bentham on the Relation of Psychology and Ethics

Bentham and Mill both held the view that human beings, and sentient creatures generally, were solely motivated by a desire for pleasure and an aversion to pain. As Bentham explained, this belief was founded on experience and observation, the only basis for knowledge ( Bentham 2010 : 624). He began An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed 1780, published 1789) by stating: ‘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’. The sovereign masters of pain and pleasure ‘govern[ed] us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think’, and indicated ‘the standard of right and wrong’ ( Bentham 1970 : 11). Hence psychology (itself founded on a physiology) 8 and ethics could both be understood only in terms of their relationship to the entities of pleasure and pain. In relation to psychology, an individual was in a state of happiness or well-being when he experienced a balance of pleasure over pain; in a state of suffering or misery when he experienced a balance of pain over pleasure. As far as the individual was concerned, good consisted in the experience of pleasure, or the exemption from pain, while evil consisted in the experience of pain or the loss of pleasure ( Bentham 1998 : 256). When an individual anticipated the enjoyment of some pleasure (or the avoidance of some pain) from the performance of an action, he had a desire to perform that action—in other words, he had an interest in performing it. The desire or interest gave rise to a motive, which, when coupled with a belief in the power (the capacity to alter the physical world) to accomplish the action in question, led to the production of the action. Except in those cases where coercion was involved, in other words where one person’s will was directed by another person’s will, the will was directed by the understanding, which consisted in knowledge and judgement ( Bentham 1970 : 96–100; 1983b : 92–4).

The sensations of pleasure and pain were the only things that mattered, and were, therefore, the source of all value. The value of a pleasure or pain, which was equivalent to the quantity of pleasure or pain experienced, depended on six ‘elements’ or ‘dimensions’, namely intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, and purity. Leaving pain out of the account, the intensity of a pleasure referred to its strength; duration to the length of time for which it was enjoyed; certainty to its likelihood or probability; propinquity to its nearness in point of time; fecundity to the probability of its leading to further pleasures; and purity to the probability of its not leading to pains. There was, however, a seventh ‘element’, namely extent, which referred to the number of persons that were subject to the pleasurable experience. To calculate the morality of an action, one took the pleasures and pains produced in the instance of a single individual, repeated the process for each individual affected, and aggregated the results. If the balance were on the side of pleasure, the act was morally good; if on the side of pain, morally evil ( Bentham 1970 : 38–41). The general interest was an aggregation of the interests of all the members of the community in question. By taking extent into account, a proposition of psychology was transformed into a proposition of ethics. A right action was one that produced a balance of pleasure over pain, taking into account the pleasures and pains of every person affected by the action in question: ‘An action…may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility, (meaning with respect to the community at large) when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.’ A person who accepted this view was an adherent of the principle of utility ( Bentham 1970 : 12–13; for commentary see Postema 2006 ).

Each individual was motivated primarily by self-regard, that is a desire to promote his own interest. Individuals were also motivated by sympathetic regard, that is a desire to promote the happiness of those towards whom they felt some friendship or affection, and by antipathetic regard, that is a desire to promote the suffering of those towards whom they felt some hostility or disaffection. Because of the predominance of self-regard, individuals could not be relied upon to promote the interest of the community as a whole where there existed a conflict between their own interest and the general interest ( Bentham 1970 : 116–24; 1983b : 202–4, 210–11, 277–8). The task of the legislator was to distribute sanctions, consisting of rewards and punishments—pleasures and pains—in order to discourage those actions that were detrimental to the community as a whole, and encourage those that were beneficial. In other words, actions that were detrimental to the greatest happiness should be constituted into offences (except such cases where punishment was ‘unmeet’ through being groundless, inefficacious, too expensive, or needless), while those that harmed no one should be left alone ( Bentham 1970 : 34–7, 158–64). The law was the most important means of promoting happiness, since it created security (consisting most importantly in the distribution of rights and duties that protected person, property, reputation, and condition in life), thus guaranteeing reasonable expectations, and allowing human beings to project themselves and their plans into the future ( Kelly 1990 : 71–136). The legislator had to attach just enough punishment to an offence to dissuade the potential offender from committing it—too little punishment would be ineffective, while anything above the minimum would be to inflict unnecessary evil. The legislator, with the happiness of the community as his objective, had it in his power to guide the behaviour of those subject to him by means of the sanctions at his disposal ( Rosen 2003 : 152–7). The problem that Bentham had to face, as we shall see, was how to ensure that the legislator himself was committed to promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number, rather than his own self-interest.

In the second edition of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation which appeared in 1823, having become dissatisfied with the term the principle of utility, since it did not bring to mind either the ideas of pleasure and pain or the number of the interests concerned, Bentham explained that he now preferred to speak of the greatest happiness principle or the greatest felicity principle ( Burns 2005 ). The notion of happiness did not make sense unless it was related to the sensations of pleasure and pain, while the rightness or wrongness of an action depended more on the number of the persons affected than on any other circumstance ( Bentham 1970 : 11 n.) He confessed that, when originally writing An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , he had not understood the implications of the principle of utility for constitutional law, and so had not appreciated the strength of the hostility manifested towards it by the then Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn (afterwards Lord Loughborough) when he had called it ‘a dangerous principle’. In particular, Bentham had not attended to ‘those features of the English Government, by which the greatest happiness of the ruling one with or without that of a favoured few, are now so plainly seen to be the only ends to which the course of it has at any time been directed’. The principle of utility, or the greatest happiness principle, was ‘unquestionably’ dangerous ‘to every government which has for its actual end or object, the greatest happiness of a certain one , with or without the addition of some comparatively small number of others, whom it is matter of pleasure or accommodation to him to admit, each of them, to a share in the concern, on the footing of so many junior partners’ ( Bentham 1970 : 14–15n.).

3. Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform

By the time that he began to write on parliamentary reform in 1809 Bentham had come to recognize that rulers, like all other human beings, were primarily motivated by their self-interest ( Dinwiddy 1975 ). The problem was how to organize the structure of government so that rulers promoted not their own happiness but the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In Plan of Parliamentary Reform , eventually published in 1817, Bentham recommended ‘democratic ascendancy’, which would be achieved by radical political reform. Under the existing constitution, the monarch and aristocracy joined together in order to oppress the people in general. The universal interest was thereby sacrificed to the ‘conjunct yoke’ of the monarchical and aristocratical interests. The King, in his role as Corruptor-General, offered money, power, and factitious dignity (titles of honour) to members of the Houses of Parliament in return for their votes. Bentham was content to allow the executive to continue in the hands of the King and his ministers, but proposed that the House of Commons should, by means of electoral reform, be made subservient to the people, and thereby act as a check upon the executive. The suffrage would be extended to males over the age of 21 who could read and sign their name. Certain classes of persons who were considered to be incapable of exercising the suffrage to their advantage would be excluded. These classes included minors, sailors and soldiers (on the grounds that they were subject to the influence of the Corruptor-General), and females (though there was no good reason in Bentham’s view for their exclusion). Roughly equal electoral districts would be established, so that each person’s vote had a similar value. The secret ballot would secure the freedom of suffrage, in that it would allow each person to vote according to his own judgement as to what constituted his best interest, and not according to the will of some other person, such as his landlord. Secrecy of suffrage was, in Bentham’s view, the crucial measure, since where voting was open, a very small sum would be enough to bribe each voter—Bentham confessed that a few shillings would secure his own vote. Elections would take place annually at a fixed time, and compared with the existing interval of seven years would considerably reduce the value to the Corruptor-General of any bribe offered to a representative. The suffrage would, therefore, be virtually universal, practically equal, secret, and annual. In addition, government officials would be excluded from the Commons, while constant attendance would be required from the representatives themselves. Bentham envisaged that the reforms he proposed would render the members of the House of Commons dependent on the people, rather than on the King ( Schofield 2006 : 146–52). These measures would not have abolished the monarchy or the House of Lords. It was not until after the publication of Plan of Parliamentary Reform that Bentham became a republican.

4. Bentham’s Republicanism

As he intimated in the second edition of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , it was not until later in his career that Bentham turned his attention wholeheartedly to constitutional law. In 1809 he began to advocate the radical reform of Parliament, and then in 1818 republicanism. The cause of this shift is not entirely clear, but he came to recognize that in order to introduce legal reform, it would first be necessary to introduce political reform, and that meant a representative democracy, or in other words a republic ( Schofield 2006 : 240–9). His most important work was the monumental Constitutional Code (partially published 1830), on which he began work in 1822, having received an invitation from the Portuguese Cortes to draw up penal, civil, and constitutional codes ( Bentham 1998 : 335–6). In introductory material intended for the constitutional code, drawing on the psychological and ethical theories he had outlined in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , Bentham argued that representative democracy was the only good form of government. In an absolute monarchy, the monarch’s sinister interest was ‘irreconcilably opposite’ to the universal interest: it was his interest that whatever act increased his own happiness should be performed, no matter how much harm resulted to the rest of the community ( Bentham 1989 : 152–4). The monarch operated through three ‘real and corporeal’ instruments, namely the soldier, lawyer, and priest, and through four ‘fictitious, incorporeal, nominal’ instruments, namely force, fear or terror, corruption, and delusion. The soldier, in return for his pay, used force and intimidation, mainly against foreign enemies but also against recalcitrant subjects at home. He also contributed inadvertently to delusion through military show, which perverted the judgement of the people by equating the monarch’s ‘power and splendor’ with ‘excellence, moral and intellectual’. The lawyer’s principal instrument was delusion. He invented ‘a sort of Divinity which he calls Common Law’, which was a source of profit both to the monarch and to the lawyer himself, with money in the form of fees being exacted from those able to pay, while access to justice was denied to those unable to do so. The priest’s principal instrument was also delusion, and through delusion, intimidation: ‘The Divinity sprung from the brain of the Lawyer is Common Law. The Divinity sprung from the brain of the Priest is Religion.’ While the lawyer confined his terrors to the present life, the priest invented a future life which he ‘filled with torments in intensity and duration infinite’. According to the priest, unless an individual did the will of the monarch in the present life, no matter the amount of misery produced, he would be condemned to an eternity of torment in the future life ( Bentham 1989 : 183–6). The priesthood, the legal profession, and the military maintained in their various ways the authority of the monarch in return for their share in the fruits of the oppression.

In a limited monarchy or a mixed form of government, containing a legislature that purportedly represented the people, the monarch had money, power, and factitious dignity at his disposal. He consumed a proportion of these ‘objects of general desire’ himself, but used the remainder to corrupt the members of the legislature, typically in the form of offices, commissions, and pensions. Members of the legislature had an interest in obtaining as much of this money, power, and factitious dignity—this matter of corruptive influence—as possible. No one needed to be told that the monarch would reward any member of the legislature who contributed to increasing the number and amount of the objects of desire at his disposal: it would be as pointless as it would be for a shopkeeper to run into the street to tell passers-by that he had goods for sale. The legislature voted in favour of wars and the annexation of colonies; the additional offices, commissions, and pensions thereby created were bestowed on members of the legislature or their relations; the people were forced to pay through increased taxation imposed by the legislature. Hence a mixed form of government was a partnership in corruption, with the monarch as the leading partner and the representatives of the people as the junior partners ( Bentham 1989 : 195–202).

The only form of government that might be constituted in such a way as to promote the greatest happiness was a representative democracy. The key was to identify the interest of rulers with that of the people. Such an identification existed when an individual experienced good or evil in the same proportion that it was experienced by the whole community: ‘As between individual and the community, identification of interests is constituted by communion in good, or by communion in evil, or by communion in both kinds.’ The opposition of interests existed when the individual experienced good, but evil was experienced by the whole community ( Bentham 1989 : 125). Where the opposition of interests was produced by laws and institutions, ‘the root of the evil is in the form of the government’, and could only be remedied by changing it ( Bentham 1989 : 126–7). The choice was between passively accepting the situation and suffering accordingly, or else rising up and overthrowing the government and replacing it with one in which the interest of rulers coincided with that of the universal interest. There was no point merely changing the existing set of rulers for a new set of rulers. The new rulers, placed in the same situation and thus imbued with the same sinister interest, would pursue the same sinister course as the old rulers: ‘The whole Official Establishment is in that case in the state of a ship infected with the plague’ ( Bentham 1989 : 128).

In advocating representative democracy, Bentham did not adopt the traditional theory of the division of power between legislative, executive, and judiciary. He argued that when the different holders of the branches of power disagreed, government came to a standstill, and when they agreed, the division was unnecessary ( Bentham 2002 : 409–13). Instead he insisted on clear lines of command between the different powers of government, and invented a new terminology to represent his alternative approach. The primary distinction was between operative power and constitutive power. The operative power performed the business of government, while the constitutive power determined the persons who would exercise the operative power ( Bentham 1989 : 30–1). 9 Operative power was divided into legislative and executive power, with the latter divided into administrative and judicial power. The administrative department applied the general rules and ordinances sanctioned by the legislative power to particular persons and things, and had control over such resources as had been set aside for the service of the state. The judicial department likewise applied the rules and ordinances sanctioned by the legislative power, but only in those cases where there existed a dispute between two or more parties ( Bentham 1989 : 6–7).

In order to establish good government, Bentham argued that the natural opposition of interests that existed between rulers and subjects had to be replaced with an artificial identification of interests. In order to accomplish this, two different sets of interests had to be identified. The interest of the possessors of constitutive power needed to be identified with the universal interest, and the interest of the possessors of operative power with that of the possessors of constitutive power. In relation to the constitutive power, it was necessary to place it in the hands of every one—in other words, there should in principle be universal suffrage, but subject in practice, as we shall see, to certain exceptions. Since the universal interest was the aggregate of all individual interests, each individual should vote for the candidate whom he considered would best promote his own interest. In each electoral district, that candidate would be elected who appealed to the interests of the majority of voters. Once elected to the legislature, the representative or deputy (as Bentham termed the elected candidate) would vote, in regard to any particular arrangement, in favour of the interests of the inhabitants of his own district, as would all the other deputies. The result would be that ‘the arrangements which are favorable to the interests of the inhabitants of all the Districts, or at least to the majority of them,…will be adopted and carried into effect’. That part of the happiness of each individual that was not adverse to that of any other would, insofar as depended on government, be secured to him, ‘while all such portions of happiness as he could not be made to enjoy without depriving others of happiness to greater amount will not be given to him’ ( Bentham 1989 : 135–7).

In the case of the possessors of supreme operative power, an unlimited pursuit of their own interests would be detrimental to the extent that an opposition existed between their interests and the universal interest. To ensure that this power was directed towards the promotion of the universal interest, a counterforce had to be established: ‘this is the power reserved or given to the creators of their power, the possessors of the supreme constitutive power, to be the annihilators of it whenever they please’. The possessors of the constitutive power would allow the possessors of the legislative power to remain in office so long as they pursued their own happiness in no other way than through their share in the universal interest. If they attempted to engage in a course of action detrimental to the universal interest, the possessors of the supreme constitutive power would remove them from office. In this way, the identification of the interests of rulers and subjects would be as complete as possible; the constitutive power would be in the hands of the subjects themselves, while the legislative power would be in hands chosen by them. In relation to the legislative power, the subjects would themselves be rulers ( Bentham 1989 : 132–5). In other words, the electorate, exercising constitutive power, would be sovereign ( Bentham 1983a : 25). Beneath the electorate in the chain of subordination would be the legislature, and beneath the legislature, in parallel chains of subordination, would be the administrative and judicial departments, which together constituted the supreme executive power (for Bentham’s democratic theory, see Harrison 1983 : 225–62; Rosen 1983 ; Schofield 2006 : 250–303).

5. Securities for Official Aptitude

The purpose of Bentham’s proposed constitutional structure was to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number—the only right and proper end of government—by effecting the two subordinate ends of constitutional law, namely the maximization of official aptitude and the minimization of expense. ‘The goodness of the government’, explained Bentham, ‘will be as the aptitude of the portions of law enacted by it and the operations performed by it’, and the aptitude of the law and the operations would in turn depend upon the aptitude of those enacting the law and performing the operations: hence, the need to secure the maximization of official aptitude. Drawing again on his psychological theory, Bentham divided aptitude into three branches—moral, intellectual, and active. Moral aptitude consisted in a willingness to promote the general interest. Intellectual aptitude consisted in the knowledge and judgement required to perform the tasks associated with a particular office. Active aptitude consisted in the physical performance of those tasks. Since all expense was evil, it was also necessary to secure the minimization of expense, understood not merely in terms of monetary expense, but in terms of costs of all sorts, including taxation, punishment, remuneration, factitious dignity, and all forms of obligation (that is the imposition of constraint and restraint) ( Bentham 1989 : 4–5).

Viewed from another perspective, the identification of interests brought about by representative democracy provided the framework within which the securities for official aptitude could operate effectively. The detailed administrative arrangements that Bentham drew up in his writings for the constitutional code were intended to contribute to the securing of the various branches of aptitude, with particular emphasis on the members of the legislature, ministers including the prime minister and the justice minister, judges, members of the armed forces, and subordinate officials within the various sub-departments (ministries). Not all the securities were appropriate in each instance, but Bentham identified a number of securities that would apply across most of the official establishment. Of the securities for moral aptitude, the most important was the very structure of representative democracy, that is the limitation of the legislative power by its subordination to the constitutive power. This subordination would be achieved, as we have seen, by placing the power of appointment and dismissal (location and dislocation in Bentham’s terminology) in the hands of the possessors of constitutive power, exercised at stated intervals. The power of dismissal was crucial, and far more important in securing subordination than the power of appointment:

A servant whom, whatsoever be his behaviour towards you, it has been out of your power to dismiss is by that very thing made your master: your master in reality, your servant only in name. So you have but the power of dismissing him, a servant chosen though it be by an adversary will be less annoying to you than in the other case a servant chosen by yourself may be.

A second mode of limiting power was the division of the legislative power into fractions. If one person was sole legislator, elected for one year, it would be relatively easy for him to extend his power for a further year, and easier still each succeeding year. Hence, as well as annual elections, it was necessary that the power be shared among a number of individuals, each elected by a separate set of constituents, distributed into roughly equal electoral districts. The possessors of executive power would in turn be made subordinate to the possessors of legislative power by subjection to the powers of dismissal and, in cases of legal infringement, judicially exercised punishment. The legislature would also enjoy the power to prevent, both temporarily and permanently, executive acts from coming into force, and to rescind their written orders. Were it not for this subordination, the chief executive functionary (whether monarch, president, or prime minister) would be able to veto all the acts of the legislative body, and by means of the offices at his disposal, corrupt its members, and transform the government into a despotism ( Bentham 1989 : 30–3, 36–7, 41).

A further security for moral aptitude was of such critical importance that without it the structure of representative democracy would not of itself lead to the promotion of the greatest happiness: this security was the moral responsibility of rulers, that is their subjection to criticism at the hands of the public opinion tribunal wielding the force of the moral sanction—in short, publicity and open government. The public opinion tribunal was formed by all persons who took notice of an issue. The decision of the tribunal, while it could not be definitively ascertained, was a presumption made by ‘each individual in his character of member of the tribunal of public opinion’ in relation to ‘the decision likely to be pronounced by the several other members’ ( Bentham 1989 : 56–7). 10 The opinion pronounced or acted upon by each individual member of the public opinion tribunal would be determined by his conception of his own interest. The public opinion tribunal was, therefore, divided into two sections, the democratical and the aristocratical. The interest of the former was that of the majority, of the subject many, of the productive classes. The interest of the latter was that of ‘the ruling and otherwise influential few’, of the non-productive classes, and hence would often be in opposition to the interest of the democratical section. The members of the democratical section would attach good repute to those actions that they regarded as contributory to the universal interest, and disrepute to those that they regarded as detrimental, and apportion praise and blame accordingly. The members of the aristocratical section would attach disrepute to those actions that they regarded as detrimental to their particular interest. The will of the public opinion tribunal as a whole, however, would be determined by the interest of the majority of its members, that is by the democratical section ( Bentham 1989 : 68–9).

With the major exception of the legislative power, which was to be divided into fractions, official positions were to be ‘single-seated’, that is all functions were to be undertaken by a particular, identifiable functionary. When decisions were made by a committee, no single individual could be held responsible, and no praise or blame attached to any one by the public opinion tribunal. Without single-seatedness, it was virtually impossible to hold officials accountable for their actions ( Bentham 1983a : 173–86). The implication of moral responsibility was that all government activity, and the reasons for it, should be documented, and those documents made public, unless a public case had been made for secrecy ( Ben Dor 2000 ; Lieberman 2000 ).

Other securities for moral aptitude included minimizing the amount of money at the disposal of functionaries and prohibiting them from making any personal profit from it ( Bentham 1989 : 45); reducing the amount of salary received by functionaries, since the lower the salary, the less attractive the office as a source of corruption ( Bentham 1989 : 40, 47); and excluding factitious dignity, that is abolishing titles of honour artificially created and bestowed. The purpose of a title was to persuade the people that meritorious service had been performed by the person on whom it was conferred, but in practice such titles were conferred without any connection to meritorious service. The proper role of government was to make known the sort and quantity of service an individual had rendered, and allow people to decide for themselves what respect (or disrespect) they wished to give to the individual in question ( Bentham 1989 : 48–52).

A further security for moral aptitude consisted in the non-establishment of any religion, or more precisely in prohibiting the giving of any reward or inflicting of any punishment for making any profession of religious belief. If an individual accepted that a particular religion were true, there was no need to reward him for professing his belief. If he did not believe it to be true, such an inducement instilled a habit of insincerity and mendacity. Moreover, the reward in question could only be supplied by taxation, obtained by coercion, and hence constituted an evil in itself. To pay priests to inculcate religious belief was still worse. The priest was rendered both morally corrupt and intellectually debilitated since he concentrated on only one side of the question—that is on those arguments that tended to show, in his view, that the belief was true ( Bentham 1989 : 325–7). The priest, as we have seen, did not merely delude himself, but contributed to bad government by deluding the people as a whole. The advantage to rulers of an established religion was that they enjoyed the patronage of the immense mass of money, extracted from rich and poor alike, that was paid to the priests ( Bentham 1989 : 329). No religion had ever been established ‘but for the purpose as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression, in the hands of the government’ ( Bentham 1989 : 331).

For the securing of intellectual aptitude, Bentham recommended examination tailored to the specific duties and powers of each office. The examination should be public, so that the public opinion tribunal could monitor the activities of the examiners, and take place orally, with each candidate encouraged to take part in the examination of his rivals, since he had an interest in bringing to light their inadequacies. The result would be ‘an extraordinary supply of intellectual aptitude on the part of every one of them’ ( Bentham 1989 : 77–84). Active aptitude required the uninterrupted attendance of the official at the place where the duty needed to be performed. With the possible exception of ‘[t]he periodical day of rest’, each and every functionary, from the highest to the lowest, should attend the ‘individual spot, if such a spot there be, in which alone the service can be rendered’. One security was to link pay to attendance ( Bentham 1989 : 87–9). A second security was to establish ‘relish for the function’. Candidates would be required to bid in a public auction for the pay allotted to an office: they might offer to serve for reduced pay, for no pay at all, or even to give money. If a candidate was willing to pay a higher price, it could be assumed that he anticipated a greater amount of pleasure from performing, and would possess a greater degree of skill in performing, the functions attached to the office. The patron of the office—say a minister appointing an official in his sub-department—would need to take into account the results not only of the auction, but also of the public examination, indicating the degree of intellectual aptitude possessed by each candidate. The minister would choose the individual whom he considered to be the best candidate, but his choice would be subject to the scrutiny of the public opinion tribunal, who would have the same information—the results of the auction and the examination—that the minister possessed in coming to his decision. The minister would judge which candidate was the most apt, and the public would judge the minister’s judgement ( Bentham 1989 : 89–93).

6. Bentham’s Blueprint for Representative Democracy

In Constitutional Code , Bentham translated these principles of good government into a set of complex institutional arrangements, though only a brief outline can be offered here (for more detailed accounts see Hume 1981 : 165–237; Rosen 1983 : 130–67). The territory of the state would be divided into equal electoral districts, with a roughly equal number of constituents, each returning one member to the legislature, hence ensuring that each person’s vote was of a similar value. Elections would be held annually, and the ballot would be secret, hence ensuring that no voter would be subject to any form of corruptive influence. The electorate would be composed of all males above the age of 21, subject to a literacy test ( Bentham 1983a : 11, 27, 30). Bentham was in favour of female suffrage, and had in fact recommended it to the French as early as 1789 ( Bentham 2002 : 246–8), but thought that to incorporate the proposal into the constitutional code would be counter-productive until the public mind itself had become more enlightened ( Bentham 1989 : 99–100). Each set of constituents had the power to remove their deputy from office at any point between elections by means of a petition of a quarter of the electorate, followed by a majority vote. Several executive functionaries, including the prime minister, ministers, justice minister, and judges, were subject to the same procedure ( Bentham 1983a : 31–3). The legislature would be composed of a single chamber. There would be no limits to its power—it would be ‘omnicompetent’, that is there would be no entrenched or immutable laws that it could not alter (see Schwartzberg 2007 ). It was, however, to be subject to checks in the form of the securities for appropriate aptitude ( Bentham 1983a : 41–4). The deputies would be subject to a three-year period of non-relocability, so that they could not be re-elected until constituents had at least three experienced candidates from which to choose ( Bentham 1983a : 72–3). In order to obviate any difficulties generated by annual elections and temporary non-relocability in relation to the continuity of policy and legislation, there would be a continuation committee attached to the legislature, consisting of outgoing members of the legislature. Members of the continuation committee had the right to make motions and speak in the legislature, but not to vote ( Bentham 1983a : 67–8). The prime minister, at the head of the administrative department, would be appointed for a four-year term by the legislature, and could be dismissed by both legislature and by a petition and majority vote of the constitutive power ( Bentham 1983a : 148–59). Bentham envisaged thirteen sub-departments, each headed by a minister, appointed for life by the prime minister, but removable either by the legislature, or prime minister, or petition and majority vote of the constitutive power ( Bentham 1983a : 171–2, 295, 311, 365). The justice minister would be in an analogous position to the prime minister at the head of the judicial department, responsible for appointing judges, but subject to dismissal at the hands of the legislature or the constitutive power by petition and majority vote ( Bowring 1843 : ix. 597, 607–8, 610).

7. Mill’s Essay on Government

Mill’s Essay on Government was published in 1820, and is in many respects an exposition of Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform , and therefore less radical than Constitutional Code . 11 For Mill, the role of the representatives of the people was to act as a check upon those by whom the powers of government were exercised, and hence the main division was between the people and their representatives on the one side, and the wielders of government power—the executive—on the other. This was to mirror Bentham’s approach in Plan of Parliamentary Reform . By the time that he began work on the constitutional code in 1822, Bentham regarded the representatives of the people (or deputies as he termed them) as themselves rulers, and drew the main line of division between the people on the one side (the constitutive power) and the deputies and all other holders of government office on the other (the operative power). This development in Bentham’s thought was a product of his commitment to republicanism, and his view that the people themselves would act as a check upon an omnicompetent legislature. In Plan of Parliamentary Reform he had envisaged the continued existence of the monarch, who would yield executive power, and the House of Lords, and hence need to be checked by a House of Commons subject to the people. In his proposed republic, monarch and aristocrats would have no place. Mill did not follow Bentham into republicanism ( Mill 1992 : 35–6), and hence did not go beyond the approach outlined by Bentham in Plan of Parliamentary Reform .

Mill started from the same psychological and ethical assumptions as those announced by Bentham in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation . He outlined his basic principles as follows:

That the actions of men are governed by their wills, and their wills by their desires: That their desires are directed to pleasure and relief from pain as ends , and to wealth and power as the principal means: That to the desire of these means there is no limit; and that the actions which flow from this unlimited desire are the constituents whereof bad Government is made. ( Mill 1992 : 17)

The aim of government was the greatest happiness of the greatest number, namely ‘to increase to the utmost the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the pains, which men derive from one another’, with happiness consisting in the balance of pleasures over pains ( Mill 1992 : 3–4). The great difficulty of government, instituted as it was to secure to each man the product of his labour to the greatest extent possible, was to stop rulers from exercising the powers of government badly. Just as an individual was tempted to take the objects of desire from any individual weaker than himself, so the members of government were under the same temptation in relation to the members of the community. Hence, it was necessary to establish securities against the abuse of power ( Mill 1992 : 6).

Mill, like Bentham, adopted the standard Aristotelian division of government into democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy for purposes of analysis. In relation to democracy, Mill repeated the commonplace argument that the people as a whole could not govern themselves, on account of both the chaos that would ensue in a mass assembly, and the fact that political questions would take up the whole of their time, and leave none for labour. In an aristocracy, the rulers would lack intellectual capacity, since they had no motive to perform the labour that was necessary to acquire that capacity, and would use their power to take the objects of desire for themselves. The same objections applied to a monarchy. Having obtained the power to take from every man what he pleased, the monarch would simply take it ( Mill 1992 : 17–20). Having rejected the three simple forms of government, Mill, like Bentham, rejected the doctrine of the mixed constitution, to which, it was claimed, the British Constitution owed its excellence. 12 Mill pointed out that, if any such government were established, two of the three powers would combine and ‘swallow up’ the third, and given the opposition between the democracy and the other two powers, it was inevitable that the monarchy and aristocracy would combine in order ‘to obtain unlimited power over the persons and property of the community’ ( Mill 1992 : 17–20; compare Bentham 2002 : 405–18).

The only good government was a representative democracy, where appropriate checks to the power of rulers could be instituted by means of a representative body: ‘For though the people, who cannot exercise the powers of Government themselves, must entrust them to some one individual or set of individuals, and such individuals will infallibly have the strongest motives to make a bad use of them, it is possible that checks may be found sufficient to prevent them’ ( Mill 1992 : 21–2). The representative body both needed sufficient power to check those who exercised the powers of government, and ‘an identity of interest with the community; otherwise it will make a mischievous use of its power’. Each representative had two capacities: first, as a representative he exercised power over others; second, as a member of the community, others exercised power over him. The point was so to arrange matters that, ‘in his capacity of Representative, it would be impossible for him to do himself so much good by misgovernment, as he would do himself harm in his capacity of member of the community’. Given that the representative needed enough power to overcome resistance from those in whom the powers of government were lodged, his power could not be diminished in amount, but only in duration: he would calculate that the profits he obtained from misgovernment would be outweighed by the suffering he experienced as a result of it. Punishing the representatives for abuse might be a further means of limiting their power, but it was often difficult to prove that a determinate offence had been committed. Hence, ‘As it thus appears, that limiting the duration of their power is a security against the sinister interest of the people’s Representatives, so it appears that it is the only security of which the nature of the case admits.’ In contrast to Bentham, Mill did not support temporary non-relocability: a re-elected representative would be better acquainted with the business of government ( Mill 1992 : 22–5; for commentary, see Rosen 1983 : 169–74).

The interest of the body choosing the representatives needed to be identified with that of the community as a whole, otherwise it would choose those representatives who would promote the interests of that smaller number. Mill recommended that the franchise be restricted to males over the age of 40. This would not compromise the identity of interests since these individuals had no interest distinct from that of the community as a whole. The interests of children were ‘indisputably included’ in those of their parents, and women in those of their fathers or husbands—and so children and women could be ‘struck off’ the franchise ‘without inconvenience’. Mill rejected any property qualification on the grounds that, unless it were very low, it would result in an aristocracy, while a low qualification would be little different from no qualification at all. A middle course might be found, but Mill’s conclusion seems to have been that it would be difficult to find a stable enough principle that would not create an aristocracy. Mill also rejected the notion that certain classes or professions should be represented, on the grounds that such classes and professions would merely pursue their sinister interests ( Mill 1992 : 26–35).

8. Conclusion

Bentham and Mill both accepted that the starting point for constitutional design was the fact that human beings were predominantly self-interested. Rulers were no different from any one else in this respect, and hence it should be no surprise that, with power in their hands, and unless subjected to some form of check, they would promote their own interests, no matter how much the community as a whole suffered as a result. A second assumption was that no one person’s happiness was worth more than that of any one else: as Bentham put it, ‘every individual in the country tells for one; no individual for more than one’ ( Bentham 1827 : iv. 475). A third assumption was that each person, unless there was some special reason to the contrary, was the best judge of his own interest ( Bentham 1983b : 150, 250–1). Hence, admitting every one into a share of political power by means of the franchise, providing they were not subject to corruptive influence or intimidation, would produce a representative assembly committed to the promotion of the general interest. The secret ballot was a critical measure, since it ensured that the elector could vote according to his own conception of his interest without fear of reprisal, and made futile any attempt at bribery. In his later republican writings, Bentham argued that the administrative and judicial departments of government should be directly subordinate to the legislature, and thus indirectly to the electorate, which, by virtue of its power in this respect, was sovereign. The framework created by representative democracy was supplemented by a series of securities for official aptitude, including the minimization of salaries, the abolition of titles of honour, the exclusion of established religion, public examination, pay linked to attendance, and, most importantly, publicity. By these measures, the natural opposition of interests between rulers and subjects was replaced by an artificial identification of interests. Mill’s Essay on Government was an outline of the theory of constitutional law that Bentham proposed in his writings on parliamentary reform composed between 1809 and 1817, but did not anticipate the novel and even more radical conception of representative democracy that Bentham developed in detail in the 1820s in his writings for the constitutional code.

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Bentham, Jeremy ( 1983 a). Constitutional Code , i, ed. F. Rosen and J. H. Burns . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bentham, Jeremy ( 1983 b). Deontology together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism , ed. Amnon Goldworth . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bentham, Jeremy ( 1988 ). The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham , viii. January 1809 to December 1816 , ed. Stephen Conway . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bentham, Jeremy ( 1989 ). First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code , ed. Philip Schofield . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bentham, Jeremy ( 1998 ). Legislator of the World: Writings on Codification, Law, and Education , ed. Philip Schofield and Jonathan Harris . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bentham, Jeremy ( 2002 ). Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution , ed. Philip Schofield , Catherine Pease-Watkin , and Cyprian Blamires . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bentham, Jeremy ( 2010 ). Writings on the Poor Laws , ii, ed. Michael Quinn . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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McKown, Delos B. ( 2004 ). Behold the Antichrist: Bentham on Religion . Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

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Bentham’s texts often have a complex printing and publication history. The publication of Elements of the Art of Packing was delayed when Bentham was warned by his friend, the barrister Sir Samuel Romilly, that, if he did publish it, both the printer and Bentham himself would be charged with seditious libel ( Bentham 1988 : 60–1).

The classic account is Halévy (1928) .

The work was eventually published in Bowring (1843) , vi. 1–187. Mill’s eldest son John Stuart Mill’s first major literary endeavour was similarly concerned with Bentham’s writings on evidence: the young Mill edited the massive Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827) .

For Bentham’s religious views see Crimmins (1990) ; Schofield (1999) ; and McKown (2004) .

In contrast to the standard view, Bain (1882 : 425–7) thought that Bentham’s writing style was far superior to that of Mill, who was never able to free himself completely from his ‘Scotticisms’.

Hamburger (1965 : 1–75) arguably understates the influence of Bentham both on Mill himself and on the philosophic radicals more generally.

Bentham did not actively involve himself in the foundation of the university (except for an unsuccessful attempt to have Bowring appointed as Professor of English Language and Literature), though his educational ideas were an important inspiration in terms of its ethos and curriculum (see Bellot 1929 : 12–13; Burns 1962 ).

Mill (1829 : i. 5–7) recognized that medical science had not progressed to the point where it could provide an adequate account of physiology.

A further division between supreme and subordinate power will not be discussed here. A national legislature, for instance, would exercise supreme legislative power, while a provincial legislature would exercise subordinate legislative power.

Anticipating the notion of deliberative democracy, Bentham suggested that sections of the public opinion tribunal, which he termed juries, might be established in order to give a definite opinion on a particular subject-matter ( Bentham 1989 : 58–9).

Thomas (1979 : 119–46) interprets Mill’s Essay on Government as an inconsistent compromise between Hobbesian psychology, Benthamite democratic hedonism, and Platonic paternalism. For a defence of Mill’s consistency, see Wendell (1971) .

Bentham composed a highly ironic defence of the mixed constitution of Britain in A Fragment on Government , first published in 1776 ( Bentham 1977 : 461–73).

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7.1.10: Mill’s Rule Utilitarianism versus Bentham’s Act Utilitarianism

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In addition to a difference in views regarding the importance of the quality of a pleasure, Mill and Bentham are also separated by reference to Act and Rule Utilitarianism and although such terms emerged only after Mill’s death, Mill is typically considered a rule utilitarian and Bentham an act utilitarian.

An act utilitarian, such as Bentham, focuses only on the consequences of individual actions when making moral judgments. However, this focus on the outcome of individual acts can sometimes lead to odd and objection-raising examples.  Judith Jarvis Thomson  (1929–) raised the problem of the “transplant surgeon”.

Imagine a case where a doctor had five patients requiring new organs to stop their death and one healthy patient undergoing a routine check. In this case, it would seem that total pleasure is best promoted by killing the one healthy patient, harvesting his organs and saving the other five lives; their pleasure outweighs the cost to the formerly healthy patient.

While Bentham does suggest that we should have “rules of thumb” against such actions, for typically they will lead to unforeseen painful consequences, in the case as simply described the act utilitarian appears powerless to deny that such a killing is required in order to maximise total pleasure (just add your own details to secure this conclusion for the act utilitarian).

Rule utilitarians, in whose camp we can place Mill, adopt a different moral decision-procedure. Their view is that we should create a set of rules that, if followed, would produce the greatest amount of total happiness. In the transplant case, killing the healthy man would not seem to be part of the best set of utilitarian-justified rules since a rule allowing the killing of healthy patients would not seem to promote total happiness; one outcome, for example, would be that people would very likely stop coming to hospitals for fear for their life! Therefore, if a rule permitting killing was allowed then the maximisation of total happiness would not be promoted overall.

It is through Rule Utilitarianism that we can make sense of Mill’s “harm principle”. According to Mill, there is:

…one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control.

That principle is:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

Even if a particular act of harming another person might bring about an increase in total pleasure on a single occasion, that act may not be condoned by the set of rules that best promotes total pleasure overall. As such, the action would not be morally permitted.

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Mill, Bentham, and the Art and Science of Government

Comparisons of Bentham and J.S. Mill tend to privilege Mill. If we compare these two not as normative philosophers but as theorists of the art and science of government, however, a different perspective emerges. This essay compares the definitions of art and science provided in Mill's and Bentham's treatments of logic, and considers the consequences for the art of government of Mill's embrace of the project of a social science. One important consequence is the emergence of a technopolitical understanding of government that sees this art as a practice that either tries to shape or conform to a natural characterological substrate, and that ideally mediates between these polar alternatives. Through this new framework Mill and many post-Millians misread Bentham as a clumsily deductive artificer. The essay concludes its exploration of this misreading with a preliminary examination of the problems--ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political--that a focus on character produces.

1. Introduction: Reading J.S. Mill and Bentham

• 1 For a brief statement of what is virtually a consensus position, see Martha C. Nussbaum, “Mill Betw (...)

1 Comparisons between John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham usually emphasize the greater sophistication of the former, celebrating Mill’s liberalism and pluralism at the expense of Bentham. 1 There is much to be said for this position, but it derives from a particular way of reading Bentham, Mill, and, by extension, classical utilitarianism. This way of reading is already apparent from the phrase “classical utilitarianism,” which can only be classical, of course, by means of a kind of prolepsis: Bentham and Mill are among the models, early and high, that anticipate and inform what we take to be utilitarianism today. We take utilitarianism today to be a moral philosophy and normative political philosophy; this utilitarianism develops and articulates a standard of the good life, a standard of right conduct and of the best regime. Viewed through this lens—a perfectly sensible one—Mill develops more defensible doctrine than Bentham does, according to most defenders and perhaps all critics of utilitarianism alike.

• 2 See the popular collection edited by H.B. Acton, Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on R (...)

2 Mill himself gives us plenty of reasons to read him and Bentham this way. His most famous texts, Utilitarianism and On Liberty , are texts that can readily be characterized as works of moral and political philosophy, and his essays on Bentham—combining as they do praise for his powerful creedal achievements with disapproval of many of his assumptions and methods—do the first draft of a favorable comparison for us. 2 In his essays on Bentham, however, much of Mill’s concern is with issues that preoccupy Mill more than Bentham; Bentham’s lack of concern—with character and beauty, with the inherent qualities of actions and pleasures, perhaps in the final analysis with morality itself—is in fact the very problem that Mill consistently identifies in his treatment of Bentham. And Mill is right: Bentham didn’t care about these things, but perhaps Bentham was right, considering his project, not to. Bentham’s project was not that of twentieth and twenty-first century moral and political philosophy. Instead, Bentham worked to develop a new art of government. One of Mill’s great achievements was to so normalize this project that we no longer see it as a distinct project. Mill was, like Bentham before him, a theorist of government; but he had one foot in Bentham’s world and one in our own.

• 3  The work of Stefan Collini and his colleagues remains essential for understanding this Mill in con (...)
• 4  Although many commentators see Mill’s ethology or science of character as having died an early dea (...)

3 For the most part Bentham does not philosophize, as utilitarians do today, about right conduct or the best regime. He spends more time debunking normative principles than constructing them, and the bulk of his voluminous writings have little directly to do with principles at all ( An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , for example, dispenses with principles in its first two chapters). And although Mill’s Utilitarianism , On Liberty , and Representative Government read much like works of normative theory, they can also be read as works on government, making them more continuous with A System of Logic and Principles of Political Economy which were, we should recall, more prominent in the nineteenth century context. If we read Mill forward from Bentham rather than Bentham back through Mill, a different picture of Mill and of the comparison between Bentham and Mill emerges. I attempt here only a very preliminary sketch of such a reading, focusing on one crucial difference between the two theorists. Mill writes for the most part following the assimilation into English letters of the French post-revolutionary ambition to a social science, and Bentham for the most part before this. Mill, consequently, understands government as an agency that intervenes in a dynamic field with its own lawful natural rhythms. 3 For Bentham, by contrast, government, broadly construed, always already arranges our relations (often poorly), and it is improper to speak of laws of nature even in the Newtonian, much less the Comtian sense. Whereas Mill sees much of what separates him and Bentham, he does not see this (at least not in this way), and this oversight pushes him beyond misplaced expectations to actual misreadings of Bentham. Through Mill’s eyes, Bentham begins to look not only monist and illiberal, but clumsily utopian. Ironically, it is precisely moments of Benthamic liberalism and pluralism that are lost in the turn to social science, which elevates character and its education to center stage, 4 and which substitutes an imperial technopolitics for Radical vigilance. But these are not perhaps so much Mill’s problems—considering his support for individuality, plurality, and productive conflict—as they are our own.

2. Art, Science, Social Science

4 First, consider Mill on art and science, from his Logic :

5  Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toron (...) The relation in which rules of art stand to doctrines of science may be thus characterized. The art proposes to itself an end to be attained, defines the end, and hands it over to the science. The science receives it, considers it as a phenomenon or effect to be studied, and having investigated its causes and conditions, sends it back to art with a theorem of the combinations of circumstances by which it could be produced. Art then examines these combinations of circumstances, and according as any of them are or are not in human power, pronounces the end attainable or not. The only one of the premises, therefore, which Art supplies, is the original major premise, which asserts that the attainment of the given end is desirable. Science then lends to Art the proposition (obtained by a series of inductions or of deductions) that the performance of certain actions will attain the end. From these premises Art concludes that the performance of these actions is desirable, and finding it also practicable, converts the theorem into a rule or precept. 5

5 And now compare Bentham, from his Logic :

As often as the words arts and sciences are pronounced, a natural, and, it is believed, a very general, not to say universal, supposition is—that, in the first place, arts and sciences taken together, are different and distinguishable from whatever is neither art nor science; in the next place, that art and science are no less clearly different and distinguishable from each other. [...]

The plain truth of the matter seems to be this,--between the field of art and science, and the remainder of the field of thought and action, there exists not any assignable difference; correspondent to these denominations, what there exists in the case, is a difference in the state of the mind of those by whom the part in question, of that field, is cultivated; where the nature of the case requires an operation to be performed, and of that operation the performance is regarded as requiring study , i.e. a certain degree of attention and a certain degree of labour, employed in fixing it; then it is, that in speaking of the operation done, the word science , or the word art , or both together, are employed. 6 Bentham, “Essay on Logic,” Works of Jeremy Bentham , ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838 (...) In so far as, whether with or without, a view to further action, so it is that, in the receipt and collection of the ideas belonging to the subject, perceptible labour is employed, then it is that the word science is employed, and such portion, whatever it be, of the field of thought and action to which the labour is applied, is considered as a portion of the field of science. In so far as a determinate object, in the character of an end , being in view, operation in the particular direction, is recurred to for the attainment of that end,--that portion, be it what it may, of the field of thought and action to which the labour is applied, is considered as part and parcel of the field of art. 6

• 7  Mill, A System of Logic , p. 947. Cf. Mill from “On the Definition of Political Economy,” in Essays (...)

7 Mill’s idea is, I think, clear. Art is about effecting something, and science tells art how to effect it. Art sets ends, and gets its means from science. This instrumental conception does not by any means exhaust science, so in a way art depends on science but science doesn’t exclusively depend on art. At the same time, this conception of science as, shall we say, practical science is very important for Mill. The entire System of Logic , which is not formal logic but, as Mill himself puts it, the logic of truth, ends with this chapter on the logic of practice; and that chapter closes a book, “The Logic of the Moral Sciences”, that for the most part sees the moral sciences as practical sciences—sciences engaged in with a view to understanding, so as to affect and improve, the human condition. Thus, for example, the policy-maker aims to enhance national wealth, and learns maxims for how to do so from the science of political economy. As Mill says, “the grounds, then, of every rule of art, are to be found in the theorems of science.” 7

8  Mary Mack, Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas (London: Heinemann, 1962).

9  Bentham, “Essay on Logic,” p. 240.

• 10  And whereas for Mill the idea of a non-practical or purely theoretical science, including a theore (...)
• 11  Bentham, “Manual of Political Economy,” in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings , ed. W. Stark (Londo (...)

12  Bentham, “Logic,” p. 241.

8 Bentham is not so clear. We are on the terrain of art-and-science, he seems to say, any time that we are thinking or doing anything where our thinking or doing is disciplined or could be disciplined by what is needed to do something—more science when we are studying and more art when we are doing, but remember, studying and thinking are doing too. Art and science, as Mary Mack and others have argued, are always art-and-science. 8 They cannot really be separated: every art has its science and every science its art; Bentham’s name for this complex of art-and-science is “discipline.” 9 The moment of priority in every discipline is, however, its art. 10 Thus, to take again the example of political economy, Bentham says of Adam Smith that the latter emphasized the science of political economy at the expense of the art; Bentham’s Manual of Political Economy “is, to Dr. Smith’s, what a book on the art of medicine is to a book of anatomy or physiology.” The problem with Smith’s approach is that it focuses, in Bentham’s view, on “the course that human industry takes abstractedly from the consideration of the law.” 11 This is an example of how, for Bentham, “only by its subserviency to practice, has knowledge any use,--only by its subserviency to art, is science in any shape of any use.” 12

13  Mill, Logic , p. 875. The social science is a moral and natural science.

• 14 Ibid. , p. 877. The preceding passage in the text suggests that the name for the art corresponding t (...)

9 If the problem with theoretical political economy is its abstraction from law, however, we might think that the solution lies in what Mill calls “the social science,” which would study concrete society as a whole, in all of its density and complexity. “It is [...] but of yesterday that the conception of a political or social science has existed, anywhere but in the mind of here and there an insulated thinker, generally very ill prepared for its realization.” 13 Such a science does not render politics or the art of government in any way obsolete or automatic; even at its best, it might well require variety and flexibility rather than general rules in its “corresponding art.” 14 Even a perfected social science needn’t yield knowledge sufficient for prediction; such knowledge is unnecessary for the science to be

15 Ibid. , p. 878. most valuable for guidance. The science of society would have attained a very high point of perfection, if it enabled us, in any given condition of social affairs [...] to understand by what causes it had, in any and every particular, been made what it was; whether it was tending to any, and to what, changes; what effects each feature of its existing state was likely to produce in the future; and by what means any of those effects might be prevented, modified, or accelerated, or a different class of effects superinduced. There is nothing chimerical in the hope that general laws, sufficient to enable us to answer these various questions [...] do really admit of being ascertained [...]. Such is the object of the Social Science. 15

• 16  See K.M. Baker, “The Early History of the Term ‘Social Science,’” Annals of Science XX (1964). Ben (...)
• 17  For a fascinating and informative account see Lawrence Goldman, “The Origins of British ‘Social Sc (...)

10 Again, we might think that such a science would address Bentham’s concerns, but Bentham himself imagines no such science, and my inquiry here is in part whether he should imagine or want to imagine it. Bentham himself was probably among the first to use the phrase “social science” in English, but only very occasionally and not with any systematic intent. 16 By the time Mill writes his Logic , however (1843), the phrase invokes emerging disciplinary formations and divisions that, I submit, put Mill on our side of a problematic threshold, with Bentham on the other. 17 And it is Mill’s greater familiarity on this score, even more than his clearer prose, that makes his Logic so much easier than Bentham’s for us to understand.

3. Politics

• 18  Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Ha (...)

11 If we return to Bentham’s discussion of art and science, we see that, in connection with political economy, he makes use of the medical metaphor to characterize his work: his manual is to Smith’s Wealth of Nations “what a book on the art of medicine is to a book of anatomy or physiology.” And we see this suggestion of a political therapeutics in different places throughout his writings, as we do in Mill. One of the most prominently placed of such passages is in the 1789 Preface to An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation . Here Bentham invokes a science that appears at first glance as potentially expansive as Mill’s social science: the “science of law.” According to the Preface the science of law is “to the art of legislation, what the science of anatomy is to the art of medicine.” Note though how Bentham continues. He writes, “with this difference, that the subject of it is what the artist has to work with , instead of being what he has to operate upon .” 18

19  Mill, Logic , pp. 875-6.

12 Could this mean that the Benthamic doctor pays no attention to his patient? This seems to be Mill’s reading, but it is a bad reading, based in the kind of instrumentalism that Mill takes for granted. In the chapter of the Logic quoted above, Mill criticizes practitioners’ non-speculative knowledge of politics, comparing it to “medical investigation, before physiology and natural history began to be cultivated as branches of general knowledge.” As the passage continues in the post-1846 editions, it slips fully into metaphor: “Students in politics thus attempted to study the pathology and therapeutics of the social body, before they had laid the necessary foundation in its physiology; to cure disease without understanding the laws of health.” Intervening in the first two editions is a revealing paragraph referencing not only practitioners but “philosophical speculators on forms of government.” In it, Mill correctly notes that “it is only at a [...] recent date that social phenomena, properly so called, have begun to be looked upon as having any natural tendencies of their own.” (Of course “natural tendencies” of some sort are not really the issue, seeing how prominent they are in, for example, Aristotle; more correct would be to say that social phenomena, properly so called, were only recently looked upon at all.) But, looking back through the lens of this development, he assumes—quite wrongly—that for speculative thinkers (“speculators”) from Plato to Bentham “hardly any notion was entertained that there were limits to the power of human will over the phenomena of society, or that any social arrangements which would be desirable, could be impracticable from incompatibility with the properties of the subject matter: the only obstacle was supposed to lie in the private interests or prejudices, which hindered men from being willing to see them tried.” 19 (To see how weird the dichotomy implicit in these passages is we need only consider thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Machiavelli, and Madison: all clearly neither social scientists in Mill’s sense nor ignorant of “limits to the power of human will over the phenomena of society.”)

13 Mill’s interpretation is, I think, a serious but not uncommon misreading of Bentham’s projections. Bentham was a trenchant reformer from beginning to end, but his reforming efforts involved constructing legal and institutional economies that would more felicitously arrange existing expectations—that would take people as they were and better harmonize their interests. Although this entails shaping their interests—their economies of pain and pleasure—there is no project apart from those constituent pains and pleasures themselves; these are the ground of Bentham’s eudaimonics, of its means and its ends. But there is also no comprehensive science of the social that could ever yield a single report on the various causes and effects relevant to national happiness. In reading Bentham in the way that he does, Mill helps to inaugurate a particular standpoint, one that is characteristic of the nineteenth- and twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century moral sciences. These have become policy sciences. Malthus attacked Godwin in a very different context from our own, yet arguably an entire tradition of theory from at least the late nineteenth century on has exhibited a kind of perverse synthesis of their opposed orientations regarding utilitarian improvement; this theory is critical of various political projects for their non-recognition of natural/social limits, and is motivated to substitute for politics a management of population in accordance with its own laws. In this biopolitical search for foundations scientific would-be governors veer from necessity to utopia and back again in a manner foreign to Bentham, who remains by comparison an eighteenth-century institutional thinker.

• 20 Considerations on Representative Government [1861], chapter 1: “To What Extent Forms of Government (...)
• 21  For an overview of continuity and change in Mill’s treatment of these issues, see J.M. Robson, “Ci (...)
• 22  Today’s arguments about Darwin and human nature seem always to forget what they certainly must kno (...)
• 23  John Skorupski, “Introduction: The Fortunes of Liberal Naturalism,” in Skorupski, ed., The Cambrid (...)
• 24  See Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). This techn (...)

14 In my critique of Mill on Bentham I have drawn on subsequently purged text, but this text resonates with Mill’s other published work on Bentham, as it does with his other reflections on art and science. The Logic ’s moral-scientific oppositions anticipate the confrontation that introduces the Considerations on Representative Government , between two sorts of “political reasoners,” those for whom “government is conceived as strictly a practical art” and those who “regard [...] the science of government as a branch [...] of natural history.” Mill famously mediates between these, leaning hard towards “choice” but recognizing the need to fit governmental forms to a “people’s” assessed institutional and ethological conditions of improvement. 20 (This illustrates his statement from the Logic that scientific knowledge of society can yield general laws of development without yielding general rules for the art of government.) In my mention of peoples and their improvement and my consideration of ethology I do not aim to rehearse the familiar criticisms of Mill’s civilizational hierarchy, or of his earlier appeals to a more enduring national character that Representative Government seems somewhat to modify. 21 It should be said, however, that commentators often unhelpfully leap to Mill’s defense by pointing to his privileging of history and “culture” over biology in matters of “race,” forgetting that this opposition between history and biology is from the twentieth century; Mill’s historicism anticipates no one so much as Darwin himself in his highly problematic treatments of race and culture. 22 To the extent that Mill’s positions varied, they remained consistent throughout with what John Skorupski characterizes as “liberal naturalism.” 23 My concern is less directly with these important critical arguments than it is a concern to characterize how they are framed, and to point to Mill’s part in building this frame. What does Mill’s staging of options in Representative Government tell us about his, and our, conception of politics? Following Timothy Mitchell, we can characterize this conception as problematically “technopolitical”: 24 too much of politics is taken up with government, and government itself is understood in terms of policy. The continuing argument between those who see policy as adapting to a social substrate and those who see policy as molding it simply reinforces the technopolitical frame.

15 In his much earlier (1836) essay on “The Definition of Political Economy,” Mill criticizes, in a footnote, the idea of a science of legislation as

25  Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy,” p. 321n. Compare the earlier (1833) “Remarks on Be (...) an incorrect and misleading expression. Legislation is making laws . We do not talk of the science of making anything. Even the science of government would be an objectionable expression, were it not that government is often loosely taken to signify, not the act of governing, but the state or condition of being governed , or of living under a government. A preferable expression would be, the science of political society ; a principal branch of the more extensive science of society [...]. 25

• 26  Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy,” pp. 320-21. (I have transliterated the Greek in th (...)

16 This more extensive science, “whether we prefer to call it social economy, speculative politics, or the natural history of society, presupposes the whole science of the nature of the individual mind [...].” The “social science [...] embraces every part of man’s nature, in so far as influencing the conduct or condition of man in society; and therefore may it be termed speculative politics, as being the scientific foundation of practical politics, or the art of government, of which the art of legislation is a part.” Mill tells us about the social science in order to clarify that what “is now commonly understood by the term ‘Political Economy’ is not the science of speculative politics, but a branch of that science.” But Jean-Baptiste Say’s use of the term (“ l’économie politique ”), which according to Mill incorrectly equates it with the social science of which it is only a branch, is, Mill maintains, countenanced by its etymology. And in the 1836 version of the article he writes that “ Oikonomia politike , the economy of the polis , or commonwealth, must originally have meant the whole of the laws or principles which determine the working of the social machine.” 26

27  Mill, Logic , pp. 889-894.

28  See Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence , Works of Jeremy Bentham , volumes VI and VII.

17 This bald anachronism is later corrected by Mill with his statements, quoted above, from the Logic that “It is [...] but of yesterday that the conception of a political or social science has existed, anywhere but in the mind of here and there an insulated thinker” and “it is only at a [...] recent date that social phenomena, properly so called, have begun to be looked upon as having any natural tendencies of their own.” But he never loses the habit of, if not attributing social science to other thinkers, thinking of them as social scientists manqué . And so there is the Logic ’s critique of “the geometrical, or abstract method,” which is more of a critique of “the interest-philosophy of the Bentham school” than of Bentham himself. 27 Here the assumption is, again, that Bentham’s (or the Bentham school’s) aims are that of a social science , that they aim at ascertaining the laws of motion of society so as to intervene in it and redirect it. But Bentham’s own work does not even amount to what Mill calls a “social statics,” much less a “social dynamics.” Of course, this is to some extent Mill’s objection: interest-thinking is a social science manqué , hampered by its deductivism. There is irony, here, because of the extent to which Mill is indebted for the Logic ’s monumentalization of induction over deduction to Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence (the million-plus words of which Mill had the misfortune to edit). And in the Evidence Bentham continually points to interest and away from character, showing the enormous flexibility of the language of interest (which Mill, in the Logic , acknowledges in Bentham himself) in a doggedly relational approach to, for example, the reliability of testimony. On Bentham’s view, it is contemporary English procedure, with its a priori exclusions, that is deductive—and a reliance on character could be similarly so, not recognizing how, under certain conditions, good things come from putatively bad people and vice versa. 28

4. Conclusion: Character

• 29  On the Association, see Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The (...)

30  Mill, Logic , p. 907.

18 The problem of character links together a series of ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political problems. (I will briefly sketch these one at a time, and some of them will resonate with familiar criticisms of Mill. I insist, however, that we keep in mind that these are as much or more our problems as they are Mill’s.) The object of Mill’s social science is, again, to inform an improving art of government. (This purpose of course animated his several and salutary public works, and is explicit in the founding documents of new organizations he supported such as the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. 29 ) And certainly Bentham’s is also very much, in some sense, an improving art of government. But Mill takes it for granted, as do we, that there is a something there to improve, with natural tendencies of its own. What makes up the identity of this something is, fundamentally, character: “Ethology [...] is the immediate foundation of the Social Science.” 30 The value that Mill does not want to see in interest-analysis is that it could be exclusively structural or relational: that it could be concerned exclusively with the arrangement of elements, and not with the elements themselves. Bentham’s science of law is a science of arrangement (and this doesn’t mean he thinks things can simply be rearranged by new legislation). This is, in part, merely a matter of emphasis, but it is an important one. When Mill and we can confidently speak of “social conditions”—for example, the social conditions fit or unfit for representative government—we are focusing on a set of facts from which we can infer an underlying character. This is very different from Bentham’s exclusively relational focus on “sinister interest”—the identification of interest opposed to the aggregate interest—which could be a concern or not no matter what the character or characters involved. Although both Bentham and Mill can be described as methodological individualists, the issue here is not so much methodological individualism versus holism as it is whether we trace worrisome effects to the condition of (individual or group) character or to the condition of relations.

31  Bentham, “Logic,” p. 241.

19 Inference and the tracing of effects bring us to epistemology. The social science is Mill’s comprehensive science of government, firmly grounded in psychology and ethology. Bentham also has faith in the potential reach of science, but every science for Bentham has its corresponding art, and there are many arts and sciences or disciplines, and their hierarchy is not clear. (It is however conceivable that a certain epistemological priority claim could be made for the discipline of judicial evidence, which needs to have an understanding of the other disciplines sufficient to know something about their standards of evidence). Bentham’s pre-social-scientific openness to disciplinary plurality is a crucial aspect of his utilitarian art of government: “The several disciplines, being each of them a means of happiness or well-being, considered with relation to mankind taken in the aggregate, the thing to be desired with a view to their happiness, is, that the quantity of disciplines should at all times be as great as possible. Say for shortness,--subservient to the maximum of happiness , is the maximum of disciplines .” And “to no one individual is the possession of this maximum of disciplines at any point of time possible.” 31 By contrast, Mill’s focus on character as object and subject of study augurs a narrowing of this disciplinary plurality.

20 The potential of character is most familiar to us in the field of ethics. I have already indicated that Mill is right to think of Bentham as a bad moral philosopher, on his and our understanding of the project of moral philosophy. But there is an important ethical dimension to Bentham’s inadequacies on this front. In his essays on Bentham, Mill famously objects to Bentham’s shortcomings in the area of judgment and sensibility, to his apparent moral and aesthetic obtuseness. His early critique takes Bentham to task for refusing to extend the view of an action to the character underlying it:

Now, the great fault I have to find with Mr. Bentham as a moral philosopher [...] is this: that he has practically, to a very great extent, confounded the principle of Utility with the principle of specific consequences [...]. 32  Mill, “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society , pp. 7-8. When the moralist thus overlooks the relation of an act to a certain state of mind as its cause, and its connexion through that common cause with large classes and groups of actions apparently very little resembling itself, his estimation even of the consequences of the very act itself, is rendered imperfect. For it may be affirmed with few exceptions, that any act whatever has a tendency to fix and perpetuate the state or character of mind in which itself has originated. And if that important element in the moral relations of the action be not taken into account by the moralist as a cause, neither probably will it be taken into account as a consequence. 32

21 Mill’s later essay on Bentham enlarges this critique with a charge of “one-sidedness,” in “treating the moral view of actions and characters, which is unquestionably the first and most important mode of looking at them, as if it were the sole one: whereas it is only one of three [...].” Mill rightly notes that Bentham gave no consideration to the beauty or loveableness of actions, but in elaborating on this charge he reveals that this was not so much a matter of inability as of refusal.

33  Mill, “Bentham,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society , p. 112-13. He carried this so far, that there were certain phrases, which, being expressive of what he considered to be this groundless liking or aversion, he could not bear to hear pronounced in his presence. Among these phrases were those of good and bad taste . He thought it an insolent piece of dogmatism in one person to praise or condemn another in a matter of taste: as if men’s likings and dislikings, on things in themselves indifferent, were not full of the most important inferences as to every point of their character; as if a person’s tastes did not show him to be wise or a fool, cultivated or ignorant, gentle or rough, sensitive or callous, generous or sordid, benevolent or selfish, conscientious or depraved. 33

22 Mill recognizes, but here chooses to ignore, how very sensitive the issue of taste is for Bentham, because of the role it plays in ipsedixitism: in the tendency to make one’s own desires and aversions the rule of everyone’s practice. Consider Bentham from an early manuscript fragment on bestiality:

‘My abhorrence I feel for it say you is ungovernable—the very thought is unsupportable’—Mine is equal to it—What then is the inference? we shall not do it—but do not you see that inferring it as you do upon mere sentiment (or feeling) the Man (in question) has just as good a reason for doing it as you have for letting it alone. 34  Bentham MSS, University College London Bentham Collection, Box 74a p. 6. [...] A Man’s own feeling, tho the best reason in the world for his abhorring the thing are none at all for his abhorring the Man who does it—how much less then are they for destroying Him. 34

• 35 On Liberty , ch. IV, in Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, Part I , ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: Univ (...)

23 The passage is reminiscent of the most bracing implications of the principle of non-interference from On Liberty : Mill’s insistence in that mature work that we not look to the characterological causes and effects, but merely to the effects on others, of individuals’ actions. Thus, according to On Liberty , it is not for the “intemperance or extravagance” of a neglectful father or debtor that we hold him accountable, but for his neglect: “If the resources which ought to have been devoted to [his family or creditors], had been diverted from them for the most prudent investment, the moral culpability would be the same.” 35 Impairment is not an issue in itself without regard to harm to others, and its source—whether normally considered a sign of virtue or a sign of vice—is completely irrelevant to its assessment.

• 36  Mill, “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society , p. 16. The pas (...)

24 But On Liberty is arguably ultimately concerned with liberty for its effects, as a mode of government, on character. Mill is concerned from early on with these effects, and he is critical from the beginning of Bentham’s lack of concern: “It never seems to have occurred to him to regard political institutions in a higher light, as the principal means of the social education of a people.” 36 Again, this is partly a difference in emphasis, but I think it is an important one. The polity as a whole is turned, by Mill’s science and ours, into a school of discipline. Bentham has famously been identified as a disciplinary theorist, but this identification is incorrect, except in so far as he develops technologies of discipline for use in specific institutional contexts. He is instead a theorist of government and, despite his technopolitical tendencies, his government promotes a utilitarian economy of arrangement without yielding to specific disciplinary representations of that arrangement. To the extent that he emphasizes discipline at the political level, it is the discipline exercised on centers of power by the (itself undisciplined, in any general way) “public opinion tribunal.” Mill promotes discursive plurality and an agonal public, but his desire to educate the public, and his glimpse of a master science that would tell it all about itself, weaken Bentham’s securities against misrule and pave the way for a different kind of utilitarian government. Mill himself would have abhorred many of the arts of our rule of experts, especially its neoliberal administration informed by anemic political economy, and supplemented by busybody arts and sciences of self-help. I am only suggesting that his turn toward science, character, and the science of character—and the related separation of “normative” from “empirical” utilitarianism—makes it more difficult than it otherwise might be to gain critical purchase on such developments.

1 For a brief statement of what is virtually a consensus position, see Martha C. Nussbaum, “Mill Between Aristotle & Bentham,” Daedalus 133:2 (April 2004). Drafts of this paper were presented at the 2006 John Stuart Mill Bicentennial Conference, University College London, the 2006 Canadian Political Science Association meetings in Toronto, and the 2007 Western Political Science Association meetings in Las Vegas. My thanks go to co-panelists and audiences in these sessions for their responses. Thanks also to the Special Collections Library of University College London and its staff for access to the Bentham Collection, and to the Bentham Project and its staff for their hospitality and support.

2 See the popular collection edited by H.B. Acton, Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1972) and Mill, “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy” and “Bentham,” in J.M. Robson, ed., Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 1-18 and 75-115 (Robson, ed., Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , volume X).

3  The work of Stefan Collini and his colleagues remains essential for understanding this Mill in context; see Collini et al., That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Collini et al. would no doubt see my own essay as afflicted with the excesses of an “’erosion of the distinctively political’ by the rise of the ‘sociological perspective’” narrative (p. 10). But I am less concerned here with the erosion of politics than I am by its representation as a particular (techno-political) art-and-science of government; and my main point here is to stress how this representation contributes to a misreading of predecessors, especially Bentham. In his chapter on Mill (127-159), Collini is certainly correct that Mill never made good on the ideals of the Logic , but this doesn’t alter the fact that he contributed mightily to the construction of a particular distinctively political perspective with lasting consequences. This perspective is sufficiently powerful to frame even Collini et al.’s otherwise admirably non-teleological history, in both its monumentalization of induction vs. deduction and its embrace of the Millian dichotomy underwriting “a balance: to believe both that there are external conditions, either perennial or at least of sufficient generality to be worth identifying in more than purely local terms, which effective political activity must respect, and also that political activity of an instructed and considered kind and of potentially far-reaching significance is possible (p. 8).” The subsequent chapters’ excellent account of nineteenth-century “things political” far exceeds the terms of this framing from the Prologue.

4  Although many commentators see Mill’s ethology or science of character as having died an early death, I see it as alive and well, for example in the policy sciences’ emphasis on the development of various “capitals”: human, social, moral, etc.

5  Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. 944.

5 Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , volume VIII.

6 Bentham, “Essay on Logic,” Works of Jeremy Bentham , ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-43), volume VIII, p. 240. (Italics in this and all subsequent quotations are in original.)

7  Mill, A System of Logic , p. 947. Cf. Mill from “On the Definition of Political Economy,” in Essays on Economics and Society , ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), p. 312 ( Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , volume IV): “Science takes cognizance of a phenomenon , and endeavours to discover its law ; art proposes to itself an end , and looks out for means to effect it.” The importance of this essay, which I touch on below, was brought to my attention by Wendy Donner’s valuable discussion of Millian art and science in The Liberal Self (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

10  And whereas for Mill the idea of a non-practical or purely theoretical science, including a theoretical moral science, is eminently conceivable, it doesn’t seem to be for Bentham; all learning, according to the tables of his Chrestomathia , is part of eudaimonics.

11  Bentham, “Manual of Political Economy,” in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings , ed. W. Stark (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952-54) , volume I, p. 224. We shouldn’t let the fact that this claim is false—that Bentham here helps to inaugurate nineteenth-century political economy’s disciplinary appropriation and revision of Smith’s Wealth of Nations —distract us from its importance for his own work.

14 Ibid. , p. 877. The preceding passage in the text suggests that the name for the art corresponding to the social science is the “art of politics.”

15 Ibid. , p. 878.

16  See K.M. Baker, “The Early History of the Term ‘Social Science,’” Annals of Science XX (1964). Bentham’s use of the phrase, as early as 1812, was discovered by J.H.Burns.

17  For a fascinating and informative account see Lawrence Goldman, “The Origins of British ‘Social Science’: Political Economy, Natural Science and Statistics, 1830-1835,” The Historical Journal , 26, 3 (1983).

18  Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1970), author’s preface.

20 Considerations on Representative Government [1861], chapter 1: “To What Extent Forms of Government are a Matter of Choice,” in Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, Part II , ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 374-382 ( Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , volume XIX).

21  For an overview of continuity and change in Mill’s treatment of these issues, see J.M. Robson, “Civilization and Culture as Moral Concepts,” in John Skorupski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 338-371.

22  Today’s arguments about Darwin and human nature seem always to forget what they certainly must know: that Darwin’s main project in Origin of Species is to join contemporary geology in historicizing nature, and so to problematize the distinction between species and variety in “one long argument” for descent with modification. And they often reference without really reading Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), which is a kind of radical Millian ethology. On the one hand, Descent of Man does much to erase lines of essential difference not only among humans but between human beings and other animals; on the other hand it reinstates humanism in its emphasis on the distinctiveness of the “moral sense” and explains imperial successes in terms of the group selectionist advantages of civilized cooperation (compare Mill’s 1836 “Civilization”), and implicitly justifies even exterminist campaigns (Darwin writes as the very last of the indigenous Tasmanians are dying) in terms of a kind of race-struggle that contributes to the production of an enlarged character with increasingly global, and even cross-species, sympathies. With his allowances for various modes of inheritance and his related merging of biological and historical time, Darwin’s “race” is “culture” and vice versa. All this should give us pause about either Mill/Darwin apologetics or Mill/Darwin dismissal as benighted Victorians; clearly their problems are very much our own. For contrasting recent treatments of Mill on race, culture, and empire, continuing a discussion given new urgency by Uday Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) as well as by current events, see Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis, eds., Utilitarianism and Empire (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), and Margaret Kohn and Daniel I. O’Neill, “A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America,” Political Theory 34:2 (April 2006), pp. 192-228.

23  John Skorupski, “Introduction: The Fortunes of Liberal Naturalism,” in Skorupski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mill , pp. 1-34. Although accurate as to Mill, Skorupski unhelpfully poses liberal naturalism against a “social constructivism” (p. 16ff) understood, it seems, in Hayekian terms; I am arguing that this opposition is, in part, a Millian invention. (For a nice dismantling of the opposition between Hayek and Bentham, see Allison Dube, The Theme of Acquistiveness in Bentham’s Political Thought (New York: Garland, 1991). I am going beyond Dube here, suggesting that Hayek is more technopolitical than Bentham, and that this is evident from his invocation of a science of “spontaneous order.”)

24  See Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). This technopolitics is very different from the constructivism referenced by Skorupski and associated with Benthamism (see previous note), because it includes both this and its naturalist putative others.

25  Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy,” p. 321n. Compare the earlier (1833) “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy,” where Mill (anonymously) disparages Bentham as a “moral philosopher” but praises him for doing for “philosophical legislation” a “service which can be performed only once for any science” (I turn to the critique of Bentham as moralist below). He does also reference, however, the “science (or rather art)” of practical legislation. See Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society , ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 7-9 ( Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , volume X).

26  Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy,” pp. 320-21. (I have transliterated the Greek in the final quotation.)

29  On the Association, see Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857-1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

32  Mill, “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society , pp. 7-8.

33  Mill, “Bentham,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society , p. 112-13.

34  Bentham MSS, University College London Bentham Collection, Box 74a p. 6.

35 On Liberty , ch. IV, in Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, Part I , ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 281 ( Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , volume XVIII).

36  Mill, “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society , p. 16. The passage continues: “Had he done so, he would have seen that the same institutions will no more suit two nations in different stages of civilization, than the same lessons will suit children of different ages.” Again, the point here is not to note how this anticipates the notorious exception to On Liberty ’s harm principle for “those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage” (see On Liberty , ch. I, Essays on Politics and Society, Part I , p. 224 and note 22 above). Instead, the point is to illustrate how this tutelary dimension to the focus on character, which applies just as much in the metropole as it does in the periphery, reinforces a technopolitical framework. And Mill is simply mistaken if he is suggesting that Bentham proposes one-size-fits-all legislation; it’s just that variation for Bentham is differently motivated. See for example “Place and Time,” newly edited from the Bentham manuscripts by Philip Schofield, in Selected Writings of Jeremy Bentham , ed. Stephen G. Engelmann (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming 2009).

Electronic reference

Stephen G. Engelmann , “Mill, Bentham, and the Art and Science of Government” ,  Revue d’études benthamiennes [Online], 4 | 2008, Online since 01 February 2008 , connection on 22 April 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/178; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudes-benthamiennes.178

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University of Illinois at Chicago

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Utilitarianism ; and, On liberty : including Mill's Essay on Bentham' and selections from the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin

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Mill versus Bentham – Hedonism Philosophy Essay

Introduction, mill’s argument on hedonism, bentham’s argument, mill’s argument versus bentham, works cited.

Hedonism is a philosophical concept that explains why people seek pleasure and avoid pain in life. According to Lemos, people aim at maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain in all the activities that they perform (401). Therefore, individuals tend to engage in activities that increase their levels of pleasure and decrease their levels of pain. Some of the philosophers who defend the argument of hedonism include John Mill and Jeremy Bentham. According to Mill, a qualitative approach is the best measurement of pleasure derived by a person from an activity. Mill explains that pleasure comprises of two levels, high and low-quality pleasure.

On the other hand, Bentham states that the quantitative approach is the best in measuring the level of pleasure. He asserts that the duration of an activity and the intensity of pleasure are very important in measuring the levels of pleasure. This essay compares and contrasts the hedonism arguments presented by Bentham and Mill.

John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher who held the argument that qualitative approach is the best method to determine the pleasure that an individual derives from an activity. In my opinion, Mill believes that pleasure can be of high quality or low quality. In his assertion, Mill presents the argument that high-quality pleasure surpasses low-quality pleasure. My perspective on Mill’s argument is on the fact that humbled human beings, which he referred to as pigs, cannot access high-quality pleasure. They thus involve themselves in activities that give them low-quality pleasure (Gibbs 34). However, the elites and intellectuals in society spend most of their time reflecting and thinking about high valued activities that would give them a higher quality of pleasure as compared to humbled individuals.

From my point of view, Mill asserts that one form of pleasure is worthy than the other form of pleasure. The most decisive argument that he gives is that as individuals look for happiness, they should try to minimize the pain that activity brings in the process of deriving happiness. Therefore, Mill argues that people should undertake those activities that bring maximum happiness and minimum pain so that they can achieve maximum satisfaction of their desired needs. I believe Mill held the idea that one of the main reasons behind his argument is that humbled individuals indulge in activities that bring low-quality pleasure to attain satisfaction.

In my assertions, Mill highlights that “it is better to be an unsatisfied human being than being a satisfied pig” (Gibbs 31). On the contrary, sophisticated individuals do not engage in activities that provide meager pleasure, but they engage in activities that result in high levels of utility, satisfaction, and pleasure. From my point of view, Mill stresses that the desires of individuals determine the nature and level of happiness they seek.

In justifying the importance of different aspects of pleasure, Mill argues that those individuals who have experienced high levels of pleasure are usually reluctant to forego pleasurable activities. My opinion on the argument is that Mill thought that since these people have already experienced the benefits that accrue from pleasurable activities, they are not ready to forego the pleasures. The most decisive argument that he puts forward is that pleasurable activities are aspects of happiness that associate with the mind and philosophers regard the activities as unique aspects of individuals (Gibbs 33).

Learning new things and acting morally is among the aspects. Mill notes that the line of clarity between high and low levels of pleasure is minimal, where; the line relies on thoughts and the mindset of an individual. Hence, from my perception, Mill defines a qualitative approach to define pleasure. From the argument presented by Mill, it is evident that high aspects of pleasure are very important, and individuals should expand their thinking capacities so that they can engage in activities that have a high quality of pleasure.

The most crucial assertion that Mill demonstrates is that in hedonism, the quality of satisfaction is better than the quantity as individuals can distinguish amongst different levels of pleasure. In my analysis, Mill accepts that “the greatest pleasures are those of the highest faculty, and the best and pleasantest of lives are those characterized by greatest pleasures (Gibbs 33). Furthermore, he believes that individuals can only select the type of activity that derives a certain level and a certain type of pleasure, as long as they possess some amount of understanding of pleasure.

This presents the existence of clarity among the different levels of pleasure. Therefore, according to Mill’s assertions, people who have a high intellectual understanding in the society perform acts which present high-quality pleasure, whereas, humbled individuals opt for those activities that generate low-quality pleasure.

Mill notes that activities that generate high-quality pleasure such as learning new things and helping the needy in society are more important than activities that generate low-quality pleasure like drinking or eating. He explains that one should assess the extent and intensity of pleasure gained from an activity before choosing a given type of pleasure deriving activity. Additionally, he believes that since individuals always know what is best for them, there is a high likelihood that they make an informed selection of activities and derive the expected satisfaction. However, this is dependent on an understanding of the existing types of pleasure, such as helping others, eating, learning new things, or drinking.

Thus, one of the arguments that Mill presents is that it is better to gain satisfaction from activities that give high-quality pleasure than activities that bring low-quality pleasure. Hedonistic spirit compels people to seek optimum happiness or the highest quality of pleasure so that they can satisfy their needs.

Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher who presented his perception of hedonism using a quantitative approach. In my opinion, Bentham believes that for individuals to understand pleasure, the quantitative approach provides an effective way of assessing it. He explains that people can assess pleasure using the intensity and the duration of the pleasure. Bentham argues that there are several forms of hedonism, such as motivational, ethical, and psychological hedonism. Therefore, individuals engage in those forms of hedonism that give maximum happiness and act in a manner that ensures maximum enjoyment from the activity other than pain.

One of the arguments that he highlights is that pleasure is the core objective behind the individual’s motivation to engage in any given activity. In my opinion, Bentham’s belief in happiness represents the absence of pain and the presence of gratification and satisfaction in an activity. Hence, individuals will take part in activities that give them maximum satisfaction, utility, and pleasure.

The argument that Bentham explains is that there are various types of hedonism. He states that hedonism exists in qualitative and ethical aspects. According to Bentham, both hedonistic and egoistic people have a collective motivation of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain from any activity they undertake. In my observation, Bentham notes that pleasure acts as the driving force to motivate people to perform certain activities. Therefore, people are more likely to engage in activities that cause the greatest satisfaction. In my opinion, Bentham argues that irrespective of the different types of hedonism, people still struggle to maximize pleasure and reduce the pain that activity provides. Essentially, my focus is that Bentham presents a qualitative approach, as it is evident from his argument.

Since Bentham proposed the use of quantitative approach in measuring the level of happiness accrued from an activity, he devised a formula that requires individuals to multiply the intensity of pleasure by its duration. Hedonistic calculus is the popular formula devised by Jeremy Bentham. In my view, Bentham states that by using the method, people can count the amounts of pain and pleasure brought about by an activity. According to Bentham, the method not only requires an understanding of the types of pleasure but also an understanding of the importance of what an activity initiates in the life of an individual. Therefore, the quantitative approach proposed by Bentham requires people to examine an activity critically in line with the magnitude of gratification and pain that the activity is likely to cause before making their choice.

In his approach to hedonism and measurement of pleasure, Bentham employs aspects that determine the worth of pleasure. He shows that these factors included duration, certainty, intensity, propinquity, extent, and purity. Bentham asserts that the duration represents the period that an individual or those around the person experience the derived pleasure or pain. Furthermore, the belief that different levels of pain and pleasures are present in any activity refers to certainty. The most explicit argument that he elaborates is that the strength of pleasure or pain induced by the act is the intensity.

Moreover, the time taken for an activity to bring about pain or pleasure represents propinquity. The extent of pleasure stands for the effect that pleasure or pain has on other people around an active individual. Also, if the sensation caused by the activity is opposite, then it implies that there is some level of purity

In my analysis, by including duration, certainty, intensity, propinquity, extent, and purity in hedonistic calculus, Bentham presents the benefits that accrue from aspects of pleasure. He also creates a clear distinction between folk hedonists and hedonism. One of the major differences between hedonism and folk hedonists relates to their focus. While folk hedonists focus on immediate pleasure and avoidance of immediate pain from an activity, hedonism focus on the long-term pleasure or pain that activity presents.

Therefore, Bentham expounds on the important aspects of hedonism. Bentham further elucidates the importance of satisfaction as possessed by different aspects of pleasure when he employs the formula of hedonistic calculus to determine the level of satisfaction derived from an activity. Using the method of hedonistic calculus, individuals who want to achieve high satisfaction must engage in ethical activities. Therefore, according to Bentham, the important aspect of pleasure possessed is very vital in the study of hedonism.

The most decisive claim, which Bentham makes is that hedonistic calculus employs all factors that contribute to the worth or value of pleasure. The method then uses the formula to determine the level of satisfaction derived from an activity. Using the method of hedonistic calculus, individuals who want to achieve high levels of pleasure or hedonism must engage in moral activities. In my opinion, he elucidates that his approach had its basis on the quantity of pleasure or pain derived from an activity. Furthermore, it implies that the focus of the approach he presented is quantitative because it uses a mathematical formula to determine the quantity of pleasure provided by a given activity.

The Similarities

Mill and Bentham are among the most influential philosophers who defend the concept of hedonism. According to my examination, they present their arguments and perspectives concerning hedonism and its ultimate motive, pleasure, and happiness. The most decisive claim that they make is that the key objective behind activities that individuals undertake is the continuous pursuit for maximum enjoyment. Among the major aspects, which they share, is that pleasure and happiness are important. From my perspective, both philosophers highlight the concept of increasing enjoyment or happiness while minimizing the pain from the activities. Mill states that individuals are likely to choose activities that can provide maximum satisfaction. Similarly, Bentham also notes that individuals engage in those activities that give them maximum happiness. Individuals also act in a manner that enables them to achieve the highest enjoyment of an activity.

Both Mill and Bentham recognize the importance of different aspects of pleasure in their arguments of hedonism. According to Mill, aspects of pleasure are beneficial though at different levels. In my inspection, Mill explains that high-quality pleasure gives high satisfaction and happiness, whereas low-quality pleasure gives relatively reduced satisfaction and happiness. In his assertion, Bentham uses the method of hedonistic calculus to present the important aspects of pleasure. According to me, Bentham, states that when an individual engages in activities that are presentable, and ethical, the individual attains high levels of satisfaction. Bentham uses aspects such as duration, certainty, intensity, propinquity, extent, and purity to underscore the importance of hedonism.

In my judgment, the importance of understanding hedonism is another similarity that both Mill and Bentham possess. Mill believes that people who have a high intellectual understanding in society perform acts that generate high-quality pleasure, whereas humbled individuals opt to perform activities that lead to low-quality pleasure. Bentham asserts that it is important to understand the method of gauging different types of pleasure.

He also presents the need to understand the importance of happiness in the life of individuals. Thus, according to my observation, both Mill and Bentham highlight the importance of understanding pleasure. Both philosophers explain that people must critically examine activity in line with the magnitude of the satisfaction that an activity is likely to cause before making their choice. Therefore, Mill and Bentham want individuals to gain an enhanced understanding of activities so that they can derive optimum satisfaction before engaging in them.

The Differences

In my analysis, the types of approach represent the main difference between Mill and Bentham concerning the concept of hedonism and measurement of pleasure derived from an activity. According to Mill, individuals must use a qualitative approach, which emphasizes on the quality of pleasure or happiness in measuring the level of pleasure that an act brings to a person. In his assertion, Mill states that hedonism is measured using different levels of satisfaction, such as low quality and high-quality levels of pleasure. However, Bentham argues that the best method that people can employ in assessing pleasure is quantitative approach. He notes that individuals can gauge the level of satisfaction that activity gives using the formula of hedonistic calculus. The formula requires people to sum the total pleasure and pain from an activity, and then multiply their intensities by the duration of the derived satisfaction.

Mill states that pleasure exists at different levels, such as high and low levels. According to him, the elites, and elaborate members of the society are the ones who access a high level of happiness and good pleasure, whereas, the simple people enjoy a low level of pleasure. He further states that because the elite has enhanced understanding of hedonism, they enjoy high-quality pleasure, unlike the simple people. However, Bentham argues that aspects of pleasure such as duration, certainty, intensity, propinquity, extent, and purity, determine the worth or value of pleasure. Also, Bentham highlights that activities that are acceptable, morally upright, and presentable give maximum satisfaction and that people have the freedom to engage in these activities. This is different from Mill, who employs the levels of happiness to explain hedonism.

This essay discusses the importance of hedonism and its emphasis on maximizing pleasure while minimizing pain from an activity. It presents the arguments of two philosophers, John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham. From the arguments of both Mill and Bentham, it is clear that hedonism has its ultimate objective of minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure. Additionally, it is clear that aspects of pleasure are very critical in the study of hedonism, as well as in the livelihoods of human beings. The essay also presents the differences and similarities of arguments that Mill and Bentham make. Therefore, in comparisons and contrasts, the essay reveals that Mill and Bentham share several ideas in their perception of hedonism.

Gibbs, Benjamin. “Higher and Lower Pleasures.” Philosophy 61.235 (1986): 31-59. Print.

Lemos, John. “Sober and Wilson Nozick and the Experience Machine.” Philosophia 29.1 (2002): 401-409. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2024, January 6). Mill versus Bentham - Hedonism Philosophy. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mill-versus-bentham-hedonism-philosophy/

"Mill versus Bentham - Hedonism Philosophy." IvyPanda , 6 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/mill-versus-bentham-hedonism-philosophy/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Mill versus Bentham - Hedonism Philosophy'. 6 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Mill versus Bentham - Hedonism Philosophy." January 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mill-versus-bentham-hedonism-philosophy/.

1. IvyPanda . "Mill versus Bentham - Hedonism Philosophy." January 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mill-versus-bentham-hedonism-philosophy/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Mill versus Bentham - Hedonism Philosophy." January 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mill-versus-bentham-hedonism-philosophy/.

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