The Greatest Good

The traditional sin of selfishness played an important role in new efforts to reconcile individual desire with the common good. The utilitarian Jeremy Bentham built literally upon Montesquieu's notion that the state should promote civic virtue, drafting detailed blueprints for the architectural reform of prisons.

Bentham believed in both the force and the transcendence of self-interest. In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation he described individuals as motivated by the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.²⁵ Yet he also believed in the potential for a rational state that could, much like a rational deity, rule with complete benevolence. Bentham's implicit assumption, like Adam Smith's, seems to have been that well- educated men had the gentility required to represent the common interest. Certainly he never doubted his own gentility: ‘‘I am a selfish man,'' he wrote, ‘‘as selfish as any man can be. But in me, somehow or other, selfishness has taken the shape of benevolence.''²⁶

He was less impressed by the selfishness of his predecessors, and expressed disgust at the baroque inefficiencies and feudal remnants littering the British legal system. Rationality and common sense required legislative reform. In 1788, Bentham began a treatise on constitutional law urging the French government to remodel itself before it was forcibly overthrown, but history outran him.²⁷ He was an energetic critic of slavery and called for emanci­pation of all British colonies.

Bentham treated pleasure and pain as dimensions of ‘‘utility’’—a term he appropriated from David Hume, but treated as a scientific concept analo­gous to Newton’s concept of gravity.²⁹ Proponents of the neoclassical school of economics that emerged later in the nineteenth century carried the concept to higher levels of mathematical sophistication. In doing so, how­ever, they relinquished a key aspect of Bentham’s vision, the notion that the individual pursuit of utility should be subordinated to ‘‘the greatest happi­ness of the greatest number’’. Calculus tells us it is impossible to maximize two different magnitudes at once, and Bentham also ignored the difficulties of comparing the subjective feelings of two or more individuals.

Yet he correctly observed that, all else equal, poor people were likely to get more pleasure from an additional dollar of income than rich people ever would. Bentham never argued for complete equality, but praised the rela­tively egalitarian distribution of income in the non-slave regions of the United States.³⁰ Predisposed to an odd mixture of the paternalistic and the libertarian, he had little sympathy for public assistance to the poor, because he felt it would discourage work.

Bentham seemed to have more confidence than Smith in the state’s ability to promote the common good. In matters relating to women and family life, however, he was a radical libertarian. He criticized all legal conventions governing marriage, divorce, and sexuality, on the grounds that these were private matters.³¹ Contracts that could neither be broken nor renegotiated— like the traditional rules of marriage—were, in his opinion, inefficient.³²

In his Manual of Political Economy, written between 1793 and 1795, Bentham listed arguments criticizing the prevailing mercantilist view that the state should promote population growth.³³ He called attention to the coercive pronatalism of laws that discouraged ‘‘marriages promising to be unprolific'', ‘‘prolific venery out of marriage”, and ‘‘venery necessarily unprolific” (venery is a now archaic term for sexual intercourse).³⁴ These arguments were followed by seven short paragraphs in Latin which defended the legitimacy of sexual pleasure, even when its intent was not procreative, and even when it was positively ‘‘unnatural”.

Bentham reiterated these views in a series of unpublished manuscripts later deposited in the library of University College London, which appar­ently remained unpublished until C.

Bentham compared the legal prosecution of male homosexuality in England (which included the threat of capital punishment) with the repressive measures of the Spanish Inquisition. Not all his views were so enlightened. He was skeptical of the potential for self-control within heterosexual unions, particu­larly among the ‘‘savages of Asia, Africa, and America”. His proposed solution to the problem of overpopulation was the legalization of infanticide. He was never fond of ‘‘rights”—in his view, the greatest happiness of the greatest number should take precedence over any such abstraction.

But unlike most of his contemporaries, Bentham was not afraid of what might happen if women were allowed to pursue pleasures of their own. His theory of utility assumed a fundamental similarity of psychological structure among all members of the species.³⁷ If the vote should be extended to a larger group of men, he argued, it should be extended to women as well. Bentham did not press hard for this demand because he perceived it as politically impractical. In his histories of legislation, however, he scoffed at the common argument that laws which discriminated against women were intended only to protect them.³⁸

Many later feminists were influenced by Bentham's reasoning, including the writer Harriet Martineau and the economist John Stuart Mill. His contemporaries, however, did not share his libertarian views on sex. Like

Mandeville, Bentham believed that prostitution should be decriminalized. He stopped short of arguing for public support, and expressed confidence that few women would ever choose to sell their sexual services. Still, he raised the prospect of providing retirement annuities for prostitutes and homes for their children. His grand plans included details of architectural and interior design.³⁹