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Life and Logic: What Matters, and Why?

Nonsense . . . is not a mere vague reproach: . . . it is a meaning definite and compleatly defensible. Nonsense - what is it but . . . words without corresponding ideas of which they are the sign. (UC lxi. 34 (1828))

§ 1. Life and Work

On 15 February 1748 Alicia Bentham (née Grove) gave birth to her first child Jeremy in Houndsditch in East London. Alicia had six more children over the next nine years, of whom only the last, Samuel (1757-1831), survived infancy. Bentham's lifetime witnessed massive historical changes, beginning two years after the last pitched battle on British soil, ending as the Great Reform Bill passed, and taking in not only the American and French Revolutions, but the transformation of Britain into the first industrial economy. His childhood was prosperous, but not emotionally warm, especially after his mother's death in 1759. He was prodigiously gifted, reading fluently by the age of three, and his father Jeremiah, a successful lawyer and property speculator, fed his cognitive development, hoping that he would one day rise to legal eminence.

Jeremy was taught Latin, Greek, French, music and art, though for a philosopher of pleasure his childhood seems to have been rather ascetic, since he was forbidden books offering mere 'amusement', as unsuitable for children (1843: x. 21). His parents were religiously and politically conservative; devotion to religious practice and principles was emphasized. Late in life Bentham recalled that his childhood had been blighted by fear of the supernatural, exacerbated by servants who tormented him with tales of malign spirits inhabiting the toilet at his grandmother's house (1843: x. 18-19). He had very limited contact with children of his own age before arriving at the exclusive Westminster School in 1755 (1843: x. 14), where he was bullied for his small stature and his intelligence. Dutifully, he tried to satisfy parental expectations, but his childhood must have been a lonely one, alleviated by extended summer visits to his grandmothers in Hampshire and Essex, where the atmosphere was less intense, and he could develop his lifelong interests in nature and science.

In 1760 Bentham, aged twelve, was enrolled at Oxford University, receiving his BA in 1763. His life at Oxford continued lonely, unstimulating and, thanks to Jeremiah's parsimony, impecunious. In order to graduate, scholars were required to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, and the young Bentham, viewing them as a series of statements combining obvious falsehoods with contradictory or meaningless prescriptions, but aware that failure to subscribe would shatter his father's ambitions for him, sacrificed his integrity to that ambition and swore the self-consciously perjurious oath with a sense of intellectual betrayal the bitter memory of which lingered for the rest of his life (2011a: 35-6).

Bentham's father rented lodgings for him in Lincoln's Inn and provided a rental income of £100 a year. For a while, he continued ploughing the furrow set before him, attending the courts in Westminster Hall and pursuing the path to qualify as a barrister, before being called to the bar as he came of age in 1769. By then, however, two things had changed. First, Bentham had returned to Oxford to hear the lectures on jurisprudence given by William Blackstone, Vinerian Professor of Law, and decided that English law as it existed, as delivered by Blackstone and witnessed in Westminster Hall, did not make sense: it was, strictly speaking, incomprehensible. The epigraph to this chapter comes from a much later indictment of Common Law in just these terms. Second, he had exploited his relative independence to read the leading authors of the Enlightenment, and enthusiastically adopted their ambition to substitute science for superstition in all areas, especially morality and law. Helvétius (1759), Beccaria (1995) and Hume (2007), who all aspired to establish morality on a scientific footing, were authors who particularly inspired him.1 Having reached his majority, Bentham concluded that his particular genius and mission was not to practise law but to establish its foundation on a rational basis (1843: x. 27). To do so, he began to develop the ontology and epistemology presented in § 2 of this chapter.

Bentham's decision to abandon the practice of law and the prospects it offered did not please Jeremiah, and their relationship, while courteous, remained strained. He was however, and remained, close to his brother, encouraging his interest in science, doing what he could to assist him in establishing his own career, and expressing the affection he himself, he perhaps felt, had been denied. Another important relationship for Bentham was with John Lind, a decade older and much more worldly wise, who was acting as unofficial agent for the King of Poland in London. Bentham had met Lind at Oxford, and after Lind's return to London in 1773 the two became, at the least, intimate friends, co-operating in writing in support of the British government in relation to the growing crisis in its American colonies.2

In 1776 Bentham's A Fragment on Government - an offshoot of a larger critique of Blackstone only published in the twentieth century (1977) - was published anonymously. Fragment followed Hume in rejecting the social contract as the basis of governmental authority, and identified 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' as the standard of right and wrong (1977: 393). There was considerable speculation over its author's identity, which abated along with its sales when Jeremiah, unable to contain his pride in its success, disclosed Bentham's authorship. One approving reader was the Earl of Shelburne, a powerful Whig politician, soon briefly to lead the British government, who sought Bentham out in 1780 and invited him to spend the next summer at his country seat. Shelburne, who had encouraged Richard Price and Joseph Priestley among other aspiring thinkers, and controlled several seats in the House of Commons, remained close to Bentham for over a decade. Through Shelburne, Bentham gained access to circles of privilege and power, meeting the young William Pitt, who failed to impress him (1843: x. 119), and the reforming lawyer Samuel Romilly, who became a long-term friend and confidant. The most significant contact for Bentham's future reputation was Étienne Dumont, a Genevan refugee who would be responsible, through abbreviated and accessible recensions of Bentham's writings, for making him known in Europe and the Americas as a legal theorist.

In the 1770s Bentham began developing the linguistic tools necessary to exchange sense in discussion of law, and decided that only codified, written law, could remedy the deficiencies of judge-made Common Law, under which no one could be sure what the law was until the judge pronounced it. Common Law was 'incognoscible', unknowable, making a mockery of law's action-guiding purpose. Each judgment being specific to a particular case, no one could be sure that it would be held relevant in apparently similar future cases. Judges interpreted law as they pleased, sometimes relying strictly on precedent, sometimes on personal moral intuitions, so that it was inconsistent and arbitrary. Since only lawsuits gave rise to judgments, it was also radically incomplete. Bentham undertook the task of setting out principles underlying a pannomion or complete code of law. Following Beccaria, and responding to growing willingness on the part of rulers to rationalize and codify state-inflicted punishments, he focused initially on penal law (de Champs, 2015: 55-69). By 1780, he had largely printed An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1996) (henceforth IPML), where this focus is evident (Ch. 3), but is prefaced by discussion of human psychology and presentation of the principle of utility as the only rational foundation for both morality and law (Ch. 2). In 1782, he developed his 'logic of the will' (see 2010b: 115-18), a form of deontic logic effectively reinvented in the twentieth century. In the next years, he began writing self-consciously for a European audience, using French in the effort to make his intended 'Projet d'un code de loix détaillé et complet, à l'usage d'un état quelconque' accessible to European sovereigns, and especially Catherine the Great, who had indicated her desire to codify Russian law (de Champs, 2014: 185-94).

In 1785 Bentham travelled to Russia to join his brother Samuel, who had secured employment with Prince Potemkin, Catherine's favourite. He remained there until late 1787, but never made the approach to Catherine. He reacted enthusiastically to Samuel's invention of the panopticon principle, and wrote a short work extolling its application wherever supervision was required (Ch. 6). A report that the British government, now headed by Pitt, planned to reduce the legal rate of interest prompted Bentham to write Defence of Usury (2016a: 43-121), arguing that Adam Smith had been wrong to defend legal limitations of interest rates, which often presented an insuperable obstacle to innovation by making it impossible for borrower and lender to agree on distributing the additional risks and returns of new enterprises.

Bentham returned to London early in 1788 and in 1789, buoyed by the positive reception of Defence of...