Question

Compare and contrast three versions of Utilitarianism: Bentham's, Mill's, and Edgeworth's. Give a short summary of each, where one summary keys off another summary (that is, say how they differ). You might mention how different parts of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" assessment are emphasized (by two of them, anyway). How do you personally assess the advantages and disadvantages of each of their versions?

Answer 1

The inspiration for the present volume came from Anthony Julius upon his appointment as University College London’s first professor of law and the arts at the beginning of 2017. Given UCL’s close association with Jeremy Bentham, and his own misgivings concerning the way in which Bentham, utilitarianism and political economy is standardly – and unsympathetically – contrasted with Coleridge, Romanticism and literature, Julius believed that the time was ripe for a reassessment. With a view to considering the question of ‘Bentham and the arts’, which, to those who had absorbed the standard account, would appear to be an oxymoron, he approached Philip Schofield, his colleague in UCL’s Faculty of Laws and director of the Bentham Project and general editor of the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. They invited Malcolm Quinn at the University of the Arts London to join the enterprise. Quinn formed the perfect link between Bentham and the arts, having recently published, under the title of Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-century Britain, a study of the influence of utilitarian thought, and of Bentham in particular, on the introduction of publicly funded art education in Britain at the beginning of the Victorian era.1 It was decided to invite scholars from a variety of backgrounds – including history, philosophy, psychology, literary studies and the arts – to contribute to a seminar series, which duly took place at UCL in the first half of 2018. It was hoped that the presentations would be of sufficient interest and importance to form the basis for a collection of essays – hopes that were not simply realized but far surpassed. In order to bring coherence and focus to the putative volume, the contributors were all asked to take Bentham’s recently published writings on sexual morality 2 BENTHAM AND THE ARTS as their core material. These writings consisted of three essays entitled ‘Of sexual irregularities – or, irregularities of the sexual appetite’, ‘Sextus’, and ‘General idea of a work, having for one of its objects the defence of the principle of utility, so far as concerns the liberty of taste … Not Paul, but Jesus’, which had been published in Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality (Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham),2 and in Not Paul, but Jesus, Volume III (the work announced in ‘General idea’), which had been made available online,3 pending its appearance in the Collected Works as part of the authoritative three-volume edition of Not Paul, but Jesus. 4 All these writings date from the mid-1810s. As was to be expected, the contributors ranged much more widely across Bentham’s corpus, but these essays, together with John Stuart Mill’s critique of Bentham and in particular of his views on poetry, form a common thread through the present volume. The orthodoxy to which Anthony Julius was exposed during his undergraduate studies at Cambridge, and which forms the impetus for the present volume, had been propagated by F.R. Leavis, arguably the most influential literary scholar of the twentieth century, who had used John Stuart Mill’s complementary essays on Bentham and Coleridge – in Mill’s view, the two major representative thinkers of the age – in order to draw the distinction between utilitarianism and Romanticism, and thereby had pitted political economy against literature. This theme is the starting-point for Julius’s own chapter below, but for present purposes it is worth drawing attention to the fact that, while his essays contained both praise and criticism of Bentham and Coleridge, Mill was particularly disdainful of Bentham’s attitude towards notions of taste. In drawing attention to taste, Mill anticipated the issue that looms large in the present volume because of its centrality to the debate on the relationship between utilitarianism and literature and between Bentham and the arts. Mill argued that every human action could be considered from three ‘aspects’. The moral aspect concerned its rightness or wrongness, addressed itself to reason and conscience and led to approval or disapproval; the aesthetic aspect concerned its beauty, addressed itself to the imagination and led to admiration or despising; and the sympathetic aspect concerned its loveableness, addressed itself to human fellowfeeling and led to love, pity or dislike. Bentham’s ‘error’ had been to treat ‘the moral view of actions and characters, which,’ Mill admitted, ‘is unquestionably the first and most important mode of looking at them, as if it were the sole one’, and had thereby ignored the aesthetic and sympathetic aspects. Mill claimed that it was ‘not possible for any Introduction 3 sophistry to confound these three modes of viewing an action’, although it was ‘very possible to adhere to one of them exclusively, and lose sight of the rest’, which was precisely what Bentham had done. Mill continued: 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 in 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. Mill claimed that nothing had done more than Bentham’s ‘error’ in this respect ‘to place him in opposition to the common feelings of mankind, and to give to his philosophy that cold, mechanical, and ungenial air which characterizes the popular idea of a Benthamite’.5 Mill went on to draw attention to ‘Bentham’s peculiar opinions on poetry’. While denying that Bentham held the fine arts in contempt, Mill explained that he ‘entertained no favour towards poetry’: Words, he thought, were perverted from their proper office when they were employed in uttering anything but precise logical truth. He says, somewhere in his works, that, ‘quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry:’ but this is only a paradoxical way of stating what he would equally have said of the things which he most valued and admired. Mill explained that Bentham’s basic view was that poetry ‘consisted essentially in exaggeration for effect: in proclaiming some one view of a thing very emphatically, and suppressing all the limitations and qualifications’. Such a criticism was too extensive, since it could be applied to each and every form of writing ‘which undertakes to make men feel truths as well as to see them’, and that justifiably did so ‘if the portion of truth which it thus enforces be that which is called for by the occasion’.6 The passage on push-pin and poetry to which Mill famously refers appears in Bentham’s Rationale of Reward, a text that had first appeared as the second volume of Étienne Dumont’s French recension Théorie des 4 BENTHAM AND THE ARTS peines et des récompenses in 1811, but based on manuscripts written in the 1770s, and translated into English by Richard Smith and published in 1825. In the context of a discussion of the arts and sciences of amusement and curiosity, as distinguished from the arts and sciences of utility, Bentham remarked: Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few.7 The above passage is one of the most often quoted passages from Bentham’s vast corpus, and constitutes the locus classicus for those who deem him to be a philistine. Mill was quite correct that Bentham regarded exaggeration as essential to poetry as Bentham noted in a passage written for Not Paul, but Jesus, Vol. III: ‘The connection in the way of causality between things in themselves so disparate as music and virtue has been announced by Poetry, and Reason proves it. In Poetry, the force of the connection had indeed been exaggerated: for without exaggeration, that is falsification in a certain form, there can scarce be Poetry.’ In the case in question, however, the exaggeration had ‘at least a platform of truth to stand upon’. Bentham went on to point out that Shakespeare’s sentiment that, The man who has not music in his soul Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils8 was not universally true: ‘But what is true is, that the more occupied a man’s mind is with music, and with the sentiments with which music is most accustomed to be accompanied … is so much the less exposed to the temptation of engaging in any such destructive enterprizes.’9 This was a point that Bentham also made in Rationale of Reward: namely that taking delight in the fine arts, apart from the pleasure it gave to the practitioner, also had a societal benefit in keeping the practitioner out of mischief.10 Returning to Not Paul, but Jesus, Bentham went on to say that, in this respect, ‘by filling up with innocent recreation that time which might otherwise have been occupied by vice’, trap-ball and chess might be said to be ‘equally favourable to virtue’. But in favour of music, I am inclined to think, we may go farther, and pronounce it to have a connection with virtue peculiar to itself. Introduction 5 The artificial notes, which music is occupied in the production of, bear for the most part a natural resemblance to the notes expressive of the social affections, of those affections which are so many modifications of benevolence: complaint, entreaty, soothing, condolence, congratulation, co-exultation and the like. There is Music for War, it may be said, as well as for Love. True: but happily the War-music is comparatively but little in vogue: and even in War-Music, it is rather what there is of sociality in war, rather than what there is of malice and cruelty, that is expressed by it.11 Again, Mill was quite correct to argue that Bentham did not recognize any separate spheres for aesthetics and sympathy – all was reducible to morality, or, in other words, to feelings of pleasure and pain. For Bentham, if taste referred to the sensations derived from the palate, then the notion made sense;12 if taste referred to the propensity to derive pleasure from an object, then the notion made sense;13 but if taste referred to some sort of mental faculty, whether inherited or acquired, then the notion made no sense. The point was that when a person said that they had a taste for something, it made sense insofar as it indicated that the speaker derived pleasure from experiencing it, while to say that something was in ‘good taste’ could not mean anything more than that, since there was no other standard than the expected pleasure against which to measure the goodness of the taste. The phrase ‘good taste’, therefore, if it meant anything, meant ‘I like it’, but it was nonetheless typically used by members of the ruling classes as a claim of superiority over those members of the subject population who, it was pretended, did not have access to this (non-existent) standard. In contrast, the commitment to pleasure as the standard of taste implied social (and political) equality. Bentham’s approach to the relationship between pleasure and taste was the key to his attitude towards sexual morality in the writings from the mid-1810s that, as noted above, form a common thread through the present volume. Bentham had condemned the punishment of homosexuality in his first major published work A Fragment on Government, which had appeared in 1776, defended sexual liberty in the ‘Pederasty’ essay written for his penal code in the mid-1780s and continued to espouse the views he had developed under the influence of the radical Enlightenment and transmit them into the Romantic period.14 As late as the mid-1820s, when working on another draft of his proposed penal code, and around the time that Mill was beginning to work on Bentham’s writings on evidence, Bentham returned, albeit briefly, to some of the themes that he 6 BENTHAM AND THE ARTS had developed in his writings on sexual morality in the mid-1780s and reiterated in his writings on sexual morality in the mid-1810s. In a short sequence of manuscripts entitled ‘Innoxious eccentricities of the sexual appetite, why not included in the scheme of punishment’, he pointed out: Nature has given to man two cups of physical sweets: the one, containing those which are the produce of the operations by which the individual is preserved; another, containing those which are the produce of the operations by which the species is preserved. Into both, seconded by blind antipathy and pride, what is called Religion has now for about 18 centuries exerted itself in the endeavour either to dash the cup from the hand, or, by the infusion of its gall, to convert the cup of sweets into a cup of bitterness. The ‘pretence’ given for denying pleasure in relation to food and drink, whether through the interdiction of certain foodstuffs or fasting in general, was ‘the acquisition of the sympathy and the appeasing the antipathy of an Almighty being, who, by a self-contradictory proposition, is at the same [time] stiled benevolent: and not simply benevolent, but supremely benevolent’. All this was despite the fact that to Jesus, ‘asceticism in all its forms was an object of undissembled scorn and ridicule. Asceticism is not Christianity, but Paulism.’15 In relation to both food and drink and sexual gratification, ‘the law of appetite’ was ‘Maximize enjoyment’, subject to the limits imposed by prudence and benevolence, whereby pleasure should not be experienced at the cost of greater pain either to oneself or to others.16 In relation to sexual gratification, Bentham pointed to five categories of ‘error’ that deviated from the ‘standard’ that the ‘tyrant’ had identified, namely sexual intercourse between one man and one woman for the procreation of children. The error tempore related to women’s menstrual periods, the error loci to the use of parts of the body that would not lead to procreation, the error sexus to activities with members of the same-sex, the error species to activities with non-humans, and the error numeri, where (presumably) any other number of persons than two were involved.17 Bentham wondered whether a casuist would reckon that the sin was greater, the further ‘the aberration from the seat and standard of rectitude’. On this basis, the error sexus would be worse than the error loci where a man’s partner was a woman, the error species would be worse than the error sexus, but worst of all would be sex with an inanimate object. Recollecting an incident from his childhood, Bentham continued: Introduction 7 Never shall I forget the horror with which a reverend divine once communicated a discovery which, in the field of sin, he had just made. Once upon a time among the antients, wise as they were, Statues – statues soft and flexible made on purpose – had been but too successful rivals to the originals: such was the pride of learning, so delectable to it the discovery, the presence of a schoolboy, son of him to whom it was communicated, was no bar to the communication of it. The acme of heinousness in this line is not yet reached. If an elastic statue of a faultless biped is in some respects less unlike the original than an original quadruped is, in other respects it is more far removed. But between a woman and a french roll, how immeasurable the distance! A° 1789 at [… ?], while Turks and Russians were in arms,18 a hapless wigh[t] became the town-talk on account of the extraordinary use he had found for so ordinary an article. But it was to beauty in its proper seat that this passion had been excited: and to the one woman so far inferior were all others, the oven presented to him a less unworthy representative than any he could have found in the appropriate bed chamber. A substitute had he found for her (the lady was told) at a baker’s? At what baker’s? answer – at any baker’s. Unhappy man! it was by the lady’s inexorable cruelty he had been driven to this distance. As in this rather singular instance woman beheld her successful rival and substitute at the baker’s, man is in the habit of beholding his at the wax and tallow chandler’s.19 Mill, who welcomed the prospect of men’s ‘natural passions’ becoming ‘as it already is with a large number of women, completely under the control of the reason’,20 would, no doubt, not have regarded Bentham’s recounting of this anecdote, and indeed the whole passage, to be in good taste, but it also suggests that Bentham may have rather more to say to us, on these matters at least, than his successor in the utilitarian tradition. The contributions to the present volume are distributed among three parts dealing broadly with first, philosophy and sexuality; second, intellectual history and literature; and third aesthetics, taste and art. Part I on ‘Philosophy and sexuality’ opens with Philip Schofield’s chapter on ‘The epicurean universe of Jeremy Bentham: Taste, beauty and reality’, which provides an account of Bentham’s utilitarianism within the context of his deeper commitment to a materialist ontology, and is intended to provide some historical context for the ensuing chapters. According to Schofield, Bentham appears to have adopted a materialist ontology and 8 BENTHAM AND THE ARTS a sceptical attitude towards religion by the time when, aged 16, he was required to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England in order to take his degree at the University of Oxford. He later confessed himself to be ‘an Epicurean’, and this, Schofield suggests, is the key to appreciating why Bentham continues to divide opinion so strongly. What is at stake is illustrated by reference to the respective attitudes of French philosopher Michel Onfray and American political theorist Cathy Gere. Onfray approves of Bentham’s positioning himself in opposition to the dominant intellectual tradition represented by Plato, Christianity and Kant, whereas Gere sees his rejection of Kantian autonomy as opening the way for the abuse of marginalized individuals in order to benefit society in general. For Bentham, Schofield explains, there was the physical world and nothing more, at least nothing more that could be known, and all notions (ideals, concepts, angels, gods) that purported to refer to the non-physical world were so much nonsense. The same was true for statements about beauty and taste, insofar as they were made with reference to some metaphysical standard, while those making these statements were claiming not only aesthetic but political superiority over the bulk of the population who failed to appreciate the pretended non-existent standard. In his typology of ethical theories, Bentham had distinguished adherents of the principle of utility from adherents of the principle of sympathy and antipathy. The latter attempted to exercise power and influence by elevating their own opinions into standards that were binding on others. Hence proponents of ‘taste’ were adherents of the principle of sympathy and antipathy.

In recent years the “Coexist” bumper sticker has gained some popularity. I’ve wondered why my colleagues divide on this seemingly trivial matter: some display it with pride while others find the message annoying. Yet perhaps the divide reflects varied reactions to the problem that preoccupied James Mill: we all form relationships to groups that are stronger than our ties to the entirety of persons. The “Coexist” sticker exhorts us to be loyal to the full group and to downplay our ties to local groups.

For James Mill, the consequence of divided loyalties, especially when institutionalized in political structures, was that the Few would promote their interests at the expense of the Many. The key question in this essay is how Mill – and those before and after him – was sanguine about coexistence in a free society when he nonetheless recognized the dangers associated with the interests of smaller groups being overwhelmed by the desires and consequent actions of larger, more powerful groups, or factions. In Mill’s view, economists had much to say about this “most important” question, but they had received little credit for their analysis. [2] Sadly, notwithstanding the awarding of Nobel prizes in economic science to economists or political scientists such as James Buchanan, Douglass North, Elinor Ostrom, and Vernon Smith, whose work centered on arrangements that best align individual and group interests, the same might be said today.

The Self and Others

Related Links:

• Adam Smith
• Classical School

Economists have struggled for centuries with the relationship between the self and others. For those in the classical tradition of Adam Smith through James and then John Stuart Mill, the question was central to all economic analysis, to the wealth and flourishing of nations. Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments made the case that economic actors are not selfish or even simply self-interested, because they also sacrifice their own material or physical well-being to help others, even though they “derive nothing”[3] from doing so, no promise of future reciprocity, no reputational gain, nothing but the pure joy associated with a praiseworthy act. For Smith, one becomes virtuous through the imaginative exchange of approbation, by learning what is praiseworthy as well as by obtaining well-deserved praise.

For Smith, James Mill, and his eldest son John Stuart Mill, economic activity is a means by which people acquire a sense of reciprocity, fairness, trust, duty, and altruism. In contrast with the modern economic turn that developed an economics of isolated actors unconnected to others by bonds of friendship or language, classical economists presupposed that people are embedded in social contexts. In this view, cooperation in economic and social activity emerged from the resulting interactions; as Smith put it, actors entered into a “great school of self-command” of language and self-sacrifice.[4]

Classical economists held that all people are connected by bonds of sympathy that carry motivational force and generate a wide sphere of reciprocity. Yet they also recognized the strong tendency for people to form groups characterized by relative uniformity in social or economic dimensions. Here arose the danger of “factions,” of cooperative action within one group at the expense of another. Unlike the division of labor, where gains from specialization and trade accrue on both sides of a transaction, for Smith and, even more, for James Mill, factions are associated with zero-sum outcomes.

When small groups cooperate at the expense of large groups, the problem that greatly troubled James Mill, the outcome is deleterious. Smith believed that “Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.” [5]

Importantly, masters regard one another as “neighbours and equals”: they are close to each other in social and economic dimensions, and as a consequence they seek the approval of those within the group by taking steps that harm those outside the group.

While Smith focused on the economic problem of collusion, it was the political context of groups exploiting one another that especially troubled James Mill. In Mill’s view, such factions emerge out of and then rely on and reinforce political or economic power. Unchecked power is the means by which an individual or a group promotes its interest to the detriment of others: