Jeremy Bentham still sits in a London university, by his own request
The founder of modern utilitarianism asked that after his death his body be preserved and displayed as an auto-icon. It now greets visitors at University College London's Student Centre. Bentham judged everything by one yardstick, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and followed it to conclusions far ahead of his time.
Born in London in 1748 to a wealthy Tory attorney's family, Bentham was reportedly found as a toddler reading a multi-volume history of England at his father's desk. He began Latin at three and by seven was playing Handel violin sonatas at dinner parties. He went up to Oxford at 12, qualified as a barrister in 1769 but never practised, and came to loathe the tangle of English law, which he nicknamed the Demon of Chicane.
His principle led him to argue for freedom of speech, the separation of church and state, equal rights for women, divorce and, in an essay he never published, the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He opposed slavery, capital punishment and the physical punishment of children, and he is counted among the early champions of animal rights. Yet he dismissed natural rights as nonsense upon stilts. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, from 1789, was the first major book on utilitarianism.
Not all his positions aged well. In 1776, when the British government secretly commissioned a rebuttal of the American Declaration of Independence, Bentham contributed an essay mocking the colonists' political philosophy.
His best-known scheme began with his brother Samuel, who was running projects in what is now Belarus for Prince Potemkin and devised a circular building from which a few supervisors could watch many workers. Jeremy adapted it into the Panopticon prison: guards unseen by inmates, so prisoners must assume they are always watched, with offers to run it himself at no salary to the nation. It was never built as planned. His pupils included James Mill and John Stuart Mill, and his ideas shaped reform of prisons, schools, the poor laws and Parliament. He died in 1832.
Source: Jeremy Bentham
