Bentham on Pleasure
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Talking Politics
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2021
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is a definitive early statement of the basis of utilitarianism: how do we achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number? David looks at Bentham’s rationale for this approach and the many criticisms it has faced. Bentham has often been accused of reducing politics to mechanical calculation and missing what really matters. But given the time in which he was writing, wasn’t the prioritisation of pleasure the most radical idea of all?
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Going deeper…
- Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran, ‘Asperger’s Syndrome and the Eccentricity and Genius of Jeremy Bentham’ (2006)
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
- Thomas McMullan, ‘What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance?’, The Guardian (2015)
- (Audio) In Our Time, Utilitarianism
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. In today's episode of History of Ideas, |
| 0:18.0 | which is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, David discusses |
| 0:22.4 | the origins of utilitarianism in the thought of Jeremy Bentham, the man who came up with |
| 0:27.8 | the catchphrase, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Bentham has been mocked |
| 0:33.2 | as a cold, calculating, mechanical philosopher. Listen on to discover how he was so much more than that. |
| 0:40.3 | There's a rule or convention that's come to be adopted, particularly in contemporary American |
| 1:03.0 | political commentary, which is known as the Goldwater Rule, and it says that we should resist |
| 1:08.3 | the temptation to try and diagnose the psychological condition of politicians, either as actual, |
| 1:14.2 | professional psychologists or as unchair psychologists. If we haven't treated them, it's too easy to say |
| 1:21.0 | of this or that person that they suffer from narcissistic personality disorder or whatever it is. |
| 1:26.1 | Start it with Barry Goldwater. It's continued to this day. A lot of people found it very hard to |
| 1:30.2 | abide by it during the presidency of Donald Trump, but that's the rule. There isn't an equivalent to |
| 1:35.9 | the Goldwater Rule for political philosophers. Maybe there should be, but there isn't. |
| 1:42.6 | So there is often a temptation that is succumbed to by people who read these philosophers or read |
| 1:47.3 | about them to diagnose a condition, particularly to speculate about whether they were autistic |
| 1:55.8 | on the autistic spectrum. So I have read articles that say that Thomas Hobbes was autistic. I have read |
| 2:02.4 | articles about Kant, a manual Kant, an autism, Vickinstein, and his autism. But perhaps the distinctive |
| 2:12.0 | case, the standout case, is the one that's made about the philosopher I'm talking about today, |
| 2:18.0 | Jeremy Bentham. In 2006, an article by two psychologists, Lucas and Sheeran, which is about |
| 2:25.8 | Bentham, genius, creativity, and asperger syndrome, makes the case that from what we know now |
| 2:33.0 | and from what we know about Bentham, it seems very likely that he did indeed have asperger syndrome. |
| 2:41.1 | What's the evidence? Well, Bentham was an obsessive systematiser. He loved and looked for patterns |
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