This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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The age of law reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same.

So said one of Bentham's 19th century contemporaries.

Bentham's proposed reforms were designed to increase happiness and minimize pain.

That was his overriding aim in everything.

He even donated his body to science. His fully dressed skeleton can now be seen in a glass case at University College London.

So prolific was Bentham that a project to transcribe and edit his writings has been going on for decades.

Philip Schofield has devoted much of his academic life to Bentham.

Professor Schofield is both the director of the Bentham Project and editor of Bentham's collected works.

Philip Schofield, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much.

The topic we're going to focus on today is Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism. Could you say a little bit

about who Jeremy Bentham was? Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748. He died in 1832. he lived most of his life here in London his father

realizing that the young Jeremy was very clever and himself being a lawyer decided that Jeremy would pursue a career in law.

Bentham himself however decided that he would rather reform the law,

so about the age of 21 he set off on what became his lifelong career of writing and thinking about the law.

Now if you want to go about reforming the law, what do you do?

What he thought you should do was abolish the common law and established a codified system of law.

Statute was the way forward rather than the common law but codified statute. He thought that utilitarianism

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