Between 1787, and the end of his life in 1832, Bentham turned his attention to the development and application of economic ideas and principles within the general structure of his legislative project. For seventeen years this interest was manifested through a number of books and pamphlets, most of which remained in manuscript form, that develop a distinctive approach to economic questions. Although Bentham was influenced by Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he (...) neither adopted a Smithian vocabulary for addressing questions of economic principle and policy, nor did he accept many of the distinctive features of Smith's economic theory. One consequence of this was that Bentham played almost no part in the development of the emerging science of political economy in the early nineteenth century. The standard histories of economics all emphasize how little he contributed to the mainstream of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century debate by concentrating attention on his utilitarianism and the psychology of hedonism on which it is premised. Others have argued that the calculating nature of his theory of practical reason reduced the whole legislative project to a crude attempt to apply economics to all aspects of social and political life. Put at its simplest this argument amounts to the erroneous claim that Bentham's science of legislation is reducible to the science of political economy. A different but equally dangerous error would be to argue that because Bentham's conception of the science of legislation comprehends all the basic forms of social relationships, there can be no science of political economy as there is no autonomous sphere of activity governed by the principles of economics. This approach is no doubt attractive from an historical point of view given that the major premise of this argument is true, and that many of Bentham's ‘economic’ arguments are couched in terms of his theory of legislation. Yet it fails to account for the undoubted importance of political economy within Bentham's writings, not just on finance, economic policy, colonies and preventive police, but also in other aspects of his utilitarian public policy such as prison reform, pauper management, and even constitutional reform. All of these works reflect a conception of political economy in its broadest terms. However, this conception of political economy differs in many respects from that of Bentham's contemporaries, and for this reason Bentham's distinctive approach to problems of economics and political economy has largely been misunderstood. (shrink)

The argument of this paper is part of a general defence of the claim that Bentham's moral theory embodies a utilitarian theory of distributive justice, which is developed in his Civil Law writings. Whereas it is a commonplace of recent revisionist scholarship to argue that J. S. Mill had a developed utilitarian theory of justice, few scholars regard Bentham as having a theory of justice, let alone one that rivals in sophistication that of Mill. Indeed, Gerald J. Postema in his (...) book Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, argues that Bentham had no substantial concern with the concept of justice, and that what analysis of the concept there is in Bentham's thought is unlike the utilitarian theory of justice to be found in chapter five of J. S. Mill's Utilitarianism Although Postema's interpretation is not the only one that will be addressed in this paper, it serves as an important starting point for any rival interpretation of Bentham's ethical theory for two reasons. Firstly, it is the most comprehensive and most penetrating discussion of Bentham's utilitarian theory, drawing as it does on a wide variety of published and unpublished materials written throughout Bentham's career. Secondly, it is interesting in this particular context because the contrast that Postema draws between Bentham's and Mill's theories of justice depends upon a particular reading of Mill's theory of justice and utility which is derived from recent scholarship and which is by no means uncontroversial. As part of the defence of the claim that Bentham had a sophisticated theory of distributive justice, it will be argued in this paper that the contrast drawn between Bentham and Mill does not stand up to careful scrutiny, for insofar as Mill's theory of justice can be consistently defended it is not significantly different from the utilitarian strategy that Bentham employed for incorporating considerations of distributive justice within his theory. This is not to claim that there are not significant differences between the theories of justice of Bentham and J. S. Mill, but it is to claim that whatever technical differences exist between their theories, both writers saw the need to incorporate the concept of justice within utilitarianism. Therefore, rather than showing that Mill is an interesting thinker to the extent that he abandons his early Benthamism, by demonstrating how close Mill's theory of utility and justice is to that of Bentham, it will be possible to argue that Bentham employed a sophisticated and subtle utilitarian theory that was responsive to the sort of problems which occupied Mill a generation later. (shrink)

This paper examines Rosen's claim that Bentham's principle of utility was a distributive rather than an aggregative principle.

With a book as wide ranging and insightful as Barry'sJustice as Impartiality, it is perhaps a little churlish to criticize it for paying insufficient attention to one's own particular interests. That said, in what follows I am going to do just that and claim that in an important sense Barry does not take utilitarianism seriously. Utilitarianism does receive some discussion in Barry's book, and in an important section which I will discuss he even appears to concede that utilitarianism provides a (...) rival though ultimately inadequate theory of justice. Nevertheless, utilitarianism is not considered a rival to ‘justice as impartiality’ in the way that ‘justice as mutual advantage’ and ‘justice as reciprocity’ are. One response, and perhaps the only adequate response, would be to construct a rival utilitarian theory. I cannot provide such a theory in this paper, and I certainly would be very cautious about claiming that I could provide such a theory elsewhere. What I want to suggest is that utilitarianismisa genuine third theory to contrast with ‘justice as mutual advantage’ and ‘justice as impartiality’ – ‘justice as reciprocity’ being merely a hybrid of ‘justice as mutual advantage’, at least as Barry presents it (pp. 46–51). I also want to argue that it poses a more significant challenge to a contractualist theory such as Barry's than his discussion of utilitarianism reveals. (shrink)