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Secular utilitarianism: Social science and the critique of religion in the thought of Jeremy Bentham
History Printed
ofEuropean Ideas, Vol. m Great Britain
14. No. 5. pp. 739-742,
0191-6599/92 $S.OO+O.OO Pergamon Press Ltd
1992
Secular Utilitarianism: Social Science and the Critique of Religion in the Thought of Jeremy Bentham, James E. Crimmins (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990) 348 pp., 235.00. Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, P.J. Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 240 pp., 227.50. JOHN CALLAGHAN*
Bentham’s anti-clericalism is well known despite early attempts by his editorin-chief, John Bowring, to suppress some of the volumes on religion. Books such as Church-ofEnglandism (18 18), Not PaulBut Jesus (1823), and Swear Not At All (18 17), in any case fell ‘deadborn from the press’ and Bentham’s views on religion have excited little interest in the intervening years. Crimmins’ book remedies this particular defect by providing an exhaustive account of the extent of Bentham’s views on almost every aspect of the subject. His main purpose, however, is ‘to provide an interpretation of Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy in which his religious views are located as an integral concern; on the one hand intimately associated with the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological principles which gave shape to his system as a whole, on the other hand, central to the development of his entirely secular view of society’. In so doing he rejects the arguments that Bentham’s anti-clerical outbursts in his later years were simply provoked by frustration at the Establishment’s obstruction of his schemes for reform or evidence of James Mill’s anti-religious influence. Crimmins contends that Bentham’s ideas on religion were developed in an intimate relationship with his theory of knowledge; as his thoughts on religion took shape so did the principles of his social science. The elaboration of this thesis involves Crimmins in a wide-ranging survey of Bentham’s unpublished writings-from the first phase of his religious investigations in 1773-1782 through to the polemics of the 1820s. The young Bentham emerges as a disciple of the philosophes and, largely through them, a follower of Bacon, Newton, Locke and Hume inspired by the project of creating a science of society capable of emulating Newtonian physics. His theory of knowledge develops as a blend of empiricist epistemology, a materialist metaphysics and a nominalist science of meaning-as befitted an enlightened man determined to free humanity from superstition. The ‘great subversive’ (as J.S. Mill once called him) later developed the technique of ‘paraphrasis’ in order to expunge irrational and ‘metaphysical’ notions from social scientific discourse. If Natural Law qualifies for this procedure, Crimmins asks how could theology-Bentham’s ‘region of the unintelligibles’-or God hope to evade it? The answer provided here is that they did not. Crimmins shows that fragments *Wolverhampton U.K.
Polytechnic,
Department
of Politics,
Wolverhampton,
WV1 ISB, 739
from the Book on Logic (18 1 l-21) such as the Fragment on Ontology, contain arguments on the nature of God and the soul which lead to the conclusion that they are fictions which disguise other realities. Bentham reasoned that nothing should be believed unless it can be supported by experiment and observation. The man who sought mathematical precision in legislation designed to promote utility was apparently convinced that religion obstructed this goal by the time the Introduction to the Principals and Morals of Legislation (IPML) was printed in 1780. During the 1770s Bentham seemingly embarked on the quest for a secular morality and rejected divinity as a source of knowledge. This set Bentham apart from religious advocates of utility such as Paley and Edmund Law who argued that belief in God provided the ethical imperative for individuals to pursue universal happiness-a task which legislation supplied imperfectly at best. Crimmins concedes that Bentham was initially prepared to make use of religious belief as a factor in moral motivation until, by 1809, he came to believe that no reforms were possible without ‘the destruction of religion, both as a dangerous form of history and as a powerful social institution’. This tactical turn explains the systematic attacks on religion which Bentham produced during the last twenty years of his life. His first temptation to take on the Church of England, however, can be traced back to 1773-1774 when he privately railed against the practice of requiring students to subscribe to its thirty-nine articles; the so-called subscription controversy convinced him that the Church promoted hypocrisy, deference, perjury, and a ‘prepared imbecility’. After the tactical turn of 1809 Crimmins shows us a Bentham who championed Catholic Emancipation, disestablishment, Irish independence, the abolition of the blasphemy laws and other progressive causes which invariably aligned him against a ‘semi-barbarous priesthood’ and its ‘sinister’ vested interests. One would expect Bentham to be hostile to asceticism but Crimmins also reveals a thinker bold enough to defend homosexuality and to imply that it characterised the relationship between Jesus and the apostle John. Bentham’s desire for freedom from religion is nicely encapsulated in his position on tolerance which accepted none of Locke’s exceptions (in respect of atheists, Catholics, and other ‘creeds incompatible with human society’) and also questioned the very idea of toleration as somehow implying that Church dogma was true but that its defenders were magnanimous enough to permit certain contrary opinions to their own. Bentham emerges in these pages as the archetypal social engineer and superrationalist ready to suspend some of his own principles-such as the axiom that individuals are the best judge of their own interests-in his zeal to eliminate religion. Thus the man who regarded a revolution in the distribution of property as an ‘idea big with horror’ was anxious to confiscate church property; the advocate of security of expectation and the greatest happiness of the greatest number gave not the slightest consideration to the role of faith and spiritual values. Crimmins depicts Bentham’s search for a totalising theory as intolerant of the ordinary ‘habit of credulity’ which the obscurantists fed off and nurtured. In the utilitarian scheme of things their place would be occupied by the scientific know-all who would ‘determine’ the conduct ofthe citizenry and ‘direct’ it with a purely secular ethics.
Reviews
741
appears in Utilitarianism andDistributive defence of Bentham against the standard critique in the current literature which maintains that utilitarianism is unable to provide an adequate account of individual rights and entitlements and therefore fails to accord due respect to persons. This is not a general defence of utilitarianism or consequentialism as an adequate basis for morality and practical reasoning but rather a rebuttal of the Rawlsian view that Bentham is so concerned with the maximisation of aggregate benefits that he is not concerned with their distribution and cannot provide an adequate theory of distributive justice. Indeed Kelly challenges a literature that goes back at least as far as Halevy in placing Bentham outside of the liberal tradition altogether on the grounds that he neglected the individual moral rights and liberties which this school of thought regard as paradigmatic features of a proper libel theory. He concludes, on the basis of a close scrutiny of unpublished manuscripts on the Civil and Distributive Law, that it is possible to derive absolute and nearabsolute moral principles from utilitarian reasoning. He also suggests that Bentham’s theory of justice surpasses that of J.S. Mill in some crucial respects. Kelly begins with a discussion of Bentham’s theory of motivation in which his theory of psychological hedonism is established as no more than the efficient cause of individual action. The individual’s conscious desires or ‘interest’, on the other hand, may be as varied as the circumstances in which people find themselves and need not be concerned with direct pleasure. In the course of this discussion Kelly acquits Bentham of psychological egoism and the supposition that all individual action is self-regarding. He also argues that behind the rhetorical flourishes Bentham was aware of the difficulties of founding an exact science of human nature; in acknowledging the existence of ‘idiosyncratical values’, for example, Bentham pointed to the limitations of his own ‘political arithmetic’. Kelly denies that the true character of the utilitarian morality of politics can be derived from the first five chapters of the IPML, as is commonly assumed. Yet this is the chief source of the claim that Bentham was guilty of the naturalistic fallacy. But Kelly argues that if the two offending passages in the first chapter are read in context then even this imperfect source of Bentham’s developed thinking does not seek to establish an identity of meaning between pleasure and good. Nor does good appear in the list of 54 synonyms to the word pleasure in the Table of the Springs of Action. The principle of utility was on this reading never intended as a normative principle but is rather a metaethical device which provides the criterion of meaningfulness of moral terms-not the analytical definitions of the terms of moral discourse themselves. Kelly stresses that Bentham saw the object of morality as communal well-being and its operational purpose as the solution of practical disputes; for this reason he rejected appeals to natural rights which could provide no consistent criterion for determining moral judgements. A very different
picture of Bentham
Justice. Kelly’s book is a rigorous
From the fragmentary writings on Civil and Distributive Law Kelly reconstructs a theory of distributive justice more fully developed than anything to be found in Bentham’s published work. The first claim is that for Bentham security is the most important source of utility because it is a necessary condition of personal continuity and interest formation. Stable patterns ofexpectation can
742
Reviept!s
only arise within the context of an authoritative system of rules. Expectation plays a constitutive role in the formation of desires, interests, and the goals and projects which depend on them. It is therefore the framework for prudential rationality. On this reasoning then Bentham’s legislator provides the system of rules but recognises that the individual must have the freedom to discount among various interests and desires. Thus if the ideal of personal autonomy is mainly responsible for the customary distinction between Bentham’s and J.S. Mill’s thought, Kelly argues that the gulf that separates them is in reality not very large. In the Principles of the Civil Code Bentham identifies subsistence, abundance, and equality-as well as security-as the four principles of utility which form the realisation conditions of individual well-being and which indirectly contribute to security of expectation and social stability. Kelly observes that after security Bentham accorded priority to the provision of subsistence as a positive individual right to those unable to secure it for themselves. Thus while the law must ensure that productive labour is seen as the normal source of subsistence he advocated measures to reduce great disparities of inherited wealth and the spread of poverty. To those, such as Parekh, who argue that Bentham was merely concerned with diminishing marginal utility, rather than establishing a prima facia case for equality and fairness, Kelly contends that Bentham’s defence of equal title to the means of subsistence is a sufficient reason for seeing in this a case for distributive justice. To those, like Nozick, who see utilitarianism as a threat to freedom Kelly is equally insistent, however, that Bentham had a strong aversion to egalitarianism and promoted positive rights to subsistence largely out of fear of the social instability arising from the discontents of the economically disenfranchised. Kelly sees Bentham neither as an interventionist-collectivist nor as an advocate of laissez-faire. The utilitarian legislator is only concerned with indirect strategies, informed by the value of security of expectation, which establish the formal conditions within which maximum social well-being can arise. In a lengthy discussion Kelly seeks to establish Bentham’s ‘security-providing principle’ as a formal principle of distributive justice by virtue of the fact that it determines the pattern of rights and titles which give substance to the realms of personal inviolability which follow from the conditions of interest formation and realisation. This puts constraints on the legislator and translates the dictates of utility into a system of obligations and duties. If this puts paid to the crude view of Bentham as an advocate of the total eradication of contingency in social life Kelly’s book also takes issue with more nuanced arguments culled from virtually the whole range of interpretive positions to be found in the secondary literature on his subject. Kelly is undoubtedly an ingenious advocate and his assiduous scholarship will require further forays into the Bentham archive if it is to be challenged. But for this reader at least the sometimes intemperate Bentham of the anti-religious diatribe is more revealing of the basic thrust of utilitarianism than the reconstructed Bentham presented by Kelly. John Wolverhampton
Polytechnic
Callaghan
ofEuropean Ideas, Vol. m Great Britain
14. No. 5. pp. 739-742,
0191-6599/92 $S.OO+O.OO Pergamon Press Ltd
1992
Secular Utilitarianism: Social Science and the Critique of Religion in the Thought of Jeremy Bentham, James E. Crimmins (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990) 348 pp., 235.00. Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, P.J. Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 240 pp., 227.50. JOHN CALLAGHAN*
Bentham’s anti-clericalism is well known despite early attempts by his editorin-chief, John Bowring, to suppress some of the volumes on religion. Books such as Church-ofEnglandism (18 18), Not PaulBut Jesus (1823), and Swear Not At All (18 17), in any case fell ‘deadborn from the press’ and Bentham’s views on religion have excited little interest in the intervening years. Crimmins’ book remedies this particular defect by providing an exhaustive account of the extent of Bentham’s views on almost every aspect of the subject. His main purpose, however, is ‘to provide an interpretation of Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy in which his religious views are located as an integral concern; on the one hand intimately associated with the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological principles which gave shape to his system as a whole, on the other hand, central to the development of his entirely secular view of society’. In so doing he rejects the arguments that Bentham’s anti-clerical outbursts in his later years were simply provoked by frustration at the Establishment’s obstruction of his schemes for reform or evidence of James Mill’s anti-religious influence. Crimmins contends that Bentham’s ideas on religion were developed in an intimate relationship with his theory of knowledge; as his thoughts on religion took shape so did the principles of his social science. The elaboration of this thesis involves Crimmins in a wide-ranging survey of Bentham’s unpublished writings-from the first phase of his religious investigations in 1773-1782 through to the polemics of the 1820s. The young Bentham emerges as a disciple of the philosophes and, largely through them, a follower of Bacon, Newton, Locke and Hume inspired by the project of creating a science of society capable of emulating Newtonian physics. His theory of knowledge develops as a blend of empiricist epistemology, a materialist metaphysics and a nominalist science of meaning-as befitted an enlightened man determined to free humanity from superstition. The ‘great subversive’ (as J.S. Mill once called him) later developed the technique of ‘paraphrasis’ in order to expunge irrational and ‘metaphysical’ notions from social scientific discourse. If Natural Law qualifies for this procedure, Crimmins asks how could theology-Bentham’s ‘region of the unintelligibles’-or God hope to evade it? The answer provided here is that they did not. Crimmins shows that fragments *Wolverhampton U.K.
Polytechnic,
Department
of Politics,
Wolverhampton,
WV1 ISB, 739
from the Book on Logic (18 1 l-21) such as the Fragment on Ontology, contain arguments on the nature of God and the soul which lead to the conclusion that they are fictions which disguise other realities. Bentham reasoned that nothing should be believed unless it can be supported by experiment and observation. The man who sought mathematical precision in legislation designed to promote utility was apparently convinced that religion obstructed this goal by the time the Introduction to the Principals and Morals of Legislation (IPML) was printed in 1780. During the 1770s Bentham seemingly embarked on the quest for a secular morality and rejected divinity as a source of knowledge. This set Bentham apart from religious advocates of utility such as Paley and Edmund Law who argued that belief in God provided the ethical imperative for individuals to pursue universal happiness-a task which legislation supplied imperfectly at best. Crimmins concedes that Bentham was initially prepared to make use of religious belief as a factor in moral motivation until, by 1809, he came to believe that no reforms were possible without ‘the destruction of religion, both as a dangerous form of history and as a powerful social institution’. This tactical turn explains the systematic attacks on religion which Bentham produced during the last twenty years of his life. His first temptation to take on the Church of England, however, can be traced back to 1773-1774 when he privately railed against the practice of requiring students to subscribe to its thirty-nine articles; the so-called subscription controversy convinced him that the Church promoted hypocrisy, deference, perjury, and a ‘prepared imbecility’. After the tactical turn of 1809 Crimmins shows us a Bentham who championed Catholic Emancipation, disestablishment, Irish independence, the abolition of the blasphemy laws and other progressive causes which invariably aligned him against a ‘semi-barbarous priesthood’ and its ‘sinister’ vested interests. One would expect Bentham to be hostile to asceticism but Crimmins also reveals a thinker bold enough to defend homosexuality and to imply that it characterised the relationship between Jesus and the apostle John. Bentham’s desire for freedom from religion is nicely encapsulated in his position on tolerance which accepted none of Locke’s exceptions (in respect of atheists, Catholics, and other ‘creeds incompatible with human society’) and also questioned the very idea of toleration as somehow implying that Church dogma was true but that its defenders were magnanimous enough to permit certain contrary opinions to their own. Bentham emerges in these pages as the archetypal social engineer and superrationalist ready to suspend some of his own principles-such as the axiom that individuals are the best judge of their own interests-in his zeal to eliminate religion. Thus the man who regarded a revolution in the distribution of property as an ‘idea big with horror’ was anxious to confiscate church property; the advocate of security of expectation and the greatest happiness of the greatest number gave not the slightest consideration to the role of faith and spiritual values. Crimmins depicts Bentham’s search for a totalising theory as intolerant of the ordinary ‘habit of credulity’ which the obscurantists fed off and nurtured. In the utilitarian scheme of things their place would be occupied by the scientific know-all who would ‘determine’ the conduct ofthe citizenry and ‘direct’ it with a purely secular ethics.
Reviews
741
appears in Utilitarianism andDistributive defence of Bentham against the standard critique in the current literature which maintains that utilitarianism is unable to provide an adequate account of individual rights and entitlements and therefore fails to accord due respect to persons. This is not a general defence of utilitarianism or consequentialism as an adequate basis for morality and practical reasoning but rather a rebuttal of the Rawlsian view that Bentham is so concerned with the maximisation of aggregate benefits that he is not concerned with their distribution and cannot provide an adequate theory of distributive justice. Indeed Kelly challenges a literature that goes back at least as far as Halevy in placing Bentham outside of the liberal tradition altogether on the grounds that he neglected the individual moral rights and liberties which this school of thought regard as paradigmatic features of a proper libel theory. He concludes, on the basis of a close scrutiny of unpublished manuscripts on the Civil and Distributive Law, that it is possible to derive absolute and nearabsolute moral principles from utilitarian reasoning. He also suggests that Bentham’s theory of justice surpasses that of J.S. Mill in some crucial respects. Kelly begins with a discussion of Bentham’s theory of motivation in which his theory of psychological hedonism is established as no more than the efficient cause of individual action. The individual’s conscious desires or ‘interest’, on the other hand, may be as varied as the circumstances in which people find themselves and need not be concerned with direct pleasure. In the course of this discussion Kelly acquits Bentham of psychological egoism and the supposition that all individual action is self-regarding. He also argues that behind the rhetorical flourishes Bentham was aware of the difficulties of founding an exact science of human nature; in acknowledging the existence of ‘idiosyncratical values’, for example, Bentham pointed to the limitations of his own ‘political arithmetic’. Kelly denies that the true character of the utilitarian morality of politics can be derived from the first five chapters of the IPML, as is commonly assumed. Yet this is the chief source of the claim that Bentham was guilty of the naturalistic fallacy. But Kelly argues that if the two offending passages in the first chapter are read in context then even this imperfect source of Bentham’s developed thinking does not seek to establish an identity of meaning between pleasure and good. Nor does good appear in the list of 54 synonyms to the word pleasure in the Table of the Springs of Action. The principle of utility was on this reading never intended as a normative principle but is rather a metaethical device which provides the criterion of meaningfulness of moral terms-not the analytical definitions of the terms of moral discourse themselves. Kelly stresses that Bentham saw the object of morality as communal well-being and its operational purpose as the solution of practical disputes; for this reason he rejected appeals to natural rights which could provide no consistent criterion for determining moral judgements. A very different
picture of Bentham
Justice. Kelly’s book is a rigorous
From the fragmentary writings on Civil and Distributive Law Kelly reconstructs a theory of distributive justice more fully developed than anything to be found in Bentham’s published work. The first claim is that for Bentham security is the most important source of utility because it is a necessary condition of personal continuity and interest formation. Stable patterns ofexpectation can
742
Reviept!s
only arise within the context of an authoritative system of rules. Expectation plays a constitutive role in the formation of desires, interests, and the goals and projects which depend on them. It is therefore the framework for prudential rationality. On this reasoning then Bentham’s legislator provides the system of rules but recognises that the individual must have the freedom to discount among various interests and desires. Thus if the ideal of personal autonomy is mainly responsible for the customary distinction between Bentham’s and J.S. Mill’s thought, Kelly argues that the gulf that separates them is in reality not very large. In the Principles of the Civil Code Bentham identifies subsistence, abundance, and equality-as well as security-as the four principles of utility which form the realisation conditions of individual well-being and which indirectly contribute to security of expectation and social stability. Kelly observes that after security Bentham accorded priority to the provision of subsistence as a positive individual right to those unable to secure it for themselves. Thus while the law must ensure that productive labour is seen as the normal source of subsistence he advocated measures to reduce great disparities of inherited wealth and the spread of poverty. To those, such as Parekh, who argue that Bentham was merely concerned with diminishing marginal utility, rather than establishing a prima facia case for equality and fairness, Kelly contends that Bentham’s defence of equal title to the means of subsistence is a sufficient reason for seeing in this a case for distributive justice. To those, like Nozick, who see utilitarianism as a threat to freedom Kelly is equally insistent, however, that Bentham had a strong aversion to egalitarianism and promoted positive rights to subsistence largely out of fear of the social instability arising from the discontents of the economically disenfranchised. Kelly sees Bentham neither as an interventionist-collectivist nor as an advocate of laissez-faire. The utilitarian legislator is only concerned with indirect strategies, informed by the value of security of expectation, which establish the formal conditions within which maximum social well-being can arise. In a lengthy discussion Kelly seeks to establish Bentham’s ‘security-providing principle’ as a formal principle of distributive justice by virtue of the fact that it determines the pattern of rights and titles which give substance to the realms of personal inviolability which follow from the conditions of interest formation and realisation. This puts constraints on the legislator and translates the dictates of utility into a system of obligations and duties. If this puts paid to the crude view of Bentham as an advocate of the total eradication of contingency in social life Kelly’s book also takes issue with more nuanced arguments culled from virtually the whole range of interpretive positions to be found in the secondary literature on his subject. Kelly is undoubtedly an ingenious advocate and his assiduous scholarship will require further forays into the Bentham archive if it is to be challenged. But for this reader at least the sometimes intemperate Bentham of the anti-religious diatribe is more revealing of the basic thrust of utilitarianism than the reconstructed Bentham presented by Kelly. John Wolverhampton
Polytechnic
Callaghan