In summary, Jeremy Bentham states that people are driven by their interests and their fears, but their interests take precedence over their fears, and their interests are carried out in accordance with how people view the consequences that might be involved with their interests.

Hedonism, for example, teaches that this feeling is pleasure — either one's own, as in egoism ( the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes ), or everyone's, as in universalistic hedonism, or utilitarianism ( the 19th-century English philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick ), with its formula of the " greatest pleasure of the greatest number.

Bentham was an early and staunch supporter of the utilitarian concept ( along with Hume ), an avid prison reformer, advocate for democracy, and strongly atheist.

Historically, utilitarian thinking about law is associated with the great philosopher, Jeremy Bentham.

( In England, economists tended to conceptualize utility in keeping with the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and later of John Stuart Mill.

Historically, utilitarian thinking about law is associated with the great philosopher, Jeremy Bentham.

Although utilitarianism is usually thought to start with Jeremy Bentham there were earlier writers who presented theories that were strikingly similar.

Rosen warns that descriptions of utilitarianism can bear “ little resemblance historically to utilitarians like Bentham and J. S. Mill ” and can be more “ a crude version of act utilitarianism conceived in the twentieth century as a straw man to be attacked and rejected .” It is a mistake to think that Bentham is not concerned with rules.

His seminal work is concerned with the principles of legislation and the hedonic calculus is introduced with the words “ Pleasures then, and the avoidance of pains, are the ends that the legislator has in view .” In Chapter VII Bentham says, “ The business of government is to promote the happiness of the society, by punishing and rewarding … In proportion as an act tends to disturb that happiness, in proportion as the tendency of it is pernicious, will be the demand it creates for punishment .”

Similarly, Hare refers to “ the crude caricature of act utilitarianism which is the only version of it that many philosophers seem to be acquainted with .” Given what Bentham says about second order evils it would be a serious misrepresentation to say that he and similar act utilitarians would be prepared to punish an innocent person for the greater good.

The former view is the one adopted by Bentham and Mill, and ( I believe ) by the Utilitarian school generally: and is obviously most in accordance with the universality that is characteristic of their principle ... it seems arbitrary and unreasonable to exclude from the end, as so conceived, any pleasure of any sentient being.

The claim for the women's vote appears to have been first made by Jeremy Bentham in 1817 when he published his Plan of Parliamentary Reform in the form of a Catechism and was taken up by William Thompson in 1825, when he published, with Anna Wheeler, An Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery: In Reply to Mr. Mill's Celebrated Article on Government.

He had one surviving sibling, Samuel Bentham, with whom he shared a close bond.

Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people.

In 1823, he co-founded the Westminster Review with James Mill as a journal for the " Philosophical Radicals " a group of younger disciples through whom Bentham exerted considerable influence in British public life.

Instead of suppressing the evil acts, Bentham is arguing that certain unnecessary laws and punishments could ultimately lead to new and more dangerous vices than those being punished to begin with.

Bentham follows these statements with explanations on how antiquity, religion, reproach of innovation, metaphor, fiction, fancy, antipathy and sympathy, begging the question, and imaginary law are not justification for the creation of legislature.

Instead, Bentham is calling upon legislators to measure the pleasures and pains associated with any legislation and to form laws in order to create the greatest good for the greatest number.

" The essay chastises the society of the time for making a disproportionate response to what Bentham appears to consider a largely private offence – public displays or forced acts being dealt with rightly by other laws.

Bentham is widely associated with the foundation in 1826 of the University of London ( the institution which in 1836 became University College London ), though he was 78 years old when the University opened and played only an indirect role in its establishment.

In 1959, the Bentham Committee was established under the auspices of University College London with the aim of producing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings.

Despite Blackstone's limited oratory skills and a speaking style described by Jeremy Bentham as " formal, precise and affected ", Blackstone's lectures were warmly appreciated.

Two decades after its publication, Blackstone's Commentaries were the focus of a mocking polemic by Jeremy Bentham, called Fragment on Government ( 1776 ).

It became the sole `` subject '' of `` international law '' ( a term which, it is pertinent to remember, was coined by Bentham ), a body of legal principle which by and large was made up of what Western nations could do in the world arena.

Social reformer Jeremy Bentham wrote the first known argument for homosexual law reform in England around 1785, at a time when the legal penalty for buggery was death by hanging.

Jeremy Bentham | Bentham's utilitarian theories remained dominant in law until the twentieth century

Moralists Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant both indicated the is – ought problem in order to identify their theories of morality and law.

Bentham, in discussing the relations of law and morality, found that when people discuss problems and issues they talk about how they wish it would be as opposed to how it actually is.

Bentham criticized natural law theory because in his view it was a naturalistic fallacy, claiming that it described how things ought to be instead of how things are.

Nonetheless, the implication of natural law in the common law tradition has meant that the great opponents of natural law and advocates of legal positivism, like Jeremy Bentham, have also been staunch critics of the common law.

Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism.

According to Kelly, for Bentham the law " provides the basic framework of social interaction by delimiting spheres of personal inviolability within which individuals can form and pursue their own conceptions of well-being.

For example, Jeremy Bentham believed that legal rights were the essence of rights, and he denied the existence of natural rights ; whereas Thomas Aquinas held that rights purported by positive law but not grounded in natural law were not properly rights at all, but only a facade or pretense of rights.

The Beruf unserer Zeit, in addition to the more specific object the treatise had in view, which has been already treated, expresses the idea, unfamiliar in 1814, that law is part and parcel of national life, and combats the notion, too much assumed by French jurists, especially in the 18th century, and countenanced in practice by Bentham, that law might be arbitrarily imposed on a country irrespective of its state of civilization and history.

Bentham asserted that in the King's Bench, Blackstone was " always in hot water ", and that there was " heartburning " between the two ; Bentham's account is considered dubious because historically, Mansfield and Blackstone had an excellent relationship, with the third volume of the Commentaries describing Mansfield as " a judge, whose masterly acquaintance with the law of nations was known and revered by every state in Europe ".

Legal positivism is a school of thought of philosophy of law and jurisprudence, largely developed by nineteenth-century legal thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin.

Bentham was also noted for calling natural law " nonsense upon stilts.

* Bentham House, law school in England

One of the earliest legal positivists was Jeremy Bentham.

In 1791, Jeremy Bentham drew up architectural plans ( it was his brother, Samuel Bentham who was the true architect ; Jeremy Bentham was the legal and philosophical brains behind the project ) that took the logic of plague control and transformed it into a plan for controlling people in prisons, workshops, schools and other institutions.

He quoted a 19th century legal scholar called Julius who argued that Bentham ’ s design was an event ‘ in the history of the human mind ’.

In English-language philosophy, legal positivism begins with the work of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher.

Hart's method combined the careful analysis of twentieth-century analytic philosophy with the jurisprudential tradition of Jeremy Bentham, the great English legal, political, and moral philosopher.