In the 18th and 19th centuries Kant, Bentham, Fichte, Hegel, Rank, and Mill ’ s political theories also had a bearing on relations between European states.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Bentham disagreed with Blackstone's defence of judge-made law, his defence of legal fictions, his theological formulation of the doctrine of mixed government, his appeal to a social contract and his use of the vocabulary of natural law.

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

Although an enthusiastic admirer of the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, he did not spare them a careful scrutiny of their approach to morality.

When Jeremy Bentham called on him, he was found playing battledore.

However, the term ( and its approximate sense ) can be found at least as early as 1840, in John Stuart Mill's 1840 essay on Coleridge, where Mill contrasts the Kantian-influenced thought of " Continental philosophy " and " Continental philosophers " with the English empiricism of Bentham and the 18th century generally.

Leavis found Bentham to epitomize the scientific drift of culture and social thinking, which was in his view the enemy of the holistic, humane understanding he championed ( Bell 9 ).

The emerging currents of secular humanist thought which had inspired Bentham also informed the French Revolution, and when the newly-formed National Constituent Assembly began drafting the policies and laws of the new republic in 1792, groups of militant ' sodomite-citizens ' in Paris petitioned the Assemblée nationale, the governing body of the French Revolution, for freedom and recognition.

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.

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.

Since 1959 ( when the Bentham Committee was first established ) UCL has hosted the Bentham Project, which is progressively publishing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings.

" Bentham and Singer both argue, for example, that to deprive an animal of its whole life is a greater loss to that sentient individual compared to the benefit of satisfying another sentient individual's senses, in this case the sense of taste which is a mere desire or preference for a certain taste ( a temporary sensory experience ), given that one does not even live less years by becoming a vegetarian or vegan and thus one is only benefitting in terms of the temporary sensory pleasure ; applying this to humans versus other humans, Singer argues that to deprive a man of the right not to be tortured would, similarly, be a great loss to most men when we ask ourselves how much they lose by not having that right, whereas a man losing a right to give birth ( or right to have an abortion ) is not considered to be any loss at all because he cannot get pregnant in the first place, thus the right not to be tortured is obviously, Singer argues, a more important right for males than a nonsensical right for males to give birth ( or to elect to have abortions ).

" Jeremy Bentham, who had been a critic of the Commentaries when it was first published, credits Blackstone with having: "... taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman ; put a polish upon that rugged science, cleansed her from the dust and cobwebs of the office and, if he has not enriched her with that precision which is drawn only from the sterling treasury of the sciences, has decked her out to advantage from the toilet of classical erudition, enlivened her with metaphors and allusions and sent her abroad in some measure to instruct.

His reputation grew when he set up a textile factory in New Lanark, Scotland, co-funded by his teacher, the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, and introduced shorter working hours, schools for children and renovated housing.

Walt returned to Lost in " The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham ", when Locke visits him in New York.

It began when a merchant and magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun, teamed up with mariner John Harriott and Jeremy Bentham to persuade shipping companies to finance a police force to stop the theft of cargo from the docks.

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.

Second, he says that Bentham fails to take account of the changing character of people, and hence the changing character of what is good for them.

Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people.

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.

Bentham made a sharp distinction between people he called:

Others, such as Utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer have argued the key to inclusion in the moral community is not rationality — for if it were, we might have to exclude some disabled people and infants, and might also have to distinguish between the degrees of rationality of healthy adults — but the real object of moral action is the avoidance of suffering.

Like Jeremy Bentham, modern economists assume that people are hedonists, that is they prefer more satisfaction to less satisfaction.

* Taxidermy: A few people, such as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, have had their dead bodies stuffed.

Partly it would be by way of natural development and progress ( the view espoused by David Hume ) but more so by way of education ( precursors of this view included John Locke, David Hartley, and the leaders of the Polish Enlightenment ) and by way of overt state action ( Claude Adrien Helvétius, later Jeremy Bentham ); reliance was placed in cooperation among people ( Charles Fourier, 1808 ), later in eugenics ( Francis Galton, 1869 ).