Chapter 3 - The Great Divide

Summary

Chapter 3 examines the decisive break between religious and secular utilitarianism in the thought of William Paley and Jeremy Bentham. Paley, the better known and more widely respected thinker of the two at the time, is in many ways the paradigm case of the theological version of morality as legislation. Paley, like Locke, used human legislative deliberation as a paradigm of rationality for thinking about the content of the divine law. Bentham’s project must be understood in part as motivated by a desire to reject the theological assumptions of theories like Paley’s that stood in the way of radical reform. It also encouraged a reframing of moral expression as a kind of legislative act. Bentham saw reputational sanctions as one substitute for religious motives for moral action, but this also required a perspectival shift towards a legislative approach when making moral statements.