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Bentham on Mensuration: Calculation and Moral Reasoning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2013

MICHAEL QUINN
MICHAEL QUINN*
Affiliation:
University College London, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article argues that Bentham was committed to attempting to measure the outcomes of rules by calculating the values of the pains and pleasures to which they gave rise. That pleasure was preferable to pain, and greater pleasure to less, were, for Bentham, foundational premises of rationality, whilst to abjure calculation was to abjure rationality. However, Bentham knew that the experience of pleasure and pain, the ‘simple’ entities which provided his objective moral standard, was not only subjective, and only indirectly accessible to the legislator, but also typically dependent on a complex of socially mediated beliefs and attitudes. All moral reasoning involved a process of inference from contingent ‘facts’ which was littered with possibilities for error. The Bentham who emerges is a more vulpine hedgehog than is usually allowed, whose core insistence is that, despite its imperfections, consequentialist analysis and decision-making remains the only viable route to a rational morality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 61 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Robbins, Lionel, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy, 2nd edn. (London, 1978), p. 181Google Scholar.

2 The central problem with Hume's treatment of utility for Bentham concerned precisely its unfitness for the evaluation of competing decisions or rules: ‘[N]o criterion of right and wrong – no answer to the question, “What ought to be done and what ought to be left undone?” is on any occasion endeavoured to be furnished’: (‘Article on Utilitarianism: Short Version Marginals’, Deontology, together with A Table of the Springs of Action and the Article on Utilitarianism, ed. A. Goldworth (Oxford, 1983 (CW)), pp. 319–28, at 323). And see also p. 324: ‘As to good and evil . . . all that he says on these subjects, including all he says on the subject of utility, consists of mere speculation; no part of it has been applied by him, or is capable of being applied, in such sort as to be of use to practice: like a cloud which, floating in the air at different levels but never in the form of rain descending upon the earth, does but tantalize the thirsty traveller without contributing any thing towards his relief.’ For an acute analysis of the differences between Hume and Bentham in the interconnected fields of language, metaphysics and epistemology see Long, D., ‘“Utility” and the “Utility Principle”: Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill’, Utilitas 2 (1990), pp. 12–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Of course, the principle of asceticism also allows the exchange of sense, but, in Bentham's view, a proper understanding of the principle can only result in its rejection: see Bentham, J., An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (henceforth IPML), ed. Burns, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A. (London, 1970 (CW)), p. 21Google Scholar.

4 For a fuller discussion see Quinn, M., ‘Which comes first, Bentham's Chicken of Utility, or his Egg of Truth?’, Journal of Bentham Studies 14 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, <http://www.ojs.lib.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/jbs/article/view/111>.

5 See Bentham's marginal summary in ‘Elements of Critical Jurisprudence’, University College London collection of Bentham manuscripts (henceforth UC), lxix. 10: ‘Beginning: Physical Sensibility the Ground of Law’.

6 Bentham, ‘Codification Proposal, Addressed by Jeremy Bentham to All Nations Professing Liberal Opinions’, ‘Legislator of the World’: Writings on Codification, Law and Education, ed. P. Schofield and J. Harris (Oxford, 1998 (CW)), pp. 241–384, at 250–1. See also Bentham, ‘A Fragment on Government’, A Comment on the Commentaries and a Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London, 1977 (CW)), pp. 391–551, at 491: ‘The footing on which this principle rests every dispute, is that of matter of fact; that is future fact – the probability of certain future contingencies.’

7 Bentham, ‘Preparatory Principles Inserenda’ (UC lxix. 94), where Bentham also makes the same statement about pleasure.

8 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 166.

9 Bentham, The Rationale of Punishment (London, 1830), p. 24 (The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the superintendence of his executor, John Bowring, 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1843) (henceforth Bowring), vol. 1, pp. 388–525, at 397). This work, being a retranslation of the first volume of a recension by Étienne Dumont, Théorie des peines et des récompenses, 2 vols. (Paris, 1811), comes with a caveat in the sense that it was not, strictly speaking, written by Bentham. The same caveat applies to Rationale of Reward (London, 1825) (Bowring, vol. 2, pp. 189–266), and a similar one to ‘Principles of the Civil Code’ (Bowring, vol. 1, pp. 297–364).

10 ‘We should say, then, that a punishment is economic, when the desired effect is produced by the employment of the least possible suffering’ (Bentham, Rationale of Punishment, p. 27 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 398) ).

11 Bentham, Rationale of Punishment, p. 27 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 398).

12 Bentham, Rationale of Punishment, p. 32 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 399).

13 Draper, A., ‘Punishment, Proportionality and the Economic Analysis of Crime’, Journal of Bentham Studies 11 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, <http://www.ojs.lib.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/jbs/article/view/58>.

14 See, for instance, Kant, Immanuel, An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (London, 2009), pp. 3–4Google Scholar.

15 Bentham, ‘A Table of the Springs of Action: Marginals’, Deontology (CW), pp. 5–73, at 43. See also p. 35: ‘He who, on whatever subject or occasion, discards calculation, i.e. reason, to follow the dissocial passion is an enemy to mankind, no less than the Savage whom he takes for his model.’

16 Postema, G., ‘Interests, Universal and Particular: Bentham's Utilitarian Theory of Value’, Utilitas 18 (2006), pp. 109–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 112n.

17 Bentham, ‘Preparatory Principles Inserenda’ (UC lxix. 125). See also Bentham, ‘Codification Proposal’, p. 250: ‘Rationale, indicates conduciveness to happiness.’

18 Bentham, ‘Table of the Springs of Actions: Marginals’, p. 43.

19 Bentham, ‘Table of the Springs of Actions: Marginals’, p. 58.

20 Bentham, ‘Table of the Springs of Actions: Marginals’, p. 51.

21 Schofield, P., Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed (London, 2009), p. 59Google Scholar. See also Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford, 2006), pp. 41–4.

22 Bentham, ‘Not Paul, but Jesus, Vol. III. Doctrine’ (UC clxi. 322), <http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/publications/npbj/npbj.html> (2013), p. 66.

23 Bentham lists two further elements, fecundity and purity, that is, the tendency of a sensation to be followed by sensations of the same or the opposite character respectively, but as he himself admits, neither element strictly relates to the present sensation, but rather to the tendency of an act to produce future sensations: see IPML (CW), p. 39.

24 See Bentham, ‘Codification Proposal’, pp. 251–2.

25 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 40. The tendency of an action is determined by its predicted consequences for the pleasures and pains experienced by sentient beings. See IPML (CW), p. 74: ‘The general tendency of an act is more or less pernicious according to the sum total of its consequences: that is, according to the difference between the sum of such as are good, and the sum of such as are evil.’

26 UC lxix. 197.

27 For a treatment of the dimensions of sensation which pre-dates IPML see UC xxvii. 32–5 (published in D. Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today (Princeton, 1952), pp. 554–8). For a much later version of essentially the same procedure, see ‘Codification Proposal’, pp. 250–7.

28 See Warke, T., ‘Multi-Dimensional Utility and the Index Number Problem: Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill and Qualitative Hedonism’, Utilitas 12 (2000), pp. 176–203, at 180–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Bentham, ‘Codification Proposal’, p. 254.

30 UC lxix. 41. See also UC cxliii. 39, containing notes for Bentham's theory of punishment, where he contrasts pleasure and pain with money precisely with reference to its divisibility: ‘Money is divisible into parts capable of being numbered: pleasure or pain itself is not.’

31 Warke, T., ‘Classical Utilitarianism and the Methodology of Determinate Choice, in Economics and in Ethics’, Journal of Economic Methodology 7 (2000), pp. 373–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 380.

32 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 290.

33 Bentham, ‘Considerations d'un Anglois sur la composition des États-Généraux’, Rights Representation and Reform: ‘Nonsense on Stilts’ and Other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. P. Schofield, C. Pease-Watkin and C. Blamires (Oxford, 2002 (CW)), pp. 63–146, at 68.

34 See UC xxvii. 33 (in Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today, p. 555). In an essay ‘Des Lotteries’, in contrasting the pleasure derivable from the hope that one is holding a winning ticket with the momentary pain arising from the realization that one is holding a losing ticket, Bentham alludes to the difficulty of weighing pleasures which are valuable chiefly through their intensity, against pleasures which are valuable chiefly through their duration: ‘Avouons pourtant qu'il est difficile de faire une équation entre un dont la valeur est principalement en intensité, et un autre dont la valeur est principalement en durée. Mais est-il croyable que dans les tempéraments les plus mélancoliques, le regret momentané qui résulte d'un billet blanc puisse l'emporter sur le plaisir si prolongé qu'aura donné l'espérance d'un billet fortuné? Je ne saurois me le persuader’ (Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. Dumont 51, fol. 63).

35 It is worth noting that the modern use of cognitive behavioural therapy in the treatment of depression and other aspects of mental distress makes extensive use, both diagnostically and therapeutically, of the patient's ability to measure and report the intensity of her emotional states. Before treatment, the responses to a series of scaling questions establish the existence and severity of the depression. During treatment, scaling questions are consistently repeated, and any reduction in severity used to inform the patient's understanding that things can get, and, if things go well, are getting, better. See, for instance, Beck, A. T., Ward, C. H., Mock, J., Erbaugh, J., ‘An Inventory for Measuring Depression’, Archives of General Psychiatry 4 (1961), pp. 561–71CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

36 See Warke, ‘Classical Utilitarianism and the Methodology of Determinate Choice’, p. 383 and n.

37 Warke, T., ‘Mathematical Fitness in the Evolution of the Utility Concept from Bentham to Jevons to Marshall’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 22 (2000), pp. 5–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 11. See also ‘Classical Utilitarianism and the Methodology of Determinate Choice’, pp. 375, 380.

38 See Warke, T., ‘A Reconstruction of Classical Utilitarianism’, Journal of Bentham Studies 3 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, <http://www.ojs.lib.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/jbs/article/view/16>.

39 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 53n.

40 Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Specially Applied to English Practice (henceforth RJE), 5 vols. (London, 1827), vol. 5, p. 636 (Bowring, vols. 6, pp. 189–585, and 7, pp. 1–644, at vol. 7, p. 569).

41 Warke, ‘Multi-dimensional Utility and the Index Number Problem’, p. 180n.

42 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 46. ‘Mode’ is another often-used Benthamic synonym for ‘species’ or ‘kind’.

43 Bentham, ‘Preparatory Principles Inserenda’ (UC lxix. 219).

44 Bentham, ‘Codification Proposal', p. 251. The formula is indeed repeated in several places: see, for instance, ‘A Table of the Springs of Action', in Deontology (CW), pp. 74–115, at 76.

45 UC xxvii. 29 (emphasis added).

46 See Halevy, E., The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London, 1928), p. 32Google Scholar: ‘Must we not admit that in Bentham the taste for classification has got the better of the analytical spirit?’

47 Mitchell, W., ‘Bentham's Felicific Calculus’, Political Science Quarterly 33 (1918), pp. 161–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 182.

48 Pitkin, H. F., ‘Slippery Bentham: Some Neglected Cracks in the Foundation of Utilitarianism’, Political Theory (18) 1990, pp. 104–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 108. See also R. Harrison, Bentham (London, 1983), p. 162.

49 Sigot, N., Bentham et l'économie: une histoire d'utilité (Paris, 2001), pp. 17–22Google Scholar, 153–8.

50 For insightful discussions see Baujard, A., ‘A Return to Bentham's Felicific Calculus: From Moral Welfarism to Technical Non-welfarism’, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 16 (2009), pp. 431–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 435–7, and Guidi, M., ‘Jeremy Bentham's Quantitative Analysis of Happiness and its Asymmetries’, Handbook of the Economics of Happiness, ed. Bruni, L. and Porta, P. L. (Cheltenham, 2007), pp. 68–93Google Scholar, at 74.

51 If pleasures and pains are typically heterogeneous, the whole notion of combining their values quantitatively becomes, as Warke notes, like adding apples and oranges (‘Multi-dimensional Utility and the Index Number Problem’, p. 180n.). Consider then the following, from Bentham's contrast between the utilitarian and ‘moralist’ concerning the relation of pleasure to happiness: ‘Of happiness, sole elements or ingredients: pleasures (and exemptions). As of a pound, pence’ (‘Table of the Springs of Action: Marginals’, p. 60).

52 ‘Not Paul, But Jesus, Vol. III’ (UC clxi. 245), <http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham- Project/publications/npbj/npbj.html>, p. 18 (emphasis added).

53 ‘Not Paul, But Jesus, Vol. III’ (UC clxi. 259), <http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham- Project/publications/npbj/npbj.html>, p. 20.

54 Warke, ‘Multi-dimensional Utility and the Index Number Problem’, p. 182.

55 UC xxvii. 36–7 (in Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today, p. 561).

56 UC xxvii. 36 (in Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today, p. 560).

57 Bentham, Draught of a New Plan for the Organisation of the Judicial Establishment in France (London, 1790), p. 46 (Bowring, vol. 4, pp. 285–406, at 375); D. Lieberman, ‘Economy and Polity in Bentham's Science of Legislation', in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. S. Collini, R. Whatmore and B. Young (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 107–34, at 123; Harrison, Bentham, pp. 161–2.

58 See further UC xxvii. 36 (in Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today, p. 560): ‘Of such pleasure then as is produced by the bestowal of money, and of such pain as is produced by taking it away, money is the direct and proper measure: and being not only the measure, but the producing instrument or cause. But of a pleasure or a pain produced by any other cause, money though not the cause may be the measure; if not the direct one yet an exact and proper one, and the only one such pain or pleasure will admitt of.’

59 UC xxvii. 37 (in Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today, p. 561).

60 UC xxvii. 35 (in Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today, p. 558).

61 In The Rationale of Reward (London, 1825), p. 72 (Bowring, vol. 2, p. 213), Bentham notes that reward given in money may in fact bring dishonour, as is the case in relation to the service provided by ‘informers’ in England. Bentham consistently berates the English for their idiotic attitude to such servants of justice, who undertake the prosecution of offences where ‘no individual has any peculiar interest in prosecuting’, and argues that their service is such as should instead lead the public to bestow honour and respect upon them. His proffered solution to the difficulty is to withdraw the ‘reward’, and with it the plausibility of ascribing venality to their motivation, and to offer indemnification of the expenses of prosecution instead.

62 Bentham, Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence (henceforth Limits), ed. P. Schofield (Oxford, 2010 (CW) ), p. 203.

63 Bentham, Limits (CW), p. 203.

64 In Rationale of Punishment, p. 418 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 518), Bentham bases the calculation of the rate of exchange between a sum of money and a period of imprisonment on the average daily earnings of the offender. The recognition that only fines provide direct measures of costs to offenders punished, and that a rate of exchange needs to be established between time in prison and fines, is repeated by theorists of the law and economics movement: see Becker, G. S., ‘Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach’, Journal of Political Economy 76 (1968), pp. 169–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 179.

65 Bentham, Limits (CW), pp. 204–5. Exactly the same contrast between cases where calculating the appropriate pecuniary satisfaction for the victim is rendered straightforward by the homogeneity of the evil (pecuniary loss) and the remedy (pecuniary compensation), and cases where financial compensation is inappropriate because the calculation of the appropriate level of compensation may be impossible, is highlighted in ‘Political Remedies for the Evil of Offences’, Bowring, vol. 1, pp. 367–88, at 373, where Bentham confirms that the pains of damage to honour at least may not be measurable in money terms.

66 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 155n.

67 It is tempting to speculate on Bentham's reaction to recent research in neuroscience, which may offer a future prospect of the objective measurement of the intensity of a wide range of pleasurable or painful sensations by measurement of the degree of stimulation of the pre-frontal cortex. In that the realization of this prospect would potentially resolve both the major difficulties in calculating the values of pleasures and pains, it seems plausible to infer that he would have been very excited indeed. See, for instance, R. J. Davidson, D. C. Jackson, N. H. Klein, ‘Emotion, Plasticity, Context, and Regulation: Perspectives From Affective Neuroscience’, Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000), pp. 890–909, at 904: ‘Understanding how feeling is instantiated in the brain and using the brain's architecture to meaningfully parse the domain of emotion is now possible through the modern methods of neuroscience.’

68 Bentham, ‘Of Sexual Irregularities’ (UC lxxiv. 139), in Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality, ed. Schofield, P., Pease-Watkin, C. and Quinn, M. (Oxford, 2014 (CW)), pp. 1–45Google Scholar, at 29.

69 Bentham, RJE, vol. 5, p. 629 (Bowring, vol. 7, p. 567).

70 Bentham lists the force of a second motive, namely ‘aversion to labour’, as being in principle measurable, but discards it immediately as being subject to a set of variables (namely the quality of the labour and the idiosyncrasies of individuals) that render ‘quantity of labour . . . but an imperfect and incompetent subject of mensuration'. See RJE, vol. 5, pp. 633–4 (Bowring, vol. 7, p. 568).

71 RJE, vol. 5, p. 48 (Bowring, vol. 7, p. 397).

72 ‘It is not with trustworthiness in psychology, as with temperature in physics; in which you can say not only, it was cooler yesterday at noon than today at the same hour; but by observation taken each day on the thermometer, you can express the difference, by numbering in each case of the degrees’: Bentham, RJE, vol. 5, pp. 632–3 (Bowring, vol. 7, p. 568).

73 Bentham, RJE, vol. 5, p. 53 (Bowring, vol. 7, p. 398).

74 Bentham, RJE, vol. 5, p. 632 (Bowring, vol. 7, p. 568).

75 Bentham, RJE, vol. 5, p. 634 (Bowring, vol. 7, p. 568).

76 Bentham, RJE, vol. 5, pp. 634–5 (Bowring, vol. 7, p. 569).

77 M. Guidi, ‘Bentham's Economics of Legislation', Dipartmento di Studi Sociali, Università degli Studi di Brescia, DSS Papers STO 1–97, p. 18 and n.

78 Bentham, RJE, vol. 5, pp. 630–1 (Bowring, vol. 7, pp. 567–8).

79 Harrison, Bentham, p. 149. See also pp. 148–9, where, in relation to the enumeration of pleasures in ‘Table of the Springs of Action', Harrison comments that the different pleasures listed ‘seem to have no more in common than that they are different motives to action'; and compare Jevons, W. S., Theory of Political Economy (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 93Google Scholar: ‘Call any motive which attracts us to a certain course of conduct, pleasure; and call any motive which deters us from that conduct, pain; and it becomes impossible to deny that all actions are governed by pleasure and pain.’

80 Harrison, Bentham, p. 158.

81 ‘Principles of the Civil Code’ (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 305). The uncertainties over the provenance of the Civil Code writings do not extend to this passage. The original, in Bentham's hand and in Bentham's French, is at UC xxxiii. 5: ‘Dans toutes ces propositions il faut faire abstraction tant[?] de l'idiopathie de l'individu que de toutes les circonstances exterieures on il peut se trouver, hormis celles don't resulte l'état de sa fortune. Car cette idiopathie était[?] inscrutable, et ces circonstances peuvent être différentes pour chaque individu, a moins d'on écarter la considération il n'y auroit pas moyens de former aucune proposition générale quelleconque.’

82 Bentham, Rationale of Punishment, pp. 254–5 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 469).

83 Bentham, Rationale of Punishment, p. 83 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 415).

84 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 176. In Rationale of Punishment, p. 112 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 424), Bentham draws on his own sensibilities in making a plea for indulgence to imprisoned authors: ‘Take away article and ink from an author by profession, and you take away his means of amusement and support: you would punish other individuals more or less, according as a written correspondence happened to be more or less necessary for their business or pleasure. A privation so heavy for those whom it affects, and at the same time so trifling for the greater number of individuals, ought not to be admitted in the quality of a punishment.’

85 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 169. See also Rationale of Punishment, p. 44 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 403): ‘In the preparation of a penal code, it ought constantly to be kept in view, that according to circumstances, of condition, fortune, sex, &c. the same nominal punishment is not the same real punishment.’

86 Baujard, ‘A Return to Bentham's Felicific Calculus’, pp. 443–5.

87 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 69.

88 From Bentham's list of secondary circumstances education and government are omitted, whilst Bentham himself lists habitual occupations as a primary circumstance. It is interesting also to note the omission from the legislator's purview of the primary circumstance of pecuniary circumstances.

89 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 71.

90 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 70.

91 See Bentham, IPML (CW), pp. 69–71, and see also Rationale of Punishment, pp. 411–13 (Bowring, vol. 1, pp. 516–17).

92 Bentham, Rationale of Reward, p. 82 (Bowring, vol. 2, p. 216). See also ‘Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved’, in Writings on the Poor Laws: II, ed. M. Quinn (Oxford, 2010 (CW)), p. 547n., where Bentham praises ‘the domestic tribunal' as approaching more nearly to perfect justice than any other.

93 Bentham, Rationale of Punishment, p. 151 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 436). See also Burns, J. H., ‘Nature and Natural Authority in Bentham’, Utilitas 5 (1993), pp. 209–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 UC lxx. 14.

95 UC xcvi. 131 (in Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today, p. 570). It should be noted, however, that Bentham's target in this discussion was Maupertuis's assertion that the only pleasures worth pursuing were the purely mental ones deriving from the pursuit of truth and virtue, so that the reduction of the apparently mental pleasure of doing one's duty to the physical pleasures liable to flow from the good will of others serves instrumentally to undermine that assertion, rather than constituting a basic premise of Bentham's own argument. See Guidi, ‘Jeremy Bentham's Quantitative Analysis of Happiness’, pp. 75–83.

96 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 44.

97 See Engelmann, S., Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality (Durham and London, 2003), pp. 48–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 42.

99 Thus the pleasures of wealth are the effects of, or are caused by, the possession or the acquisition of wealth. The pleasures of skill are the effects of, or are caused by, the exercise of skill, and so on.

100 For instance, the pleasures and pains of the senses are the effects of the senses, are caused by the senses, only in so far as an agent's loss of a sense denies him the sensations for which it is the conduit: a blind person experiences neither pleasures nor pains of sight. However, the possession of the sense does not determine the agreeableness or otherwise of the sensations it relays: the sensations it relays can be either pleasant or painful, according to circumstances exterior to it. Exactly the same is true of the mental faculties of memory and imagination. The amnesiac derives neither pleasure nor pain from non-existent memory, while its recovery is likely to subject him to both pleasures and pains of recollection. The pleasures and pains of association also depend on the existence of the human mental capacity to make connections between disparate objects, to notice patterns and make analogy. When that capacity exists, it can deliver pleasures or pains, depending on the agreeableness or otherwise of the images brought to mind.

101 Although Bentham distinguishes the pains of expectation or apprehension from all other pains, which are current sensations or ‘pains of sufferance’, this seems to be a confusion on his part. It is true that the pains of apprehension are derived from my anticipation of future pains, but an apprehension is a current belief, and the corresponding current pain I derive from my anticipation that I will be unable to satisfy a critic of this article is a pain of sufferance.

102 On Bentham's account, their affective attitude is only relevant if one of the sanctions at my disposal is withdrawal of affection. The absence of any pains of powerlessness is, as Engelmann notes, striking (Imagining Interest in Political Thought, p. 170n.).

103 UC lxx. 22.

104 UC lxx. 22.

105 UC lxx. 22–3.

106 UC lxx 23.

107 UC lxx. 23.

108 ‘Universal Grammar’, UC cii. 460 (Bowring, vol. 8, p. 330).

109 ‘Of Ontology’, UC cii. 69 (in De l'ontologie et autres textes sur les fictions, ed. J.-P. Clero, C. Laval and P. Schofield (Paris, 1997), p. 144 (Bowring, vol. 8, pp. 193–211, at 209).

110 ‘Universal Grammar’ UC cii. 460 (Bowring, vol. 8, p. 330).

111 ‘Universal Grammar’ UC cii. 460 (Bowring, vol. 8, p. 330).

112 UC lxx. 23 (emphasis added).

113 ‘Of Ontology’, UC cii. 71 (in De l'ontologie, p. 146 (Bowring, vol. 8, p. 210) ).

114 Engelmann, Imagining Interest in Political Thought, p. 70.

115 Engelmann, Imagining Interest in Political Thought, p. 54.

116 UC lxx. 23.

117 See Engelmann, Imagining Interest in Political Thought, pp. 53–62.

118 ‘Logic’, UC ci. 390 (Bowring, vol. 8, pp. 213–93, at 277).

119 Defence of Usury; shewing the Impolicy of the Present Legal Restraints on the Terms of Pecuniary Bargains (London, 1787), p. 7 (Bowring, vol. 3, pp. 1–27, at 3).

120 ‘Of Ontology’, UC cii. 71 (in De l'ontologie, p. 146 (Bowring vol. 8, p. 210) ).

121 Dor, O. Ben, Constitutional Limits and the Public Sphere: A Critical Study of Bentham's Constitutionalism (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

122 UC lxx. 23.

123 UC lxx. 23.

124 Bentham, ‘Of Ontology’, UC cii. 71 (in De l'ontologie, p. 146 (Bowring, vol. 8, p. 209) ).

125 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 159n.

126 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 101. See also ‘Universal Grammar’, UC cii. 466–7 (Bowring, vol. 8, p. 331).

127 Bentham, ‘Table of the Springs of Action', p. 107. See also IPML (CW), p. 155.

128 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 177.

129 See also Bentham, Rationale of Punishment, p. 102 (Bowring, vol. 1, p. 421), where Bentham notes that in principle, the more intense a punishment, the shorter need be its duration in order to produce a given quantity of pain.

130 See, for instance, Bentham, Rationale of Punishment, pp. 174–6 (Bowring vol. 1, pp. 443–4) where Bentham questions the legitimacy of the afflictive capital punishment inflicted on West Indian slaves.

131 Bentham, ‘Universal Grammar’, UC cii. 460 (Bowring, vol. 8, p. 330n.).

132 Bentham, ‘Preparatory Principles Inserenda’ (UC lxix. 69) (emphasis added).

133 Bentham, ‘Codification Proposal', p. 255.

134 Bentham, IPML (CW), p. 11.

135 For interpretations of Bentham's project which adopt elements of such an approach see Kelly, P. J., Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar; Rosen, F., Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy: A Study of the Constitutional Code (Oxford, 1983), pp. 200–20Google Scholar, and Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (Oxford, 2003), pp. 220–31; Postema, ‘Interests Universal and Particular’.

136 I am grateful to Peter Niesen, Fred Rosen, Philip Schofield, Xiaobo Zhai and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am particularly indebted to Doug Long for suggesting a great number of improvements both in matter and in form. The surviving infelicities are my responsibility.