Professor Maurice Cranston, who died suddenly on 5 November 1993, was a man of many talents. Pre-eminent as a biographer of Locke and Rousseau, he was also distinguished for his own contribution to political philosophy and for his capacity to expound the political thought of others in clear, simple language. He did this with great success not only in the lecture room but also in numerous broadcast talks and discussions, notably on the Third Programme (later called Radio 3) of the BBC. In his academic work he was particularly well informed on French political thought, contemporary as much as classical, and he wrote extensively on Sartre and more briefly on Camus and Foucault. He was himself fluent in the French language (though he spoke it with a pronounced English accent) and he translated Rousseau's Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality for the Penguin Classics series. He was proficient in German and Italian too, and he knew enough Danish to translate a book on Wittgenstein written in that language. His love of literature often led him to illustrate philosophical points with apt examples from classical novels. He even wrote a couple of novels (of detection) himself in his youth. It will be plain from this brief catalogue that he was an eminently civilized person. He was, in addition, an exceptionally friendly man and engagingly modest about his own abilities.

Today talk of rights is very much in vogue both in philosophical and popular ethics; so much so that it is common to find even philosophers unabashedly going straight to discussing what rights we have without touching on what their foundation might be. This is so in spite of there being a time-honoured tradition of scepticism about rights, conceived as ‘natural’ ones, going back at least to Jeremy Bentham. The present paper is intended as a contribution to this sceptical tradition for I shall try to prove that there are no natural rights or that nobody is the holder of any such right.

Moral egalitarianism will depend on one of two basic ideas. The first is the idea of equality itself. We might believe that it is a good thing if different people have equal shares of resources, or if their lives score equally well in terms of whatever makes lives valuable, at least if there is no reason based on some other moral value for one person to do better than the other. Equality is a relationship between the lives of different people. This version of egalitarianism (I will call it the ‘equality view’) claims that the existence of the relationship makes an outcome better. It attributes value to relations between lives rather than to the content of lives.

A standard objection to act utilitarian theories is that they are not helpful in deciding what it is morally permissible for us to do when we actually have to make a choice between alternatives. That is, such theories are worthless as decision procedures. A standard reply to this objection is that act utilitarian theories can be evaluated solely as theories about right-making characteristics and, when so evaluated, their inadequacy as decision procedures is irrelevant. Even if somewhat unappealing, this is an effective reply to the standard objection.

In the introductory chapter of his essay on Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill says his aim is to contribute towards the understanding of utilitarianism and towards ‘such proof as it is susceptible of’. He immediately adds that ‘this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term’ because ‘ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof’. A proof that something is good has to show that it is ‘a means to something admitted to be good without proof’. But, he goes on, this does not imply that a formula of ultimate ends can only be accepted on ‘blind impulse, or arbitrary choice’. It can be rationally discussed and subjected to proof in a wider sense of that word. ‘Considerations may be presented capable of determining the intellect either to give or withhold its assent to the doctrine; and this is equivalent to proof.’

It is a great privilege to have been invited to speak on this occasion. I shall not talk about Janet Semple's life, since I did not know Janet Semple well. I first came across her work when the Oxford University Press sent me a copy of her Ph.D. thesis, asking for my opinion as to its publishability. I groaned—yet another study of the panopticon! I opened it, started reading—and read it straight through. It was so clear, insightful, powerful in its interpretation and beautifully written. I am delighted to see that it has appeared as Bentham's Prison. I was, at a later stage, equally pleased to be involved in persuading Janet to publish some of her research on Bentham's medical and health interests. I shall not try to evaluate her work today. I think I might best honour her by trying to reflect upon some of the wider issues that surround Bentham's concerns with prisons and hospitals—issues raised by her work.

This paper will attempt to provide an overview of Bentham's fundamental thinking with regard to the relief of indigence. The manuscripts on which it draws form the texts of unpublished works, namely a set of ‘Three Essays on the Poor Laws’, which were completed by Bentham, and ‘Pauper Systems Compared’, which remains in a comparatively unfinished state. In the ‘Essays’, Bentham considers first the question of whether the relief of indigence should be a public responsibility, and, having concluded that it should, moves on to consider what conditions should be attached to that relief. In ‘Systems Compared’, Bentham analyzes different systems of provision in terms of their compatibility with these conditions.

One of the more interesting developments in recent historical writing has been a reconsideration of the debates over poor law reform. In the sharply-demarcated world of post-war scholarship, the poor law fell clearly, if somewhat problematically, into the domain of social history. For obvious contemporary reasons, post-war social history devoted a good deal of scholarly energy to constructing a history of social policy. Much of this work was problematized in terms of the then orthodox agenda of the welfare state. The dominant questions concerned modes of assessing entitlements, mechanisms for delivering welfare, and the bureaucratic characteristics of the old and new poor laws. Despite its considerable empirical merits, this kind of social history was inhibited by its methodological and problematic certainties. To a large extent this was a social history which defined itself against traditional political history, offering a narrative of social policy formation which, whilst not eliminating political processes from its account, tended to marginalize their normative significance. One extreme formulation was Sydney Checkland's ‘socially innocent state’. Here the loss of ‘social innocence’ on the part of the British state is evaluated directly in terms of its willingness to develop the kind of social agenda and administrative machinery characteristic of modern wellfarism. For Checkland in particular, social policy was conceived almost exclusively in terms of state-driven programmes of ‘social improvement’. The old poor law, with its pattern of local management, discretionary administration, and paternalist social vision flatly contracted the statutorily-articulated welfarism which Checkland took to be axiomatic to a coherently-conceived social policy. In terms of statutory authority and administrative machinery, Checkland saw the new poor law as a critical move towards a more coherently-constructed state social policy.