29 September 2026 · Ethics and the State

Bentham and the Principle of Utility

Jeremy Bentham wrote An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in the late 1700s, and in it he tries to do something neither Hobbes nor Locke had really attempted. Hobbes grounded political authority in fear of violent death, and Locke grounded it in natural rights everyone supposedly has before government exists. Bentham wants to set that whole way of arguing aside. He thinks talk of natural rights is mostly empty language dressed up to sound important, and he proposes a single, testable standard instead: does an action increase or decrease happiness. That standard, he argues, can settle not just private morality but the whole business of writing laws and running a government.

Pleasure and pain as the two rulers of human life

Bentham opens with a blunt claim. Nature has placed people under two masters, pain and pleasure, and everything a person does, says, or even thinks is governed by them, whether or not the person admits it. Anyone who claims to reject this is, in his view, only fooling themselves, since even that rejection is really just another move made to avoid pain or chase some form of satisfaction. From this he defines the principle of utility as the rule that judges any action, whether done by a private person or by a government, by whether it tends to add to or subtract from the happiness of whoever is affected by it. When the people affected are a whole community, Bentham treats the community itself as nothing more than the sum of its individual members, so the public interest is simply the combined interest of everyone in it. An action, a law, or a policy counts as good, in his system, exactly to the degree that the pleasure it produces outweighs the pain, and bad to the degree that the pain outweighs the pleasure.

He adds, almost as an aside, that this principle cannot be proven in the usual sense, since any chain of proof has to start somewhere, and this is the starting point everything else gets measured against. He also notes, with some dry humor, that nearly everyone actually follows this principle most of the time without noticing it, even people who loudly claim to reject it in their arguments.

Two rivals he dismisses

Before building further, Bentham clears away two other ways people have tried to judge right and wrong. The first he calls asceticism, the view that approves of actions the more they reduce a person's pleasure, and disapproves of actions the more they increase it, essentially utility flipped backward. He traces this to two different sources, a philosophical kind driven by pride in self denial, and a religious kind driven by fear of punishment from an angry god, and argues that in practice, hardly anyone who claims to live by this principle actually follows it with any consistency, not even its strongest defenders.

The second rival he names is the principle of sympathy and antipathy, which he describes as really no principle at all, just a polite name for personal feeling treated as its own justification. Under this approach, a person approves or disapproves of an action simply because they happen to feel approval or disapproval toward it, without pointing to any outside reason such as its actual effect on anyone's happiness. Bentham finds this the most common and most dangerous rival in matters of government, because it lets whoever is in power punish whatever they personally dislike, as harshly as they personally dislike it, with no outside check at all. He treats the whole family of appeals to conscience, moral sense, right reason, or the will of God as versions of this same move, since each one still needs some further standard to explain why that particular feeling or claimed revelation should be trusted, and in every case, Bentham argues, people quietly fall back on utility to settle that question anyway.

Four sources that give pleasure and pain their force

Bentham then asks a more practical question: where do the pleasures and pains that shape behavior actually come from, since a government that wants to use this principle needs to know what levers it has to pull. He lists four, which he calls sanctions. The physical sanction is whatever pleasure or pain simply comes from the ordinary course of nature, with no one directing it, such as getting sick from one's own carelessness. The political sanction is pain or pleasure handed out deliberately by judges acting under the state's authority, in other words, legal punishment and reward. The moral or popular sanction comes from other people in the community reacting informally, through approval, gossip, friendship, or exclusion, according to no fixed rule. The religious sanction comes from a higher power, either in this life or, as Bentham is careful to note, in a life people only expect and cannot actually observe.

He stresses that these four are not different in kind, only in where they come from, and that the political sanction in particular, the one a lawmaker actually controls, works alongside the other three whether a legislator accounts for them or not, so ignoring the moral and religious pressures already acting on people is a practical mistake, not just an oversight.

Breaking an action down into its parts

The final part of this reading shifts from big principles to something closer to a toolkit. Bentham argues that the business of government is to promote happiness mainly by rewarding and punishing, and that punishment in particular needs a very precise way of describing what someone actually did before anyone can fairly judge how much punishment, if any, fits the case. He walks through a long set of distinctions: acts can be positive, meaning some motion or exertion, or negative, meaning a deliberate holding back from acting; external, meaning bodily, or internal, meaning purely mental; transitive, when the effect lands on some outside person or thing, or intransitive, when it stays within the person doing it; and acts can be transient, like a single strike, or continued, like staying in one position. He also separates the physical makeup of an act from the circumstances surrounding it, and the circumstances from the consequences that follow, using the real historical example of the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628 to show how many separate facts, the assassin's grudge, his journey, the knife, the note found in his hat, all count as circumstances connected to one single event in different ways.

The underlying point is that punishment can only be judged fairly once an act has been pulled apart this carefully, since vague description invites exactly the kind of arbitrary judgment Bentham spent the earlier chapters arguing against.

Why this still matters

What makes Bentham worth reading next to Hobbes and Locke is how different his whole method is. Hobbes and Locke both start by imagining people before government and ask what rights or fears would lead them to form one. Bentham sets that whole approach aside. He wants one measurable yardstick, pleasure against pain, that can be applied directly to any law or policy without appealing to history, scripture, or supposed natural rights at all. That ambition to turn morality and legislation into something closer to a calculation is exactly what later critics pushed back against, and exactly what made utilitarianism, carried forward by writers like Mill after him, one of the most influential and most argued over ideas in modern political thought.

Source: Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Chapter 1 (Of the Principle of Utility), Chapter 2 (Of Principles Adverse to that of Utility), Chapter 3 (Of the Four Sanctions or Sources of Pain and Pleasure), and Chapter 7 (Of Human Actions in General). The uploaded excerpt does not include Chapters 4 through 6, so it does not cover Bentham's later method for measuring the intensity, duration, or extent of pleasure and pain.