Classic Political Philosophy for the Modern Man

by Andrew Lynn

  8

  Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies

  Introduction

  What are we to make of the fact that the man said to be one of the key figures in the emergence of modern liberalism thought that the principal dogma of liberalism’s current instantiation—namely, the proposition that our political and legal order is subject to higher-order ‘natural’ or human rights—was no more than ‘nonsense on stilts’?

  Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a philosopher, jurist, economist and—by the standards of his own day—radical. A child prodigy, he began to study Latin at the age of three, was sent to Oxford University at the age of twelve, and took his bachelor’s degree there three years later. Bentham advocated for individual and economic freedoms, freedom of expression, separation of church and state, female suffrage, sexual liberty, and abolition of the death penalty. He was immensely prolific and a lifelong bachelor. As per his instructions, on Bentham’s death his body was dissected, embalmed, dressed and placed in a chair, and now resides in a cabinet in a corridor of the main building of University College London.

  Bentham’s great work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), lays out the philosophy of utilitarianism for which he is best known today. Mankind, he said, is governed by two sovereign motives—pleasure and pain. We ought, therefore, to secure as much of the former at the cost of the least of the latter, and it was through what has become known as the ‘felicific calculus’ that we are to measure the pleasure or pain associated with an act and hence its ‘utility’. The object of all legislation must be ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’.

  Utilitarianism is of great value for the modern man in at least two respects. In the first place, it is a wholly rational approach to ethics and politics: it does not need to call upon the existence of an otherworldly realm or otherworldly entities to establish its moral code, nor does it require us to accept as a matter of faith the existence of rights that transcend all practical considerations. Of no less significance is the fact that it requires us to consider the interests of the community as a whole, rather than merely the demands of individuals or special interest groups, when establishing moral rules and expectations or setting social, political, or economic policy.

  Bentham has, it is true, often been credited with providing the philosophical foundations for liberal social reform. Hovering in the shadows of his philosophy, however, can already be detected the spectres of both totalitarianism and vulgarism. As has often been observed, the greatest happiness principle can be readily deployed to justify exploitation by the majority of minorities: it is arguable, for example, that the pleasure obtained by the majority in silencing radical or unpopular ideas might, in aggregate, exceed the pain felt by the minority whose ideas are shut down. At the same time, the greatest happiness principle in its Benthamite form tends towards the vulgarisation of society in that it overlooks the quality of pleasures that are to be entered in the felicific calculus: there is no particular reason to prefer pleasures obtained by conversation, study, or sport, for example, over pleasures obtained through watching cartoons or late-night talk shows. It is also distinctly possible that policies that are perceived to bring happiness to existing persons might lead to long-term degradation of civilizational values or the environment affecting generations to come.

  In fact, one need look no further than Bentham’s own writings to see something of the dark underbelly of utilitarianism. Consider, for example, the chapter entitled ‘Of Slavery’ in Part 3 of Bentham’s Principles of the Civil Code (1843). Here he openly and frankly works through the logic of the utilitarian philosophy as applied to the institution of slavery. He proceeds on the self-evident basis that slavery is agreeable to the masters and accepts that it must be disagreeable to the slaves. He argues, however, that once slavery is established, it becomes the condition and destiny of the greatest number: ‘A master counts his slaves as his flocks, by hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands.’ Since the benefit is on the side of the single slaveowner as against the disadvantage faced by the multitude of slaves, therefore, the outcome of the felicific calculus will plainly be in favour of abolition, and this conclusion is supported by economic productivity losses that Bentham attributes to slavery. The unsettling aspect of Bentham’s argument, however, is that there is no reference to the intrinsic value of liberty and the unenslaved state; the philosophy does not inherently come out as opposed to the institution of slavery. Indeed, it is plain from Bentham’s argument that slavery could be justified by the felicific calculus if a large number of masters outnumbered a relatively small contingent of slaves.

  Bentham’s razor-sharp mind was perhaps most triumphantly applied to a matter that remains of the utmost significance today—the question of natural rights. Human rights today may offer us a warm fuzzy feeling of doing good and signalling virtue; for Bentham, observing the bloody horrors of the Revolution in France and the Reign of Terror, there was a chain of causation leading directly from what he called the ‘terrorist language’ of ‘imprescriptible rights’ all the way to the guillotine. His Anarchical Fallacies (written between 1791 and 1795, although not published until 1816) is a powerful attack on both the concept of natural rights as well as its concrete realization in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 (as reprinted in 1791) of the French National Assembly.

  The central philosophical difficulty with the idea of ‘natural rights’, explains Bentham, is that rights are created by law, through the command of the sovereign, which means that they cannot exist prior to, or separately from, government. The very notion of ‘natural rights’, in fact, relies on the fallacy of ‘begging the question’: it is no answer to the question of how such ‘rights’ arise to assert that they arise from ‘nature’. Bentham accepts, it must be admitted, that equivalent benefits could be conferred by a government legislating for such. These benefits would not, however, be ‘rights’ in any meaningful sense, and they could always be altered or dispensed with by further legislation.

  The concept of ‘natural rights’ is not, though, merely a logical fallacy; it is also a subversive threat which gives rise to the anarchical consequences suggested by the title of Bentham’s essay. This is because, explains Bentham, all such ‘natural rights’ are of necessity extra-legal, and must, therefore, be asserted as a challenge to the existing legal order. Moreover, since such rights must, by definition, be anterior to law, they cannot be regulated or repealed by law. Worse yet, if they are truly ‘natural’, they must be applicable universally and forever; so while vis-à-vis the existing legal order ‘natural rights’ are ‘anarchical’, the new order which they purport to establish is totalitarian in nature and admits of no exceptions. ‘In us is the perfection of virtue and wisdom: in all mankind besides, the extremity of wickedness and folly,’ mocks Bentham of the posturing of natural rights advocates. ‘All nations—all future ages—shall be, for they are predestined to be, our slaves.’

  How, then, are we more rationally to approach the question of ‘rights’? We should establish such ‘rights’ (which are not really rights at all) as are advantageous to society, suggests Bentham, and maintain them so long as (and no longer than) they remain, on the whole, advantageous to society; when, on the whole, any ‘right’ is no longer advantageous to society, it should be abolished. Whether or not a ‘right’ is advantageous must be looked at in the specific context in which it is proposed to be established or abolished. And all proposed ‘rights’ must be specifically and precisely described—not ‘jumbled with an undistinguishable heap of others, under any such vague general terms as property, liberty, and the like’.

  Bentham’s ‘Critical Examination’ is a lot of fun. He pokes fun at the arrant illogicality of his target and runs rings around the lesser wits who had the impudence to erect a political order on such shaky foundations. His language is rambunctious and ebullient: all this stuff about rights, he tells us, is ‘shallow and reckless vanity’, ‘a perpetual vein of
nonsense, flowing from a perpetual abuse of words’, and, most famously, ‘nonsense on stilts’. Through a combination of mockery and incisive philosophical analysis he explodes the great shibboleths of the modern political order. To the proposition that all men are born and remain free, he answers: ‘No, not a single man: not a single man that ever was, or is, or will be.’ To the suggestion that all men are equal in rights, he has this to say: ‘The apprentice, then, is equal in rights to his master; he has as much liberty with relation to the master, as the master has with relation to him; he has as much right to command and to punish him; he is as much owner and master of the master’s house, as the master himself.’ The reader is tempted to borrow Bentham’s own language in agreement and exclaim together with him: Absurd and miserable nonsense!

  Bentham would, no doubt, have been thoroughly dismayed to know that abstract rights of the same basic type as he excoriated in the French Declaration of 1789 are now deeply embedded in the consciousness of Western man, and his legal order, as unquestionable a priori truths. Indeed, it may be no accident, given that our political order is founded on what Bentham called this ‘terrorist’ material, that the conceptual difficulties with ‘natural’ or ‘human rights’ are not more widely talked about. This renders his ‘Critical Examination’ all the more important and, viewed correctly, potentially incendiary. These are ideas whose time has—after a difficult two centuries—perhaps finally come.

  * * *

  A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE DECLARATION OF RIGHTS

  PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

  The Declaration of Rights—I mean the paper published under that name by the French National Assembly in 1791—assumes for its subject matter a field of disquisition as unbounded in point of extent as it is important in its nature. But the more ample the extent given to any proposition or string of propositions, the more difficult it is to keep the import of it confined without deviation within the bounds of truth and reason. If in the smallest corners of the field it ranges over, it fail of coinciding with the line of rigid rectitude, no sooner is the aberration pointed out, than (inasmuch as there is no medium between truth and falsehood) its pretensions to the appellation of a truism are gone, and whoever looks upon it must recognise it to be false and erroneous—and if, as here, political conduct be the theme, so far as the error extends and fails of being detected, pernicious.

  In a work of such extreme importance with a view to practice, and which throughout keeps practice so closely and immediately and professedly in view, a single error may be attended with the most fatal consequences. The more extensive the propositions, the more consummate will be the knowledge, the more exquisite the skill, indispensably requisite to confine them in all points within the pale of truth. The most consummate ability in the whole nation could not have been too much for the task—one may venture to say, it would not have been equal to it. But that, in the sanctioning of each proposition, the most consummate ability should happen to be vested in the heads of the sorry majority in whose hands the plenitude of power happened on that same occasion to be vested, is an event against which the chances are almost as infinity to one.

  Here, then, is a radical and all-pervading error—the attempting to give to a work on such a subject the sanction of government; especially of such a government—a government composed of members so numerous, so unequal in talent, as well as discordant in inclinations and affections. Had it been the work of a single hand, and that a private one, and in that character given to the world, every good effect would have been produced by it that could be produced by it when published as the work of government, without any of the bad effects which in case of the smallest error must result from it when given as the work of government.

  The revolution, which threw the government into the hands of the penners and adopters of this declaration, having been the effect of insurrection, the grand object evidently is to justify the cause. But by justifying it, they invite it: in justifying past insurrection, they plant and cultivate a propensity to perpetual insurrection in time future; they sow the seeds of anarchy broad-cast: in justifying the demolition of existing authorities, they undermine all future ones, their own consequently in the number. Shallow and reckless vanity! They imitate in their conduct the author of that fabled law, according to which the assassination of the prince upon the throne gave to the assassin a title to succeed him. ‘People, behold your rights! If a single article of them be violated, insurrection is not your right only, but the most sacred of your duties.’ Such is the constant language, for such is the professed object of this source and model of all laws—this self-consecrated oracle of all nations.

  The more abstract—that is, the more extensive the proposition is, the more liable is it to involve a fallacy. Of fallacies, one of the most natural modifications is that which is called begging the question—the abuse of making the abstract proposition resorted to for proof, a lever for introducing, in the company of other propositions that are nothing to the purpose, the very proposition which is admitted to stand in need of proof.

  Is the provision in question fit in point of expediency to be passed into a law for the government of the French nation? That, mutatis mutandis, would have been the question put in England: that was the proper question to have been put in relation to each provision it was proposed should enter into the composition of the body of French laws. Instead of that, as often as the utility of a provision appeared (by reason of the wideness of its extent, for instance) of a doubtful nature, the way taken to clear the doubt was to assert it to be a provision fit to be made law for all men—for all Frenchmen—and for all Englishmen, for example, into the bargain. This medium of proof was the more alluring, inasmuch as to the advantage of removing opposition, was added the pleasure, the sort of titillation so exquisite to the nerve of vanity in a French heart—the satisfaction, to use a homely, but not the less apposite proverb, of teaching grandmothers to suck eggs. Hark! Ye citizens of the other side of the water! Can you tell us what rights you have belonging to you? No, that you can’t. It’s we that understand rights: not our own only, but yours into the bargain; while you—poor simple souls!—know nothing about the matter.

  Hasty generalization, the great stumbling block of intellectual vanity! Hasty generalization, the rock that even genius itself is so apt to split upon! Hasty generalization, the bane of prudence and of science!

  In the British Houses of Parliament, more especially in the most efficient house for business, there prevails a well-known jealousy of, and repugnance to, the voting of abstract propositions. This jealousy is not less general than reasonable. A jealousy of abstract propositions is an aversion to whatever is beside the purpose—an aversion to impertinence.

  The great enemies of public peace are the selfish and dissocial passions—necessary as they are—the one to the very existence of each individual, the other to his security. On the part of these affections, a deficiency in point of strength is never to be apprehended: all that is to be apprehended in respect of them, is to be apprehended on the side of their excess. Society is held together only by the sacrifices that men can be induced to make of the gratifications they demand: to obtain these sacrifices is the great difficulty, the great task of government. What has been the object, the perpetual and palpable object, of this declaration of pretended rights? To add as much force as possible to these passions, already but too strong—to burst the cords that hold them in—to say to the selfish passions, there—everywhere—is your prey!—to the angry passions, there—everywhere—is your enemy.

  Such is the morality of this celebrated manifesto, rendered famous by the same qualities that gave celebrity to the incendiary of the Ephesian temple.

  The logic of it is of a piece with its morality: a perpetual vein of nonsense, flowing from a perpetual abuse of words—words having a variety of meanings, where words with single meanings were equally at hand—the same words used in a variety of meanings in the same page—words used in meanings not their own, where proper wor
ds were equally at hand—words and propositions of the most unbounded signification, turned loose without any of those exceptions or modifications which are so necessary on every occasion to reduce their import within the compass, not only of right reason, but even of the design in hand, of whatever nature it may be—the same inaccuracy, the same inattention in the penning of this cluster of truths on which the fate of nations was to hang, as if it had been an oriental tale, or an allegory for a magazine—stale epigrams, instead of necessary distinctions—figurative expressions preferred to simple ones—sentimental conceits, as trite as they are unmeaning, preferred to apt and precise expressions—frippery ornament preferred to the majestic simplicity of good sound sense—and the acts of the senate loaded and disfigured by the tinsel of the playhouse.

  In a play or a novel, an improper word is but a word; and the impropriety, whether noticed or not, is attended with no consequences. In a body of laws—especially of laws given as constitutional and fundamental ones—an improper word may be a national calamity—and civil war may be the consequence of it. Out of one foolish word may start a thousand daggers.

  Imputations like these may appear general and declamatory—and rightly so, if they stood alone: but they will be justified even to satiety by the details that follow. Scarcely an article, which in rummaging it, will not be found a true Pandora’s box.

  In running over the several articles, I shall on the occasion of each article point out, in the first place, the errors it contains in theory; and then, in the second place, the mischiefs it is pregnant with in practice.

  The criticism is verbal—true, but what else can it be? Words—words without a meaning, or with a meaning too flatly false to be maintained by anybody, are the stuff it is made of. Look to the letter, you find nonsense—look beyond the letter, you find nothing.