Jeremy Bentham
Inequalities in society mean that a rich minority exists alongside the poor. For Bentham this is morally unacceptable, and a government’s role is to ensure that a balance is reached.
Pragmatic democracy
So how can rulers be persuaded to spread the wealth, when that would seem to make them less happy? The answer, Bentham argues, is more democracy, meaning the extension of the franchise. If rulers fail to increase human happiness for the greatest number, they get voted out at the next election. In a democracy, politicians have a vested interest in increasing happiness for the majority to ensure they are re-elected. While other thinkers, from Rousseau to Paine, were pushing for democracy as a natural right – without which a man is denied his humanity – Bentham argued for it entirely pragmatically: as a means to an end. The idea of natural laws and rights is, to Bentham, nothing more than “nonsense on stilts”.
With their costs and benefits, profit and loss, Bentham’s arguments for extending voting rights appealed to hard-nosed British industrialists and businessmen – the rising new power base in the Industrial Revolution – in a way that no amount of idealism and talk of man’s natural rights could. Bentham’s down-to-earth, “utilitarian” arguments helped to shift Britain towards parliamentary reform and liberalism in the 1830s. Today, a Benthamite approach is a useful everyday benchmark for public policy decisions, encouraging governments to consider whether each policy is, on balance, good for the majority of people.
Bentham’s ideas were satirized by Charles Dickens, whose character Mr Gradgrind, in the novel Hard Times, runs a school based on cold, hard facts, leaving little room for fun.
Hard facts
However, there are some real problems with Bentham’s ideal-free recipe of utilitarianism. The English author Charles Dickens hated the new breed of utilitarians that followed Bentham, and satirized them mercilessly in his novel Hard Times (1854), depicting them as killjoys stamping on the imagination and sapping the human spirit with their insistence on reducing life to hard facts. It is not a picture that Bentham, a deeply empathetic man, would necessarily recognize, but it was a clear reference to his reduction of every issue to arithmetic. One recurring criticism of Bentham’s idea is that it encourages “scapegoating”. The greatest happiness principle can permit huge injustices if the overall effect is general happiness. After a terrible terrorist bombing, for instance, the police are under great pressure to find the perpetrators. The general population will be much happier and the alarm will subside if the police arrest anyone who appears to fit the bill, even if they are not actually the guilty party (provided there are no further attacks).
Following Bentham’s argument, some critics claim, it is morally acceptable to punish the innocent if their suffering is outweighed by an increase in the happiness of the general population. Supporters of Bentham can get round this problem by saying that the general population would be unhappy to live in a society in which innocent people are made scapegoats. But that issue only arises if the population finds out the truth; if the targeting of scapegoats is kept secret, it would appear justified according to Bentham’s logic.
Utilitarian arguments have been used to justify the prosecution of innocent people – such as Gerry Conlon, accused of IRA bombings – on the basis that the majority is made happier.
JEREMY BENTHAM
Jeremy Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London, in 1748, to a family who were financially comfortable. He was expected to become a lawyer, and he went to Oxford University aged just 12, graduating to train as a barrister in London at 15. But the chicanery of the legal profession depressed him, and he became more interested in legal science and philosophy.
Bentham retired to London’s Westminster to write, and for the next 40 years, he turned out works of commentary and ideas on legal and moral matters. He began by criticizing the leading legal authority William Blackstone for his assumption that there was nothing essentially wrong with Britain’s laws, then he went on to develop a complete theory of morals and policy. This was the basis of the utilitarian ethic that had already come to dominate British political life by the time of his death in 1832.
Key works
1776 Fragment on Government
1780 Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation
1787 Panopticon
See also: Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Immanuel Kant • John Stuart Mill • Friedrich Hayek • John Rawls
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Federalism
FOCUS
Armed citizenry
BEFORE
44–43 BCE Cicero argues in his Philippics that people must be able to defend themselves, just as wild beasts do in nature.
1651 Thomas Hobbes argues in Leviathan that by nature, men have a right to defend themselves forcefully.
AFTER
1968 After the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in the US, federal restrictions on gun ownership are introduced.
2008 The US Supreme Court decides that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep a gun at home for self-defence.
Even as the Founding Fathers were putting the finishing touches to the US Constitution in 1788, demands came for the addition of a Bill of Rights. The idea that the people have a right to keep and bear arms appears as the Second Amendment in this Bill with the words “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”. The exact wording is crucial, since it has become the focus of modern debate over gun control, and how much freedom US citizens have by law to own and carry guns.
The architect of the Bill of Rights was Virginia-born James Madison, who was also one of the main creators of the Constitution itself. This makes him possibly unique among political thinkers in that he was able to put his ideas directly into practice – ideas that are still, two centuries on, the basis of the political way of life of the world’s most powerful nation. Indeed, in later becoming US president, Madison climbed to the very peak of the political edifice that he had himself created.
The Bill of Rights is considered by some as the very embodiment of the Enlightenment thinking on natural rights, which began with John Locke and culminated in Thomas Paine’s inspirational call for the Rights of Man. Though the latter stressed the importance of democracy (the universal right to vote) as a principle in his treatise, Madison’s intentions were more pragmatic. They were rooted in the tradition of English politics – where parliament sought to prevent the sovereign overreaching his power, rather than striving to protect basic universal freedoms.
Defence from the majority
As he admitted in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the only reason Madison put forward the Bill of Rights was to satisfy the demands of others. He personally believed that the establishment of the Constitution by itself, and so the creation of proper government, should have been enough to guarantee that fundamental rights are protected. Indeed, he admitted that the addition of a Bill of Rights implied that the Constitution was flawed, and could not protect these rights in itself. There was also a risk that defining specific rights would impair protection of rights that were not specified. Moreover, Madison acknowledged that bills of rights had not had a happy history in the United States.
But there were also strong reasons why a bill of rights might be a good idea. Like most of the US’s Founding Fathers, Madison was nervous of the power of the majority. “A democracy,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” A Bill of Rights might help protect the minority against the mass of the people.
“In our Governments,” Madison wrote, “the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.” In other words, the Bill of Rights was actua
lly intended to protect property owners against the democratic instincts of the majority.
Shay’s Rebellion in 1786–87 saw a rebel militia seize Massachusetts’ court house. Quashed by government forces, it encouraged the principle of strong government in the US Constitution.
Militias legitimized
Madison also had a simple political reason for creating the Bill of Rights. He knew he would not gain support for the Constitution from the delegates of some individual states if he did not. After all, the War of Independence had been fought to challenge the tyranny of centralized power, so these delegates were wary of a new central government. They would only ratify the Constitution if they had some guarantee of protection against it. So rights were not natural laws, but the states’ (and property owners’) protection against the federal government.
"The ultimate authority…resides in the people alone."
James Madison
This is where the Second Amendment came in. Madison ensured that states or citizens would not be deprived of the ability to protect themselves by forming a militia against an overbearing national government, just as they had done against the British crown. Such a situation envisaged a community banding together to resist an army of oppression. The Second Amendment actually says in its final version: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The amendment, then, was about a militia and “the people” (in other words, the community) protecting the state, not people as individuals.
Though Madison believed that the existence of the Constitution would ensure that basic rights were protected under a federal government, he formulated the Bill of Rights as an extra measure to counteract the power of the majority in a democracy.
Individual self-defence
Madison was not talking about individuals carrying arms to defend themselves against individual criminal acts. Yet that is how his words in the Second Amendment have come to be used, and many Americans now claim that the right to carry guns is enshrined in the Constitution – challenging any move to institute gun controls as unconstitutional.
Attempts to overturn this interpretation in the courts have repeatedly met with failure, with the insistence that the US Constitution upholds citizens’ rights to bear arms in defence of themselves as well as the state. Many argue even further that, regardless of Madison’s intentions, owning and carrying a gun should be considered a basic freedom. A century before Madison’s bill, English philosopher John Locke, in identifying the right to self-defence as a natural right, took his cue from an imagined “natural” time before civilization. Just as a wild animal will defend itself with violence if cornered, so, Locke argues, may humans. The implication is that government is in some way an unnatural imposition from which people need protection. In retrospect, some commentators have put a Lockean gloss on the Bill of Rights, and assume that it is confirming self-defence by violent means as a natural, inalienable right.
However, it seems possible that Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers were more in tune with Scottish philosopher David Hume’s view of government than with Locke’s. Hume is too pragmatic to pay much attention to the idea of a natural time of freedom before rights were curtailed by civilization. For Hume, people want government because it makes sense, and rights are something negotiated and agreed upon, like every other aspect of law. So there is nothing fundamental about the right to bear arms – it is simply a matter that people generally agree about, or not. According to Hume, freedoms and rights are just examples of tenets on which people concur – and perhaps decide mutually to enshrine in law to ensure that they are adhered to. Taking this view, there is no fundamental principle at stake in the right to bear arms – rather, it is a consensus. And consensus does not necessarily require a democratic majority.
Lasting controversy
Gun control remains a hot issue in the US, with powerful lobbies – such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) – campaigning against any restrictions on gun ownership at all. Those against gun control appear to have the upper hand, with most states allowing people to own firearms. Still, there are very few states where gun ownership is entirely unregulated, and there are arguments over whether, for instance, people should be allowed to carry concealed guns. The high level of gun crime in the US, and the increasing frequency of mass murders – such as the cinema killings in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012 – have led many to question whether unrestricted ownership of firearms is appropriate in a nation that is no longer a frontier state.
It is remarkable that Madison’s Bill of Rights is still, with only a few changes, at the heart of the US political system. Some, maybe even Madison himself, would argue that a good government would have protected these rights without need of a bill. Yet the US Bill of Rights remains perhaps the most powerful meld of political theory and practice ever devised.
Natural self-defence as used by wild animals against attack is cited by exponents of natural law to justify the right of an individual to defend themselves by any means.
JAMES MADISON
James Madison Jr was born in Port Conway, Virginia. His father owned Montpelier, the largest tobacco plantation in Orange County, worked by 100 or so slaves. In 1769, Madison enrolled at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. During the American War of Independence, he served in the Virginia legislature and was the protégé of Thomas Jefferson. At 29, he became the youngest delegate to the Continental Congress in 1780, and gained respect for his ability to draft laws and build coalitions. Madison’s draft – the Virginia Plan – formed the basis of the US Constitution. He co-wrote the 85 Federalist Papers to explain the theory of the Constitution and ensure its ratification. Madison was one of the leaders of the emerging Democratic-Republican party. He followed Jefferson to become the fourth US president in 1809, and held the office for two terms.
Key works
1787 United States Constitution
1788 Federalist Papers
1789 The Bill of Rights
See also: Cicero • Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • Montesquieu • Pierre-Joseph Proudhon • Jane Addams • Mahatma Gandhi • Robert Nozick
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Feminism
FOCUS
Women’s emancipation
BEFORE
1589 Her Protection for Women by English novelist Jane Anger castigates men for seeing women merely as objects of sexual desire.
1791 In Declaration of the Rights of Woman, French playwright Olympe de Gouges writes: “Woman is born free and remains equal to man”.
AFTER
1840s In the US and UK, women’s property is legally protected from their husbands.
1869 In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill argues that women should be given the right to vote.
1893 In New Zealand, women are given the vote – one of the first countries to do so.
Published in 1792, British writer Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is seen as one of the first great feminist tracts. It was written at a time of intellectual and political ferment. The Enlightenment had established the rights of men at the centre of political debate, which culminated in France in the Revolution against the monarchy in the very year that Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication. Yet few talked about the position of women in society. Indeed, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an ardent advocate of political freedom, argued in his work Émile that women should only be educated to make them good wives able to give pleasure to men.
Freedom to work
Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication to show how wrong Rousseau was about women. The rejuvenation of the world could only happen, she argued, if women were happy, as well as men. Yet women were trapped by a web of expectations due to their dependence on men. They were forced to trade on their looks and to connive to win the affections of a man. Respectable women – women who did not indulge in this game of seduction – were put at a h
uge disadvantage.
"How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty."
Mary Wollstonecraft
Wollstonecraft argued that women needed the freedom to earn a living, granting them autonomy from men. To achieve this freedom required education. To those who argued that women were inferior to men intellectually, she insisted that this misapprehension was simply due to a woman’s lack of education. She argued that there were many occupations women could pursue with the right education and opportunities: “How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry?” Independence and education for women would also be good for men, because marriages might be based on mutual affection and respect. Wollstonecraft proposed reforms to education, such as combining private and public education, and a more democratic, participatory approach to schooling.
Wollstonecraft’s proposals for the education and emancipation of women were largely overlooked in her lifetime, and for a time after her death she was better known for her unconventional lifestyle than her ideas. However, later campaigners – such as Emily Davies, who set up Girton College for women at the University of Cambridge in 1869 – were strongly influenced by her ideas. Change was nonetheless slow to come – it was more than 150 years after the publication of A Vindication that the University of Cambridge finally offered full degrees to women.
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