3. Social Utilitarianism
In extending utilitarianism from the personal to the social, Bentham and his followers incorporated
all the fallacies of the former and added many more besides. If each man tries to maximize
pleasure and minimize pain, then the social ethical rule for the Benthamites is to seek
make always the greatest happiness of the greatest number, in a social-philosophic
calculus in which each man counts for one, no more and no less.
The first question is the powerful one of self-refutation, for if each man is necessarily
governed by the rule of maximizing pleasure, then why in the world are these utilitarian
and Philosophers doing something very different, that is, calling for an abstract social principle,
the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
And why is their abstract moral principle, for that is what it is, legitimate, while
all others, such as natural rights, are to be brusquely dismissed as nonsense?
What justification is there for the greatest happiness formula?
The answer is none whatever, it is simply assumed as axiomatic, above and beyond challenge.
In addition to the self-refuting nature of the utilitarians clinging to an overriding
and unanalyzed abstract moral principle, the principle itself is shaky at best.
For what is so good about the greatest number?
Suppose that the vast majority of people in a society hate and revile redheads, and greatly
desire to murder them.
Suppose further that there are only a few redheads extant at any time, so that their
loss would entail no discernible drop in general production, or in the real incomes of the
non-redheads remaining.
Must we then say that it is good, after making our social-philosophic calculus, for the vast
Majority to cheerfully slaughter redheads and thereby maximize their pleasure or happiness?
And if not, why not?
As Felix Adler Reilly put it, utilitarians pronounce the greatest happiness of the greatest
number to be the social end, although they fail to make it intelligible why the happiness
of the greater number should be cogent as an end upon those who happen to belong to
the lesser number.
Furthermore, the egalitarian presumption of each person counting precisely for one is
hardly self-evident.
Why not some system of waiting?
Again, we have an unexamined and unscientific article of faith at the heart of utilitarianism.
Finally, while utilitarianism falsely assumes that the moral or the ethical is a purely
are purely subjective given to each individual.
It on the contrary assumes that these subjective desires can be added, subtracted and weighed
across the various individuals in a society, so as to result in a calculation of maximum
social happiness.
But how in the world can an objective or calculable social utility, or social cost, emerge out
without of purely subjective desires, especially since subjective desires or utilities are
strictly ordinal and cannot be compared or added or subtracted among more than one person.
The truth, then, is the opposite of the core assumptions of utilitarianism.
Moral principles, which utilitarianism claims to reject as mere subjective emotion, are
are intersubjective and can be used to persuade various persons, whereas utilities and costs
are purely subjective to each individual and therefore cannot be compared or weighed between
persons.
Perhaps the reason why Bentham quietly shifts from maximum pleasure in personal utilitarianism
to happiness in the social realm is that talking about the greatest pleasure of the greatest
number would be too openly ludicrous since the emotion or sensation of pleasure is quite
clearly not addable or subtractable between persons.
Substituting the vaguer and looser happiness enabled Bentham to fuzz over such problems.
Boehm's utilitarianism led him to an increasingly numerous agenda for government intervention
in the economy.
Some of this agenda we have seen above.
Other items include a welfare state, taxation for at least a partial egalitarian redistribution
of wealth, government boards, institutes and universities, public works to cure unemployment
as well as to encourage private investment, government insurance, regulation of banks
and stockbrokers, guarantee of quantity and quality of goods.
4.
Big Brother, The Panopticon Utilitarian economists have often been, in
my view, properly accused of trying to substitute efficiency for ethics in advocating or developing
and Public Policy. Efficiency, in contrast to ethics, sounds unsentimental, hard-nosed
and scientific. Yet extolling efficiency only pushes the ethical problem under the rug.
For in whose interests, and at whose expense, shall social efficiency be pursued? In the
name of a spurious science, efficiency often becomes a mask for exploitation, for plundering
In a profound sense, Bentham was a living reductio ad absurdum.
No ad absurdum of Benthamism, a living object lesson of the results of his own doctrine.
It was in 1768 at the age of 20 when Jeremy Bentham, returning to his alma mater, Oxford,
for an alumni vote, chanced upon a copy of Joseph Priestley's essay on government and
came across the magical phrase that changed and dominated his life from then on, the greatest
and happiness of the greatest number.
But as Gertrude Himmelfarb points out in her scintillating and devastating essays on Bentham,
of all his numerous schemes and tinkerings in pursuit of this elusive goal, the one closest
to Jeremy's heart was his plan for the Panopticon.
In visiting his brother Samuel in Russia in the 1780s, Bentham found that his brother
Menger had designed such a panopticon as a workshop, and Bentham immediately got the
idea of the panopticon as the ideal physical site for a prison, a school, a factory, indeed
for all of social life.
Panopticon in Greek means all-seeing, and the name was highly suitable for the object
in view.
Another Benthamite synonym for the Panopticon was the inspection house.
The idea was to maximize the supervision of prisoners, school children, paupers, employees,
by the all-seeing inspector, who would be seated at a tower in the center of a circular
spider web, able to spy on all the cells in the periphery.
By mirrors and other devices, each of the spied upon could never know where the inspector
Bentham's apologists have reduced his scheme to merely one of prison reform, but Bentham
Bentham tried to make it clear that all social institutions were to be encompassed by the
Panopticon, that it was to serve as a model for houses of industry, workhouses, poor houses,
manufactories, madhouses, lazrettos, hospitals and schools.
An atheist hardly given to scriptural citation, Bentham nevertheless waxed rhapsodic about
About the Social Ideal of the Panopticon, quoting from the Psalms, Thou art about my
path and about my bed, and spies out all my ways.
As Professor Himmelfarb aptly puts it, Bentham did not believe in God, but he did believe
in the qualities apotheosized in God.
The Panopticon was a realization of the divine ideal, spying out the ways of the transgressor
by means of an ingenious architectural scheme, turning night into day with artificial light
and reflectors, holding men captive by an intricate system of inspection.
Bentham's goal was to approach or simulate the ideal perfection of complete and continuous
inspection of everyone.
Because of the inspector's invisible eye, each inmate would conceive himself in a state
of Total and Continuing Inspection, thus achieving the apparent omnipresence of the inspector.
Consistent with utilitarianism, the social arrangement was decided upon by the social
despot, who acts scientifically in the name of the greatest happiness of all.
In that name, his rule maximizes efficiency.
Thus, in Bentham's original draft, every inmate would be kept in solitary confinement, since
this would maximize his being safe and quiet, without chance of unruly crowds or planning
of escape.
In arguing for his panopticon, Bentham at one point acknowledges the doubts and reservations
of people who appear to want maximum inspection of their children or other charges.
He recognizes a possible charge that his inspector would be excessively despotic, or even that
the incarceration and solitary confinement of all might be productive of an imbecility,
so that a formerly free man would no longer, in a deep sense, be fully human.
And whether the result of this high-wrought contrivance might not be constructing a set
of machines under the similitude of men?
To this critical question, Jeremy Bentham gave a brusque, brutal and quintessentially
utilitarian reply.
Who cares?
he said.
The only pertinent question was, would happiness be most likely to be increased or diminished
by this discipline?
To our scientist of happiness, there were no doubts of the answer.
Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines.
So they were but happy ones, I should not care.
There speaks the prototypical humanitarian with the guillotine, or at least with the
slave pen.
Bentham was only willing to modify the solitary confinement of each inmate in the Panopticon
because of the great expense of constructing an entire cell for each person.
Economy was an overriding concern in running the panopticon, economy and productivity.
Bentham was concerned to maximize the coerced labor of the inmates.
After all, industry is a blessing.
Why paint it as a curse?
Seven and a half hours a day sufficed for sleep and an hour and a half total for meals,
for after all, he admonished, let it not be forgotten, meal times are times of rest, feeding
Banking is Recreation.
There is no reason why inmates should not be forced to work fourteen or even fifteen
hours a day, six days a week.
Indeed, Bentham wrote to a friend that he had been afraid of revealing many of his proposed
savings for fear of being beat down.
He had in mind working the inmates no less than sixteen and a half profitable hours a
of the Day, dressing them without stockings, shirts or hats, and feeding them exclusively
on potatoes, which at that time were regarded even by the poorest citizens as fit only for
animal fodder.
Bedding was to be as cheap as possible, with sacks used instead of sheets and hammocks
instead of beds.
Bentham's overriding concern with economy and productivity is made understandable by
by a crucial element in his Panopticon plan, an element often neglected by later historians.
For the great inspector was to be none other than Bentham himself.
Prisons of the realm and, presumably, eventually, schools and factories were to be contracted
out to Bentham, who would be contractor, inspector and profit-maker from the scheme.
It is no wonder, then, that Bentham had such supreme confidence in the ability of the inspector
to maximize his own happiness along with the happiness of the greatest number of Panopticon
inmates at the same time.
Bentham's long-term gain, if not the greatest happiness of the prisoners, was also to be
insured by long-run provisions that would keep released prisoners in the almost permanent
In Bentham's final plan for his panopticon, no prisoner would be released unless he enlisted in the army, enlisted in the navy, or had a bond of 50 pounds posted for him by a responsible householder.
It must be realized that 50 pounds was a handsome sum at a time when the average unskilled laborer received a wage of about 10 shillings a week,
or about two years' salary.
The bond was to be renewed annually, and any failure to renew would subject the prisoner to be shipped back to the Panopticon, though it should be for life.
Why would any responsible householder be interested in posting a 50-pound bond for an ex-prisoner?
To Bentham, the answer was clear, only if the prisoner was willing to contract his labor to that householder with the understanding that the householder would have the same power over the laborer as that of a father over his child, or of a master over his apprentice.
Since this mammoth bond had to be renewed every year, the ex-prisoner was envisioned by Bentham as a perpetual slave to the householder.
If there was no bond, the prisoner would have to be shipped to a subsidiary establishment, also run on panopticon principles.
And who better to run such establishments than the main prison contractor, that is, Bentham himself?
Indeed, all the conditions of the panopticon were designed to induce the prisoners or other inmates to be enslaved to the contractor, Bentham, virtually for life.
for Life.
In view of Bentham's overriding concern with the Panopticon and of his explicit identification
of himself as the contractor, we must remark on what Himmelfarb points to as the strange,
almost willing inattentiveness of biographers and historians to the most striking feature
of the plan and the decisive cause of its rejection.
To them, Bentham was a philanthropist who sacrificed years of his life and most of his
fortune to the exemplary cause of penal reform, and who was, inexplicably, as one biographer
put it, not to be allowed to benefit his country.
Most books on Bentham, and even some of the most respectable histories of penal reform,
do not so much as mention the contract system in connection with the Panopticon, let alone
Can Identify Bentham as the Proposed Contractor Finally, Bentham's Panopticon was supposed
to be intimately connected with a woodworking machine that his brother Samuel had invented
in Russia about the same time as the Panopticon workshop.
What better use for thousands, if not many thousands, of inmates than to be busily and
cheaply at work making an enormous amount of wood?
Bentham's woodworking machine proved to be too costly to be built and powered by a steam engine, so why not, in Bentham's own terms, human labor to be extracted from a class of person on whose part neither dexterity nor good will were to be reckoned upon, now substituted to the steam engine?
That Bentham scarcely aimed to confine the Panopticon to the class of prisoners is shown
particularly by his Panopticon Poorhouse scheme.
Written originally in 1797 and reissued in 1812, Bentham's pauper management improved,
envisioned a joint stock company like the East India Company, contracted by the government
to operate 250 industry houses, each to house 2,000 paupers subject to the absolute authority
of a contractor-inspector-governor in a building and suffering under a regimen very similar
to the Panopticon prison.
Who would constitute the class of paupers living under the slave-labor regime of the
of Panopticon Poorhouse. To Bentham, the company, of which he, of course, would be the head, would be assigned coercive powers to seize anyone having neither visible livelihood or assignable property, nor honest and sufficient means of livelihood.
On that rather elastic definition, the average citizen would be legally encouraged to aid and abet the coercive powers of the poorhouse company by seizing anyone he considered of insufficient livelihood and trundling him off to the Panopticon poorhouse.
Bentham's envisioned scale of the network of Panopticon poorhouses was nothing if not grandiose.
The houses were to confine not only 500,000 poor, but also their children, who were to continue bound to the company even if their parents were discharged as apprentices until their early twenties, even if married.
These apprentices would be confined in an additional 250 Panopticon houses, bringing the total number of inmates in the industry houses up to no less than one million.
If we consider that the total population of England at the time was only 9 million, this means that Bentham envisioned the confining in slave labor regimented and exploited by himself of at least 11% of the nation's population.
Indeed, sometimes Bentham envisioned his panopticons as incarcerating up to three-fifths of the British population.
Jeremy Bentham conceived of his Panopticon in 1786 at the age of 38.
Five years later he published the scheme and fought hard for it for two more decades, also urging France and India in vain to adopt the scheme.
Parliament finally rejected the plan in 1811.
For the rest of his long life, Bentham mourned the defeat.
Near the end of his life, at the age of 83, Bentham wrote a history of the affair, paranoically
convinced that King George III had sabotaged the plan out of a personal vendetta arising
from Bentham's opposition during the 1780s to the King's projected war against Russia.
The book's title is History of the War Between Jeremy Bentham and George III, 1831, by one
One of the belligerents. Bentham lamented, Imagine how he hated me! But for him, all
the ploppers in the country, as well as all the prisoners in the country, would have been
in my hands. A tragedy, indeed.
Jeremy Bentham started out in life as a Tory, a typical 18th century believer in enlightened
despotism. He looked to the enlightened despots, whether Catherine the Great of Russia or George
and, third, to put his reforms and crank schemes for the greatest happiness of the greatest
number into effect.
But the failure to push through the panopticon soured him on absolute monarchy.
As he wrote, I never suspected that the people in power were against reform.
I suppose they only wanted to know what was good in order to embrace it.
Disillusioned, Bentham allowed himself to be converted, partially by his great disciple
James Mill, to radical democracy, and to the panoply of what came to be known as philosophic
radicalism.
As Himmelfarb summed up the new radicalism, its innovation was to make the greatest happiness
of the greatest number dependent upon the greatest power of the greatest number.
It seems scarcely an exaggeration when Douglas Long compares Bentham's social outlook with
that of the modern scientific totalitarian B. F. Skinner. Bentham wrote toward the end
of his life that the words liberty and liberal were among the most mischievous in the English
language because they obscured the genuine issues which are happiness and security.
For Bentham, the state is the necessary cradle of the law, and every individual citizen's
duty is to obey that law.
What the public needs and wants is not liberty but security, for which the power of the sovereign
and State must be unbounded and infinite.
And who is to guard the citizen from his sovereign?
For Bentham, as Long puts it, by its very nature, the idea of liberty more than any
other concept posed a continual threat to the completeness and stability Bentham sought
in his Science of Human Nature.
The indeterminate, open-ended quality of the libertarian view of man was alien to Bentham.
He sought, rather, the perfection of a neo-Newtonian social physics.
It is certainly apt, if grandiloquent, that Bentham saw himself as the Newton of the moral
world.
The philosophic radicals, despite their proclaimed devotion to laissez-faire, adopted not only
by Bentham's later democratic creed, but also his devotion to the Panopticon.
John Stuart Mill, even when most anti-Benthamite in the course of his eternally wavering career,
never criticized the Panopticon.
More starkly, Bentham's brilliant Lenin, James Mill, despite his eagerness to bury Bentham's
statist economic views, admired the Panopticon with the extravagance of the master himself.
In an article on Prisons and Prison Discipline written for the Encyclopedia Britannica in
1822 or 1823, Mill praised the Panopticon to the skies as perfectly expounded and proved
on the great principle of utility.
Every aspect of the Panopticon received Mill's plaudits, the architecture, the hammocks instead
of Beds, the All-Seeing Inspection, the Labor System, the Contract System, the Perpetual
Slavery of the Released Prisoners.
Mill's lavish praise was private as well as public, for in a letter to the editor of the
Encyclopedia, Mill insisted that the Panopticon appears to me to approach perfection.