Laws should be based upon reason; their basic reason is not to avenge crime but to preserve social order; they should always aim at “the greatest happiness divided among the greatest number” (la massima felicità divisa nel maggior numero );33 here, twenty-five years before Bentham, was the famous principle of utilitarian ethics. Beccaria, with his customary candor, acknowledged the influence of Helvétius, who had offered the same formula in De l’ Esprit (1758). (It had already appeared in Francis Hutcheson’s Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725.)
