Bentham Quotes

“This is pre-eminently the case with Bentham: he both wrote and felt as if the moral standard ought not only to be paramount (which it ought), but to be alone; as if it ought to be the sole master of all our actions, and even of all our sentiments; as if either to admire or like, or despise or dislike a person for any action which neither does good nor harm, or which does not do a good or a harm proportioned to the sentiment entertained, were an injustice and a prejudice.”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“The first addresses itself to our reason and conscience; the second to our imagination; the third to our human fellow-feeling. According to the first, we approve or disapprove; according to the second, we admire or despise; according to the third, we love, pity, or dislike. The bmoralityb of an action depends on its foreseeable consequences; its beauty, and its loveableness, or the reverse, depend on the qualities which”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“Whetherw happiness be or be not the end to which morality should be referred—that it be referred to an end of some sort, and not left in the dominion of vague feeling or inexplicable internal conviction, that it be made a matter of reason and calculation, and not merely of sentiment, is essential to the very idea of moral philosophy; is, in fact, what renders argument or discussion on moral questions possible. That the morality of actions depends on the consequences which they tend to produce, is the doctrine of rational persons of all schools; that the good or evil of those consequences is measured solely by pleasure or pain, is all of the doctrine of the school of utility, which is peculiar to it.”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“there does in fact prevail a much greater unanimity among thinking persons, than might be supposed from their diametrical divergence on the great questions of moral metaphysics”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“one by which he contributed to the elucidation of history: much of which, except so far as this explained it, must have been entirely inexplicable to him. The idea was given him by Helvetius, whose book, De l’Esprit,[*] is one continued and most acute commentary on it; and, together with the other great idea of Helvetius, the influence of circumstances on character, it will make his name live by the side of Rousseau, when omost ofo the other French pmetaphysiciansp of the eighteenth century qwillq be extant as such only in literary history.”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“this benefit from the Montesquieu of our own times, M. de Tocqueville.”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“and to extinguish all books, all schools, all combinations of individuals for joint action upon society, which may be attempted for the purpose of keeping alive a spirit at variance with its own. Is it, we say, the proper condition of man, in all ages and nations, to be under the despotism of Public Opinion?”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“definiteness and precision: details were not to be encountered with generalities, but with details. Nor could any progress be made, on such a subject, by merely showing that existing things were bad; it was necessary also to show how they might be made better. No great man whom we read of was qualified to do this thing except Bentham. He has done it, once and for everp .”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“He committed the mistake of supposing that the abusinessa part of human affairs was the whole of them; all at least that the legislator and the moralist had to do with. Not that he disregarded moral influences when he perceived them; but his want of imagination, small experience of human feelings, and ignorance of the filiation and connexion of feelings with one another, made this rarely the case.”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“or others, unless we take in, as part of the question, its influence on the regulation of our, or their, affections and desires?”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“Ruler of the Universe; and the popular, which he characteristically calls also the moral sanction, operating through the pains and pleasures arising from the favour or disfavour of our fellow-creatures.[*]”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“else desirable, he confounded all disinterested feelings which he found in himself, with the desire of ggeneralg happiness: just as some religious writers, who loved virtue for its own sake as much perhaps as men could do, habitually confounded their love of virtue with their fear of hell.”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“Nor is it only the moral part of man’s nature, in the strict sense of the term—the desire of perfection, or the feeling of an approving or of an accusing conscience—that he overlooks; he but faintly recognises, as a fact in human nature, the pursuit of any other ideal end for its own sake. The sense of honour, and personal dignity—that feeling of personal exaltation and degradation which acts independently of other people’s opinion, or even in defiance of it; the love of beauty, the passion of the artist; the love of order, of congruity, of consistency in all things, and conformity to their end; the love of power, not in the limited form of power over other human beings, but abstract power, the power of making our volitions effectual; the love of action, the thirst for movement and activity, a principle scarcely of less influence in human life than its opposite, the love of ease:—”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“man, and from self-interest in this world or in the next. There is a studied abstinence from any of the phrases which, in the mouths of others, import the acknowledgment of such a fact.* If we find the words “Conscience,” “Principle,” “Moral Rectitude,” “Moral Duty,” in his Table of the Springs of Action, it is among the synonymes of the “love of reputation;”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham

“Man is conceived by Bentham as a being susceptible of pleasures and pains, and governed in all his conduct partly by the different modifications of self-interest, and the passions commonly classed as selfish, partly by sympathies, or occasionally antipathies, towards other beings. And here Bentham’s conception of human nature stops. He does notz exclude religion; the prospect of divine rewards and punishments he includes under the head of “self-regarding interest,” and the devotional feeling under that of sympathy awitha God.[*] But the whole of the impelling or restraining principles, whether of this bor of another worldb , which he recognises, are either self-love, or love or hatred towards other csentientc beings.”
― John Stuart Mill, An Essay on Jeremy Bentham