Jeremy Bentham Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham is known as the father of English utilitarianism, the doctrine of using the criterion of "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" to determine the moral value of any given action. Bentham employed utilitarian philosophy to examine governments, law, education, social policies, and individual behavior. Many of Bentham's writings were unpublished in his lifetime, but his "principle of utility," which he later renamed the "greatest happiness principle," was expounded throughout the nineteenth century by Bentham disciples, the Philosophical Radicals, who were to have important roles in the political and administrative reform of Victorian England. The ambitious scope of Bentham's projects, which included an attempt to codify the vast and mazelike constitutional and common law of England, and his confusing prose style made his work inaccessible to many of his peers, causing Edward Bulwer-Lytton to comment: "He acted upon the destinies of his race, by influencing the thoughts of the minute fraction who think" (England and the English, 1833).

Jeremy Bentham biography

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This biography contains 3,836 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page).