Page 173 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Unit 9: Jeremy Bentham

affections, a deficiency in point of strength is never to be apprehended: all that is to be apprehended Notes
in respect of them, is to be apprehended on the side of their excess. Society is held together only
by the sacrifices that men can be induced to make of the gratifications they demand: to obtain
these sacrifices is the great difficulty, the great task of government. What has been the object, the
perpetual and palpable object, of this declaration of pretended rights. To add as much force as
possible to these passions, but already too strong, to burst the cords that hold them in, to say to the
selfish passions, there—everywhere—is your enemy. Such is the morality of this celebrated
manifesto (Bentham ibid: 495).
Bentham, unlike Burke and Marx, identified self-interest as the core of human nature, but like
them, visualized the possibility of human society depending on people pursuing interests other
than those that were narrowly self-centred. All three attacked the natural rights doctrine on the
premise that it sought to provide instant and unconditional gratification of purely selfish individual
desires. They were not willing to organize a community exclusively on the principle of self-
interest:
Each of them offered a wider vision—the altruism of Bentham’s principle of utility,
the intergenerational wisdom of Burke’s traditions and the cooperative fulfillment of
Marxian species-being. For all of them, human life, to be bearable, involved a substantial
commitment to living together in community that is belied by the abstract egoism of a
theory of human rights.
Bentham also rejected the idea of the social contract as pure fiction, a falsehood, on the premise
that the binding force of a contract came from a government, from the habit of enforcement and
not vice versa. Following Hume, he dismissed the social contract as a chimera, a fiction never
entered into. “The notion of an actually existing unconnected state of nature is too wild to be
seriously admitted” (Bentham 1962: 36). He asserted that the social contract argument, along with
the notion of natural law and natural rights, led us to an “unavoidable inference that all
government... that have had any other origin ... are illegal” and “resistance to them and subversion
of them, lawful and commendable” (Bentham 1965: 500, 501). For Bentham, the principle of utility
provided the basis of all political and moral obligations.

9.6 Women and Gender Equality

Bentham argued for women’s right to vote and the right to participate as equals in the government.
In Introduction, he attacked the presumption that women should be accorded a subordinate status
because of their inferior minds. Under the influence of Helvetius, Bentham paid attention to the
needs of women. However, he was critical of Helvetius for condoning the practice in “certain
barbarous or half civilized nations” where warriors were rewarded with favours of women.
Interestingly, he tried to absolve Helvetius by alleging that perhaps “Montesquieu had led him
into this error”. Even then, Bentham commented that both Helvetius and Montesquieu were:
... philosophers distinguished for their humanity—both of them good husbands and
good fathers—how could they have forgotten that favours not preceded by an
uncontrolled choice and which the heart perhaps repelled with disgust afforded the
spectacle rather of the degradation of woman than the rewarding a hero ... both of
them were eloquent against slavery, how could they speak in praise of a law which
supposes the slavery of the best half of the human species.
In his Plan for Parliamentary Reform, Bentham favoured women’s suffrage, but in Constitutional
Code he realized that though there was nothing wrong with women’s suffrage, the time was not
ripe for it. His reluctance was not because women lacked the capacity and rationality to vote, but
because men would oppose it so stiffly that it could jeopardize the very cause. As for women’s
involvement in government, he felt it would lead to “nothing but confusion and ridicule”. Bentham

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 167