Academics From England

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light."

"The principle of utility judges any action to be right by the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interests are in question... if that party be the community the happiness of the community, if a particular individual, the happiness of that individual."

"Whenever you are about to be oppressed, you have a right to resist oppression: whenever you conceive yourself to be oppressed, conceive yourself to have a right to make resistance, and act accordingly. In proportion as a law of any kind—any act of power, supreme or subordinate, legislative, administrative, or judicial, is unpleasant to a man, especially if, in consideration of such its unpleasantness, his opinion is, that such act of power ought not to have been exercised, he of course looks upon it as oppression: as often as anything of this sort happens to a man—as often as anything happens to a man to inflame his passions,—this article, for fear his passions should not be sufficiently inflamed of themselves, sets itself to work to blow the flame, and urges him to resistance. Submit not to any decree or other act of power, of the justice of which you are not yourself perfectly convinced. If a constable call upon you to serve in the militia, shoot the constable and not the enemy;—if the commander of a press-gang trouble you, push him into the sea—if a bailiff, throw him out of the window. If a judge sentence you to be imprisoned or put to death, have a dagger ready, and take a stroke first at the judge."

"That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle."

"Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government."

"Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it."

"[O]f corruption, the principal and direct use is, to engage the representatives of the people to betray their trust, and sell themselves and the people to the universal corrupter—the monarch, in his capacity of corrupter-general."

"Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law. Before the existence of laws there may be reasons for wishing that there were laws—and doubtless such reasons cannot be wanting, and those of the strongest kind;—but a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, does not constitute a right. To confound the existence of a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, with the existence of the right itself, is to confound the existence of a want with the means of relieving it. It is the same as if one should say, everybody is subject to hunger, therefore everybody has something to eat."

"It is with government, as with medicine. They have both but a choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils: In making this choice, what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to assure himself of two things; 1st, that in every case, the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and 2ndly, that if evils, they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them. There are then two things to be regarded; the evil of the offence and the evil of the law; the evil of the malady and the evil of the remedy. An evil comes rarely alone. A lot of evil cannot well fall upon an individual without spreading itself about him, as about a common centre. In the course of its progress we see it take different shapes: we see evil of one kind issue from evil of another kind; evil proceed from good and good from evil. All these changes, it is important to know and to distinguish; in this, in fact, consists the essence of legislation."

"Liberty therefore not being more fit than other words in some of the instances in which it has been used, and not so fit in others, the less the use that is made of it the better. I would no more use the word liberty in my conversation when I could get another that would answer the purpose, than I would brandy in my diet, if my physician did not order me: both cloud the understanding and inflame the passions."

"[I am] at heart more of a United-States-man than an Englishman."

"Figure to yourself the mixture of surprise and delight which has this instant been poured into my mind by the sound of my name, as uttered by you, in the speech just read to me out of the Morning Herald... By one and the same man, not only Parliamentary Reform, but Law Reform advocated. Advocated? and by what man? By one who, in the vulgar sense of profit and loss, has nothing to gain by it... Yes, only from Ireland could such self-sacrifice come; nowhere else: least of all in England, cold, selfish, priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden, soldier-ridden England, could any approach to it be found."

"Ah! when will the yoke of Custom—Custom, the blind tyrant, of which all other tyrants make their slave—ah! when will that misery-perpetuating yoke be shaken off?—when, when will Reason be seated on her throne?"

"Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure … There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency."

"Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means."

"It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider."

"It is part of a work to which if ever it should be completed I intend to give some such title as Principles of Legal Policy; the object of it is to trace out a new model for the Laws: of my own country you may imagine, in the first place: but keeping those of other countries all along in view. To ascertain what the Laws ought to be, in form and tenor as well as in matter: and that elsewhere as well as here. All that I shall say to recommend it to you is that I have taken counsel of you much oftener than of our own Ld. Coke and Hale and Blackstone. The repose of Grotius and Puffendorf and Barbeyrac and Burlamaqui I would never wish to see disturbed. I have built solely on the foundation of utility, laid as it is by Helvetius. Becarria has been lucrative pedibus, or if you please manibus, meis."

"Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish something of their pains. And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find a harvest in your own bosom; while every sorrow which you pluck out from the thoughts and feelings of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful peace and joy in the sanctuary of your soul."

"To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?"

"Priestley was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth — that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."

"For as a hedonist, Bentham apparently bases moral status not on the dignity of rational nature but rather solely on the capacity to feel pleasure and pain. And this is clearly different from the Kantian position. Yet I claim that Bentham’s idea here is in general terms not inconsistent with Kantian ethics but is instead a corollary of the Kantian position. I would even claim that Kantian ethics provides a better justification for it than Bentham’s hedonism–a shallow empiricist doctrine that cannot account properly even for the values it assigns to pleasure and pain in human beings. […] Nonhuman animals do not have the capacity to reason or to talk. Therefore, beyond making the obvious point that they are not persons in the strict sense, whether they have or lack these capacities is irrelevant to how we should treat them. Bentham is therefore correct in telling us not to ask about these matters when we are deciding how to treat animals. What is relevant, because it relates their capacities to those of rational nature, is the fact that they can suffer, and desire, and sometimes also care – about members of their own species, or even occasionally about members of other species, such as humans. Bentham is therefore also correct in telling us what we should ask about these capacities, for they are the relevant ones. Bentham is correct, however, not because Kant is wrong, but because Kant is right."

"Bentham impressed upon his countrymen the notion that existing institutions were not to be taken for granted, but to be judged by their results, and perpetually readjusted so as to produce "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He did not invent that useful formula, which he had taken from Priestley, but he drove it into men's minds, and by reiterating it for half a century with a thousand different applications, he undermined the easy acceptance of chartered inefficiency and corruption, characteristic of the eighteenth century. Parliamentary, municipal, scholastic, ecclesiastical, economic reform all sprang from the spirit of Bentham’s perpetual inquiry, "what is the use of it?"—his universal shibboleth, that proved in the end the real English antidote to Jacobinism. The weakness of his system, even in the realm of politics, was the mechanical nature of its psychology, which misrepresented the multiform workings of the human mind."

"It would be difficult to find a better instance of that favourite maxim of our grandfathers that "the pen is mightier than the sword," than the effect upon British institutions of the uneventful life of Jeremy Bentham, a shy recluse of unimpressive speech and appearance, who was so little of a politician that even in 1817 he was not prosecuted for publishing his highly "seditious" Reform Catechism in favour of household suffrage. Born in 1748, and dying in 1832 just when his principles were beginning to invade the seats of power, he was never the man of the moment, but his influence was a force in history during more than a hundred years. As early as 1776...young Bentham's Fragment on Government also appeared. It challenged the legal doctrine of the age, sanctioned by Blackstone himself, that law was a fixed and authoritative science and the British Constitution perfect. Bentham, on the other hand, proclaimed both law and politics to be perpetual experiments in the means of promoting "utility" or happiness."

"When the Queen began to reign there was abroad a spirit of criticism of our legal institutions, a sense of impatience with respect to the eulogies of which they had been so long the subject. A generation had grown up that questioned the wisdom, doubted the virtues, of much which Blackstone pronounced the perfection of human reason. The teaching of Bentham, his assaults on English law and its administrators, renewed with unwearied zeal and abiding conviction throughout a long life, had not been in vain. Some of his disciples held high positions at the Bar; some were about to be raised to the Bench."

"As time went on this state of the law was severely criticised, especially by Bentham, whose theories upon legal subjects have had a degree of practical influence upon the legislation of his own and various other countries comparable only to those of Adam Smith and his successors upon commerce. His view was that the existing law should be repealed, and that in its place there should be enacted a new code, based upon what he regarded as philosophical principles. He found less difficulty than might have been expected (though he found considerable difficulty) in convincing the public of the defects of the existing state of things, but he found it impossible to persuade them to accept a new code from his hands, or from the hands of his disciples. Highly important steps, however, were taken in his life time in the direction of the changes of which he approved."

"Ethical hedonism was originally tied to psychological hedonism about human motivation. Bentham assumed that all humans are basically and exclusively motivated by the desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain, but it is possible to maintain ethical hedonism while rejecting, as most present utilitarians are inclined to do, psychological hedonism. However, certain later and contemporary versions of utilitarianism broaden the notion of ethical hedonism so that human or personal good is understood to be constituted by whatever satisfies people's desires or preferences or makes people happy."

"Jeremy Bentham – the cheerful, improving rationalist whose maxims stroll through the minds of bureaucrats, prompting them to destroy whatever they can find no reason to preserve. For a century and a half the Benthamite mentality has dominated the affairs of state, weighing laws, customs and institutions in the balance of profit, and presumptuously assuming the title to a wisdom which no mortal mind can really claim."

"Mr. Bentham did not talk much. He had a benevolence of manner, suited to the philanthropy of his mind. He seemed to be thinking only of the convenience and pleasure of his guests, not as a rule of artificial breeding, as from Chesterfield or Madame Genlis; but from innate feeling."

"The Reformers had been in the unhappy position of not having brains enough for their programme. Bentham supplied them. He classified and (inevitably) systematized the vapourings of Burdett and the nebulous projects of Cartwright. Bentham took the Burdettite catchwords of the day and gave them meaning: he redeemed the cause of democracy by providing it with a basis of reasoned theory. The sole clue to political conduct, he held, was Interest. What wonder, then, if Whigs and Tories were indistinguishable, since their interests were identical? The country was being governed by a minority for the partial interests of a minority: was not that the very definition of corruption? Corruption...was a system, it was a political theory, it was the whole government of England. Aristocracy as a form of government was itself an intolerable grievance... He based his democracy not on political considerations, but on the fundamental tag of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number". He gave Reform an irresistible catchword: he opened up a new and impugnable line of argument... Bentham gave the Reform movement a much-needed intellectual fillip. Through Mill, in the Edinburgh Review, he reached the genteel establishments: through Place, he stiffened the people."

"In their time, Bentham's ideas promoted progress, reform, wider democracy, and the amelioration of undesirable social conditions. Bentham lived... when common people, the "labouring poor," had little voice and no vote... Their toil and sacrifices enhanced the power of the nation, the glory of its rulers, the wealth of industrialists and merchants, and the indolent ease of the aristocrats. Yet here was a philosopher who said that people are people regardless of their social position. ...[L]egislators ought actively to augment the total happiness of the community. Instead of the people serving the state, the state should serve the people. ...[H]is slogan for government was "Be quiet." But he did not worship laissez-faire as a principle to be accepted blindly. ...[T]he state should monopolize the issue of paper money, thereby saving interest on its borrowing. It should... operate life and annuity insurance, and tax inheritance, monopolies, [etc.] ...Bentham's idea of diminishing marginal utility of money suggested an argument for the redistribution of income. ...[M]ore happiness will be gained by the poor person than will be lost by the wealthy one. ...Bentham's devotion to the greatest good for the greatest number led him to... advocate for.. democratic reforms. He supported universal (male) suffrage, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments, and the secret ballot. He opposed the monarchy and the , arguing that only in a democracy do the interest of the governors and the governed become identical. ...Bentham urged a system of national education, even for pauper children. Frugality Banks... should... stimulate saving by the poor. should provide jobs for unemployed workers during slack times. ...He designed ...a model prison that would reform criminals rather than punish them. No wonder Bentham and his circle of intellects (including James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Ricardo) were called "philosophic radicals.""

"Here the childlike nature of Bentham’s approach to life, which Mill often stresses, proves valuable: for Bentham understood how powerful pain and pleasure are for children and the child in us. Bentham did not value the emotional elements of the personality in the right way. He simplified them too, lacking all understanding of poetry (as Mill insists) and of love (as we might add). But perhaps it was the very childlike character of Bentham, the man who loved the pleasures of small creatures, who allowed the mice in his study to sit on his lap, that made him able to see something Aristotle did not see, the need that we all have to be held and comforter, the need to escape a terrible loneliness and deadness."

"It was the utilitarian radicals who laid the foundations of social improvement in a reasoned creed. With admirable ability, perseverance, unselfishness, and public spirit, Bentham and his disciples had regenerated political opinion, and fought the battle against debt, pauperism, class-privilege, class-monopoly, abusive patronage, a monstrous criminal law, and all the host of sinister interests."

"The Benthamic standard of “the greatest happiness” was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like “law of nature,” “right reason,” “the moral sense,” “natural rectitude,” and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham’s principle [of utility] put an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought."

"He found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science: he found the practice of the law an Augean stable, he turned the river into it which is mining and sweeping away mound after mound of its rubbish."

"If we were asked to say, in the fewest possible words, what we conceive to be Bentham's place among these great intellectual benefactors of humanity; what he was, and what he was not; what kind of service he did and did not render to truth; we should say—he was not a great philosopher, but a great reformer in philosophy."

"It is perhaps fortunate that Mr. Bentham devoted a much greater share of his time and labour to the subject of legislation, than that of morals; for the mode in which he understood and applied the principle of Utility, appears to me far more conducive to true and valuable results in the former, than in the latter of these two branches of inquiry."

"It does not seem to me a fantastic assertion that the ideas of one of the great novelists of the last generation may be traced to Bentham... Dickens, who spent his early manhood among the politicians of 1832 trained in Bentham's school, hardly ever wrote a novel without attacking an abuse."

"The name of Jeremy Bentham, one of the few who have wholly lived for what they held to be the good of the human race, has become even among educated men a byword for what is called his "low view" of human nature. The fact is that, under its most important aspect, he greatly overrated human nature."

"[Bentham] once said his ambition was to be “the most effectively benevolent man who ever lived.” He may well have been so."

"Mr. Bentham is very much among philosophers what La Fontaine was among poets:—in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely ever goes out, and sees very little company. The favoured few, who have the privilege of the entrée, are always admitted one by one."

"The directors of Synthank were eating an enormous luncheon to celebrate the launching of their new product. Some of them wore the plastic face-masks popular at the time. All were elegantly slender, despite the rich food and drink they were putting away. Their wives were elegantly slender, despite the food and drink they too were putting away. An earlier and less sophisticated generation would have regarded them as beautiful people, apart from their eyes."

"Aldiss' New Wave masterpiece is Report On Probability A. … The minutiae of all the involved's lives are the only thing; the act of observation is the only plot. The science fiction happens when it becomes apparent that there are Other watchers, and watchers watching those watchers, stretching back to what seems to be citizens of our own reality. Report On Probability A is about the metaphor of circular vision, manifested in the narrative by the round fields of view of the various optical devices and windows through which S, G, and C observe their world, expanding macrocosmically with the vast circle of observers observing the observers. As banality merges with paranoia, drawn only by whatever the reader brings to the narrative, there is no conclusion, no story, only facts. The story returns over and over to the painting The Hireling Shepherd by Holman Hunt, which becomes a recurring unresolved image which has no final meaning, only whatever speculation it's benighted observers bring to bear on it. Every character is searching for a meaning which may, or may not, exist as actual Truth. Behind each level of truth lies another; who is to say how far the chain goes or which part of it is more Actual? … The simplicity of the "story" masks an investigation into uncertainty and the nature of reality itself. The seeming bankruptcy of plot opens the reader to question the act of observation, of reporting, of writing itself. Truth is what Report On Probability A is all about, and Aldiss points out that it is a plastic thing that depends on who is trying to figure it out, and an ambiguous thing that may, at it's root, be unknowable."

"Why do so many people dislike science fiction? The answer goes like this: You have to think of science fiction in contrast to its nearest competitor, heroic fantasy. In heroic fantasy, by and large, things are pretty stable, and then some terrible evil comes along that's going to take over the world. People have to fight it. In the end they win, of course, so the earth is restored to what it was. The status quo comes back. Science fiction's quite different. With science fiction, the world's in some sort of a state, and something awful happens. It may not be evil, it may be good or neutral, just an accident. Whatever they do in the novel, at the end the world is changed forever. That's the difference between the two genres — and it's an almighty difference! And the truth is science fiction, because we all live in a world that's changed forever. It's never going to go back to what it was in the '60s or the '70s or the '30s, or whatever. It's changed."

"I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth."

"My wife Margaret and I sold our house to Sir Roger Penrose and his wife... Talking to Roger, I found we both agreed that AI, as they call it, is not going to be achieved by present-day machines."Artificial Intelligence" — that makes it sound simple, but what you're really talking about is artificial consciousness, AC. And I don't think there's any way we can achieve artificial consciousness, at least until we've understood the sources of our own consciousness. I believe consciousness is a mind/body creation, literally interwoven with the body and the body's support systems. Well, you don't get that sort of thing with a robot."

"That first novel of mine, Non-Stop, is directly attributable to Heinlein. His "Common Sense" seemed to me such a good story, but bereft of any human feelings. I thought long about that story, and then I thought how wonderful it would be to write about a spaceship in which people have been imprisoned for generations and to put in something of the human feeling. So that novel is directly attributable to Heinlein. I thought, in my youthful arrogance, that I could do it better — I didn't! I thought I could do it differently, and I think I did do it differently. And I suppose that on the whole, I've concentrated on doing things differently ever since."

"I'm lucky that SFWA has such a short memory. I was always the Young Turk, the gadfly. Part of the New Wave, although I didn't fit in there either! I spent years, and two histories, putting the so-called Old Guard in their place, and now I'm one of them!"

"Here is what I wrote about SF. If it has a familiar ring, my publishers liked it well enough to make it into a postcard for publicity purposes. 'I love SF for its surrealist verve, its loony non-reality, its piercing truths, its wit, its masked melancholy, its nose for damnation, its bunkum, its contempt for home comforts, its slewed astronomy, its xenophilia, its hip, its classlessness, its mysterious machines, its gaudy backdrops, its tragic insecurity.' Science fiction has always seemed to me such a polyglot, an exotic mistress, a parasite, a kind of new language coined for the purpose of giving tongue to the demented twentieth century."

"If we can see our difficulties, there is a way of resolving them, or the hope of a way."

"Plato would have no actors in his republic, in case pretence devoured what was real. Plato's fears have proved well-grounded. Actors, despised, almost outcast, until last century, have become something more than respectable. They, together with all those imitation actors, pop stars, TV celebrities, people who are famous for being famous, now receive adulation. They are the millionaires, the courtesans of our system. Solzhenitsyn, escaping to a West he had once admired, snarled at the meretricious falsity of what he found. We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest."