Bentham s Fallacies, Then and Now

More jobs? By jobs, he meant government spending, and he considered this a fallacy because blanket opposition to more government spending fails to take into account the good that the extra employees will be able to achieve.

Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument.

Bentham did not rush to publish his work. An abridged version appeared in French in 1816, and in English in 1824, but the complete work remained in manuscript form until its publication this year as part of an ongoing project, under the editorship of Philip Schofield of University College, London, to publish Bentham s collected works.

By 1811, he had sorted them into nearly 50 different types, with titles like Attack us, you attack Government, the No precedent argument, and the Good in theory, bad in practice fallacy. (One thing on which both Immanuel Kant and Bentham agree is that this last example is a fallacy If something is bad in practice, there must be a flaw in the theory.)

As a card carrying member of the economics profession, I have been trained to view the world from the perspective of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, according to whom the purpose of public policy is to create the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Policies that do not abide by some variant of this utilitarian principle (as proposed by, say, John Rawls or Amartya Sen) are bound to be inefficient or unfair.

One example is the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which requires all succeeding sovereigns of the United Kingdom to take an oath to maintain the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. If future generations feel themselves bound by such provisions, they are, Bentham thinks, enslaved by long dead tyrants.

Public support for independence in Scotland and Catalonia shows that this is not always the case. Bentham, of course, would have accepted that he might be mistaken.

Moral philosophy has taken two very different approaches to this question. For some, the goal is to find universal principles from which to derive moral judgments Kant s categorical imperative, Bentham s utilitarian principle, and John Rawls s veil of ignorance are some of the best known examples.

The wisdom of our ancestors fallacy has often been invoked in debates over same sex marriage. Anyone familiar with political discussion in the United States will instantly recognize a more specific version that could be called the wisdom of the Founding Fathers fallacy.

The fallacies that really challenge the modern reader, however, are those that characterize arguments that today are widely accepted even in the most educated and enlightened circles. One of these, Bentham says, in a jarring juxtaposition, may be termed Anarchy preacher s fallacy or The Rights of Man fallacy.

In the case of the unification of two or more previously sovereign states, Bentham is sensitive to the problem of providing assurances to the smaller states that the larger ones will not dominate them. Given what he takes to be the impossibility of tying future generations hands, he places his trust in the belief that sooner or later, after having been under one government, the two communities will have become melted into one.

MELBOURNE In 1809, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, set to work on The Book of Fallacies. His goal was to expose the fallacious arguments used to block reforms like the abolition of rotten boroughs electorates with so few electors that a powerful lord or landowner could effectively select the member of parliament, while newer cities like Manchester remained unrepresented.

Bentham s objection to such attempts to bind posterity applies not only to the union that created the UK, but also the one that formed the US Why should the current generation consider itself bound by what was decided hundreds of years earlier? Unlike the framers of the US Constitution, we have had centuries of experience to judge whether it does or does not promote the general welfare.

But recent advances in psychology and neuroscience may suggest that if we want to understand social and political behavior, or improve policies, we should be reading Hegel more than Bentham. That may sound weird, given that Hegel was an Idealist and would never have expected neuroscience a material reality independent of Geist (usually translated as Mind or Spirit) to be relevant to his inquiry.

The set of political decisions made over time must make some sense, and this sense must come from the narrative that is superimposed on historical events. The narrative itself is socially constructed and only marginally bound by fact.