Bentham founded classical utilitarianism, arguing in "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation" (1789) that actions and laws should be judged solely by whether they maximize the aggregate balance of pleasure over pain among everyone affected, a principle he sought to make precise through a "felicific calculus" for weighing pleasures and pains. He used this standard to attack traditional legal and political doctrines, dismissing natural rights as "nonsense upon stilts" and proposing extensive reforms to law, prisons, and administration.
Intellectual setting
Bentham wrote as part of a broader movement of legal and administrative reform in Britain, applying his utilitarian calculus to criticize the common law, the penal system, and parliamentary representation, and designed the Panopticon prison as an architectural embodiment of efficient, utility-driven social discipline.
Key ideas
The principle of utility
Bentham held that the rightness of an action or law depends entirely on its tendency to produce the greatest aggregate balance of pleasure over pain for everyone affected, proposing a "felicific calculus" of intensity, duration, and certainty to make this comparison systematic.
Critique of natural rights
Bentham rejected talk of natural, pre-legal rights as "nonsense upon stilts," arguing that only law can create genuine rights and that legal and political institutions should instead be designed and reformed according to their measurable effects on aggregate happiness.
Legacy
Bentham founded classical utilitarianism and directly shaped his student and intellectual heir John Stuart Mill, and his utilitarian method for evaluating institutions by their consequences influenced modern welfare economics, cost-benefit analysis, and law and economics.