Who is jeremy bentham biography wikipedia

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and political radical. He is primarily known today for his moral philosophy , especially his principle of utilitarianism, which evaluates actions based upon their consequences. The relevant consequences, in particular, are the overall happiness created for everyone affected by the action. Influenced by many enlightenment thinkers, especially empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume, Bentham developed an ethical theory grounded in a largely empiricist account of human nature.

Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 4 February /8 O.S. [15 February N.S.] – 6 June ) was an.

He famously held a hedonistic account of both motivation and value according to which what is fundamentally valuable and what ultimately motivates us is pleasure and pain. Happiness, according to Bentham, is thus a matter of experiencing pleasure and lack of pain. Although he never practiced law, Bentham did write a great deal of philosophy of law , spending most of his life critiquing the existing law and strongly advocating legal reform.

Throughout his work, he critiques various natural accounts of law which claim, for example, that liberty, rights, and so on exist independent of government. But his impact was greater in later years as his ideas were carried on by followers such as John Stuart Mill , John Austin, and other consequentialists. A leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law and one of the founders of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London on February 15, Bentham lived during a time of major social, political and economic change.

Jeremy Bentham (born February 15, , London, England—died June 6, , London) was an English philosopher, economist, and theoretical jurist, the earliest.

Though qualified to practice law, he never did so. Instead, he devoted most of his life to writing on matters of legal reform—though, curiously, he made little effort to publish much of what he wrote. Bentham spent his time in intense study, often writing some eight to twelve hours a day. While most of his best known work deals with theoretical questions in law, Bentham was an active polemicist and was engaged for some time in developing projects that proposed various practical ideas for the reform of social institutions.

Although his work came to have an important influence on political philosophy, Bentham did not write any single text giving the essential principles of his views on this topic.