Jeremy Bentham: What makes an action right or wrong?

Jeremy Bentham was perhaps as much a social reformer as a philosopher and is also well known for his many inventions. His major contribution to philosophy is the theory of utilitarianism

English philosopher, jurist and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (Getty)

If you are feeling a little ghoulish and find yourself at a loose end and in London, you can do worse than wander into the cloisters of University College. You will discover, encased in a mahogany and glass structure, nothing less than the mortal remains of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) seated in his usual chair in an attitude of relaxed contemplation and dressed in suitably restrained clothing, his favourite cane propped by his side. If you are very ghoulish you might be saddened to learn that the head is a wax dummy, though the skeleton under the clothes is real enough. The actual head, preserved “in the manner of the New Zealanders”, remains in the university’s safe for two reasons: first, the preservation process was not entirely successful, and it is probably too ghastly for display; second, it has gone missing a number of times. The pious students of King’s College, natural enemies of the humanists of University College, have absconded with it on at least two occasions – it was once discovered in a luggage locker in the Aberdeen rail station.

The auto-icon, as it is called, was entirely Bentham’s idea, and his reasons for it are outlined in his last work, Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living. Much of the book has to be tongue-in-cheek – it includes Bentham’s suggestion that the preserved bodies of the famous might serve as excellent lawn ornaments. But the auto-icon has a practical aim: the inspiration in his followers of certain useful feelings and beliefs. Bentham, though born to a line of lawyers and himself called to the bar in 1767, busied himself throughout his life not in the courtroom, but with all manner of practical schemes.

A practical mind