Astral Codex Ten

Bentham

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Bentham

Article

Bentham is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 15, 2022 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “expressing frustration with the shortcomings of his chosen foils, most notably Kant, Bentham”; “just like Bentham would have it”; “model of Bentham”. It most often appears alongside God, Aristotle, Barack Obama.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: July 15, 2022
  • Last seen: February 21, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
Similarly, when firmly in moral psychology territory, the first section on intuitionism is, if something that’s very much “in the water” in many communities by now, still lacks the mainstream acceptance it deserves. If you can ignore the odd attempts to cast it as an enemy of or even alternative to both Kantian deontology and utilitarianism, and skip entirely the bit about how Jeremy Bentham was autistic or something, and treat it just as psychology unmoored from normative morality, it’s great stuff.
This was never stated outright, certainly not in the helpful summary sections, but I felt it, particularly in the first of the three sections. It was expressed more in the narrative sections – in the bits where, instead of firmly stating hypotheses and marshalling arguments, Haidt allowed himself a bit more of a classic pop-sci writing style, linking together the development of his views with autobiography, and expressing frustration with the shortcomings of his chosen foils, most notably Kant, Bentham, and Kohlberg.
His “Durkheimian Utilitarianism” is utilitarianism but with an understanding of sociology and game theory. In its conception of what is fundamentally right and wrong, it’s just pure and simple care foundation, just like Bentham would have it, but Haidt then attempts to justify heuristics based around the other foundations by showing how following them, in aggregate, can often lead to better utilitarian outcomes than naive utilitarianism.
Your Book Review: Secret Government
July 07, 2023 · Original source
Our modern ideas about government transparency can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham. He advocated for radical transparency in government while also supporting a secret ballot for individuals. He believed that “men acting as representatives of all the people have a private and sinister interest, and sufficient power to gratify that interest, producing a constant sacrifice of the interest of the people” (page 23). What should be done about this? Publicity! For “Without publicity, all other checks are fruitless: in comparison of publicity, all other checks are of small account.” (page 24).
Bentham also shares our modern embrace of a secret ballot for citizens. On its face, there might seem to be a contradiction here. If citizens’ votes were public, would that not also serve as a check against their being captured by sinister self interest? Some have bitten this bullet. John Stewart Mill, for example, thought that citizens should vote publicly so that they would be compelled to vote in the public interest rather than their own. Voting publicly might also increase trust in government by allowing us to easily check the results of any election. If there was a public database of votes, citizens could simply check whether their votes were counted accurately. Any concerns about election fraud would evaporate.
Bentham resolves the apparent contradiction by appealing to the idea that the votes of citizens should be free. By this he means free from outside influence “whether as terrorism or bribery” (page 24). The idea is that if citizens’ votes were public, they would be subject to a variety of unsavory influences. Somebody might try to buy their vote, for instance. This was commonplace in the United States before the secret ballot was introduced. Also common was “terrorism,” simply threatening physical violence against anybody that didn’t vote in the appropriate manner. Organized crime was a fan of this tactic. The secret ballot removes these influences, ensuring that the only factor affecting an individual’s vote is the honest preference of that individual.
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
The idea that "slave morality is morality" might be right, but only if we agree that "morality" is just "whatever popular opinion accepts right now." That's a legitimate view that many scholars hold! But others dispute it, in various ways, on various grounds. It's not a surprise that someone called "Bentham's Bulldog" would be skeptical; Bentham, after all, declared "rights" to be "nonsense," and "natural rights" to be "nonsense on stilts." But if you think, for example, that you have individual rights that cannot be permissibly violated by a democratically elected government, then you think there is something more to morality than the weight of public opinion--and that view is not compatible with the idea that slave morality is morality.
Bentham’s Bulldog, whose surprise that anyone would endorse master morality inspired the post, wrote:
Inline links: wrote
Bulldog wrote a fuller reply on his own blog, Neither Master Nor Slave But Utilitarian, which I mostly agree with. But I don’t think utilitarianism (or any other philosophy) removes the need to think in these terms. In theory, you should be neither right nor left, neither capitalist nor communist, neither pro-US nor pro-China, simply choosing The Good at every opportunity without reference to puny mortal concepts. In practice you have to use some kind of heuristic and join some kind of coalition, and so all these things become important again.
Inline links: Neither Master Nor Slave But Utilitarian
Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
February 21, 2025 · Original source
1: Comments On Specific Technical Points 2: Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response 3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights
The anthropic principle weakly suggests that somewhere there might be things that can't be fully explained in terms of other things, but the alternative (everything can be explained in an infinite regress, so that for each level there's always a lower one) is absurd. Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response Bentham’s Bulldog wrote a response, Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments.
Inline links: Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments
Bentham’s Bulldog wrote a response, Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments.
Inline links: Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments