(23) Parfit agrees with the subjectivist, as against the
Benthamite hedonist, that intrinsic features of sensations do not play a normative role in grounding reasons in matters of mere taste independently from our favoring or disfavoring responses to those sensations.
As Waldron himself points out, a
Benthamite egoist analysis of the legislator's role cannot make sense of democracy.
This is a typical
Benthamite fantasy, but not a genuinely philosophical one, in my view, for it fails to appreciate that each of these theorists of the law set out to understand the self-understandings of law of their day, which were embedded in and reflective of the lives of jurispiriti and ordinary folk alike.
Finally, a short but influential piece by Collins (1985) described Australia as a '
Benthamite' society, characterised Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian, individualist, rationalist and legalist philosophy of public policy.
In the
Benthamite tradition of ethical utilitarianism, it is defined as happiness, to be measured and quantified in its various aspects (Bentham [1789] 1907: Chapter 4).
We do not deny that even a person who has been victimised by the enervating and poisonous doctrines of the eighteenth century materialism of the West and the [sic]
Benthamite Utilitarianism, can feel his country's wrongs and can burn with a desire to raise his nation above the petty oppressions of temporary tyranny.
He had one foot on the threshold of the new heaven, but the other foot in Sidgwick and the
Benthamite calculus [i.e., utilitarianism] and the general rules of correct behavior." (14) What Moore's younger acolytes were learning from their master was the rejection of conventional moral standards, just as John Maynard Keynes and his siblings earlier had rejected the Christianity in which they were raised.
That, yes, judges should be in the business of declaring what the law is using the traditional tools of interpretation, rather than pronouncing the law as they might wish it to be in light of their own political views, always with an eye on the outcome, and engaged perhaps in some
Benthamite calculation of pleasures and pains along the way.
For Vannatta, Kirk offers a shallow and very incomplete reading of Dewey, and mistakenly equates Deweyan pragmatism with
Benthamite utilitarianism.
Collins, Hugh (1985), "Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a
Benthamite Society," in Stephen R.
On the other hand, judges themselves see the
Benthamite critique as a reason for them to ignore the rules of evidence when they are sitting at bench trials, (5) considering themselves to be closer to the ideal fact finder and believing themselves more able to assign all relevant information its proper weight.
On the contrary, 'the road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in centrally organised and controlled interventionism.' In Polanyi's account, the self-regulating market of the mid-nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic expansion of the administrative organs of the state, the philosophical rationale for which was supplied by a '
Benthamite liberalism' that saw government as the 'great agency' of human happiness, and laissez-faire itself as, to all intents and purposes, identical with the general welfare.