Hume, Bentham, and Magnanimity
That public debate should be resolvable, decisively, through impartial and objective rules that track genuine ‘differences that ought to make a difference’ outcomes animates utilitarianism as a political program. And because humans are often interested parties who will game the rules, the natural end-point of this political program is to hand-over the collection of data that are inputs, the decision rules themselves, and the implementation of the salient rules to machines.
That is, Iain Banks Culture series, thus, depicts — in the way Star Trek depicts the liberal federal ideal — the utilitarian algorithmic ideal as a social program (unless utilitarians, or the machine overlords, decide that all neurons or all possible qualia should be weighted equally in the distant future). Some read the Culture series as satire, and others as dystopia; I won’t settle that weighty matter here.*
Regular readers know I don’t have much sympathy for the extreme technocratic and elitist turn of recent utilitarianism. This despite the fact that the original impulse that motivates this utilitarian program is quite appealing: all noble souls are genuinely horrified by how privilege entrenches itself through violence and cunning and, thereby, shapes social institutions to its own advantage in all kinds of unfair and cruel ways; all such souls rightly hope that intelligence can be deployed to reform and improve the causes that produce so much needless suffering.
But because of my recent interest in the development of nineteenth century liberalism, I have been reading in the pre-Sidgwick utilitarian sources. And while the elitism is often present, there is much to admire and enjoy about the utilitarian project that is devoted to the improvement of institutions in the service of collaboration, peace, justice, and human flourishing. This institutional utilitarianism has, in fact, re-shaped society in all kinds of fascinating ways, although (as symbolized by the Panopticon) here, too, horror lurks.
But when you go back to Bentham’s writings all of this is not worked out yet, and we encounter an intellectual schemer where the sublime and the mundane, the confused and subtle, all rub shoulders on the same page in enchanting ways. This is especially so in “A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace,” (A Plan) a work compiled from manuscripts. A Plan is the fourth of the essays published in 1843, under the title Principles of International Law part of (vol II) The Works of Jeremy Bentham: Principles of judicial procedure edited by Bowring. The original edition suggests the essays were manuscripts written in 1786-9. As it happens some of the material in A Plan was also published in 1843 as Benthamiana: selects extracts (edited by John Hill Burton). The material I will quote comes from an essay titled, ‘national jealousy.’
In a previous post, I argued that A Plan reveals Bentham’s non-trivial engagement with Smith’s Wealth of Nations. My argument was somewhat speculative, although we know from Bentham’s “Defence of Usury” (published 1787) that he was quite familiar with that work.
Now, in A Plan Bentham proposes that peace can be maintained and “considerably facilitated, by the establishment of a common court of judicature, for the decision of differences between the several nations, although such court were not to be armed with any coercive powers.” This idea was not original with Bentham and variants were explored throughout the eighteenth century; it goes back to (at least) 1623 New Cineas by Émeric Crucé and also William Penn’s 1693 pamphlet "Essay toward the Present and Future Peace of Europe." While Leibniz mentions him, Crucé was relatively obscure. Penn less so, especially because Voltaire treated him as the model legislator. So, some other time I want to say a bit more about Penn’s noticeable influence on Bentham. (For those with an eye on the present: contemporary effective altruists have considerable interests in these early Quakers and their Pennsylvania colony.)
Today’s post focuses on a passage in which Bentham explores people’s objections to such an European (!) court of arbitrage. (He is really focused on France and England.) He notes that quite a few federal/confederal systems have such a court of arbitrage, including the Suisse, the old German empire, and the American articles of confederation, of course. (Presumably this is one reason why the editors think the manuscript dates from 1789 or before.)
Bentham recognizes that submitting to such a court will generate resistance. He runs through a number of objections, but then he discusses a number that can be classed together as ‘national jealousy.’ (I return to that shortly.) One of the causes of such jealousy (I think we would say rivalry) is the following:
It is because we do not know what strong motives other nations have to be just, what strong indications they have given of the disposition to be so, how often we ourselves have deviated from the rules of justice,---that we take for granted, as an indisputable truth, that the principles of injustice are in a manner interwoven into the very essence of the hearts of other men.
But the particular cast of diffidence in question, the apprehension of being duped by foreign powers, is to be referred in part, and perhaps principally, to another cause---the jealousy and slight opinion we entertain of our ministers and public men; we are jealous of them as our superiors, contending against us in the perpetual struggle for power; we are diffident of them as being our fellow-countrymen, and of the same mould as ourselves.
Here Bentham identifies a kind of cynicism about peace in two English characteristics: first, a guilty conscience about her own actions (that “deviated from the rules of justice.”) Bentham is a fierce critic of imperialism, slavery, and colonialism, after all. Second, a mistrust of foreign rulers because there is a lack of trust in her own leaders because these are no different in kind than ordinary Englishmen (and who have a justified guilty conscience). (This egalitarian use of the mold metaphor is, in fact, reminiscent of Smith’s writings.)
Bentham’s tackles the implied challenge in a surprising (and endearing) way. Above I mentioned that Burton’s title for the extract is a nod to an essay by Hume (1760) “Jealousy of Trade.” That Burton thought of Hume while extracting this material is no surprise because (as we’ll see) Hume is explicitly mentioned in it as a source to Bentham. And Bentham’s ideas are clearly in the same spirit as the closing prayer of Hume’s “Jealousy of Trade:” “as a British subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of Germany, Spain, Italy, and even France itself. I am at least certain, that Great Britain, and all those nations, would flourish more, did their sovereigns and ministers adopt such enlarged and benevolent sentiments towards each other.”
With that in place, here’s what Bentham writes in response to the cynicism objection:
That confidence is a property of an enlarged mind (that is, magnanimous) and jealousy a narrow one is a Humean commitment (see EPM 3.6). Bentham clearly implies that Hume himself was a magnanimous historian in virtue of the fact that he was able to see in other people’s actions noble feelings; and he praises Hume for it.
As an aside, critics of Bentham and Hume often complain that they have a reductive picture of human nature that only does justice to the ‘vilest and basest motives.’ Arguably this is a standard criticism of utilitarianism ever since, and because it has an implied imprimatur of John Stuart Mill it’s often treated as a fair criticism. But when one spends time with Bentham’s writings one quickly recognizes that this can’t be quite right. Bentham is not reducing ‘wisdom’ and ‘honor’ to pleasure and pain here, nor claiming that it can be captured by a species of self-interest. While I defend Foucault’s idea that Hume and Bentham lead into Becker’s and Stigler’s Chicago economics (ca 1977), they cannot be reduced to that program
Be that as it may, Temple and De Witt are offered as existence proofs that political leaders can protect the interests of their own countries and, simultaneously, exhibit enlarged and generous attitudes and behavior toward each other (and each other’s countries).
Bentham agrees that Temple and Dew Witt are exceptions in their own time—extreme outliers. But he then appeals to the idea of progress (“improvements have been immense and unquestioned”) — they lived in an awful political age — in order to suggest that in better times one wouldn’t need such outliers (“in happier times, might achieve a work like theirs with less extent of virtue”)! He also, thereby, blocks the implied objection: that if only in extreme misery extreme virtue is possible, and we have progressed, then no such virtue will be available; by denying the need for such virtue. (To what degree Bentham actually endorses in his own voice such a proto-Nietzschean moral psychology about the generation of greatness is worth exploring some other time.)
Now, Hume discusses the Temple-De Witt friendship in his History of England, where both are explicitly describes as having generous and enlarged sentiments . In fact, I have argued (see here) that De Witt, especially, is a rather important character in the History and (recall also here) that De Witt’s political challenges also shapes the structure of accountability even for emergency powers or state of exception in (1752) “Idea Of a Perfect Commonwealth.” This essay is rather important because it is itself a federal plan (explicitly modeled on the United Provinces), and so also shaping Bentham’s ideas in more ways than one.
However, while De Witt is showered with praise by Hume (“equally eminent for greatness of mind, for capacity, and for integrity”). In the narrative of the History of England De Witt is also a tragic figure who instantiates a dangerous political flaw; De Witt is both praised for getting something truly right about the art of ruling, that is, to maintain the dispositions conducive to political unity, and in the late 1660s also for getting something disastrously wrong, by mistakenly assuming a species of rational behavior in others and thereby misunderstanding international politics, which is (also) governed by more narrow emotions. This is not obscure in Hume because the fall of De Witt is the precondition and also the effect of the rise of William III later King William of England of Glorious revolution fame.
To the best of my knowledge Bentham never comments on the fall of De Witt or Hume’s treatment of it. It’s wholly in character for Bentham to extract the exalted elements from Hume’s account. It’s the source of his greatness, and imperfections.
*If you think science itself will transform human nature, and make us more machine-like (or perhaps science just will be done by machines), then do incorporate Ted Chiang’s “Catching Crumbs from the Table” (Nature, 2000) into the utopia.