History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [441]
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26
THE UTILITARIANS1
Throughout the period from Kant to Nietzsche, professional philosophers in Great Britain remained almost completely unaffected by their German contemporaries, with the sole exception of Sir William Hamilton, who had little influence. Coleridge and Carlyle, it is true, were profoundly affected by Kant, Fichte, and the German Romantics, but they were not philosophers in the technical sense. Somebody seems to have once mentioned Kant to James Mill, who, after a cursory inspection, remarked: 'I see well enough what poor Kant would be at.' But this degree of recognition is exceptional; in general, there is complete silence about the Germans. Bentham and his school derived their philosophy, in all its main outlines, from Locke, Hartley, and Helvetius; their importance is not so much philosophical as political, as the leaders of British radicalism, and as the men who unintentionally prepared the way for the doctrines of socialism.
Jeremy Bentham, who was the recognized leader of the 'Philosophical Radicals', was not the sort of man one expects to find at the head of a movement of this sort. He was born in 1748, but did not become a Radical till 1808. He was painfully shy, and could not without great trepidation endure the company of strangers. He wrote voluminously, but never bothered to publish; what was published under his name had been benevolently purloined by his friends. His main interest was jurisprudence, in which he recognized Helvetius and Beccaria as his most important predecessors. It was through the theory of law that he became interested in ethics and politics.
He bases his whole philosophy on two principles, the 'association principle', and the 'greatest-happiness principle'. The association principle had been emphasized by Hartley in 1749; before him, though association of ideas was recognized as occurring, it was regarded, for instance by Locke, only as a source of trivial errors. Bentham, following Hartley, made it the basic principle of psychology. He recognizes association of ideas and language, and also association of ideas and ideas. By means of this principle he aims at a deterministic account of mental occurrences. In essence the doctrine is the same as the more modern theory of the 'conditioned reflex', based on Pavlov's experiments. The only important difference is that Pavlov's conditioned reflex is physiological, whereas the association of ideas was purely mental. Pavlov's work is therefore capable of a materialistic explanation, such as is given to it by the behaviourists, whereas the association of ideas led rather towards a psychology more or less independent of physiology. There can be no doubt that, scientifically, the principle of the conditioned reflex is an advance on the older principle. Pavlov's principle is this: Given a reflex according to which a stimulus B produces a reaction C, and given that a certain animal has frequently experienced a stimulus A at the same time as B, it often happens that in time the stimulus A will produce the reaction C even when B is absent. To determine the circumstances under which this happens is a matter of experiment. Clearly, if we substitute ideas for A, B, and C, Pavlov's principle becomes that of the association of ideas.
Both principles, indubitably, are valid over a certain field; the only controversial question is as to the extent of this field. Bentham and his followers exaggerated the extent of the field in the case of Hartley's principle, as certain behaviourists have in the case of Pavlov's principle.
To Bentham, determinism in psychology was important, because he wished to establish a code of laws—and, more generally, a social system—which would automatically make men virtuous. His second principle, that of the greatest happiness, became necessary at this point in order to define 'virtue'.
Bentham maintained that what is good is pleasure or happiness—he used these words as synonyms—and what is bad is pain. Therefore