Bentham. Michael Quinn

      1  1 The lacerating wit of Voltaire also made a deep impression, and Bentham’s first publication, undertaken in part to supplement his income, was a translation of Voltaire’s anti-clerical satire Le Taureau Blanc, to which he prefixed a lengthy preface in impersonation of the author’s caustic critique of the grounds of religious belief (1774: i. ix–cxliv; see de Champs, 2015: 30–5).

      2  2 Bentham gave away the bride at Lind’s wedding, and the relationship was close enough for Bentham to write: ‘There was a time when I doubted whether, so long as you were alive, I could live without you’ (1968: 289–90). In short order, Bentham, through Lind’s sisters, had met Polly Dunkley, orphaned daughter of an Essex surgeon, and proposed marriage. Polly agreed, but Jeremiah made clear to Bentham that such an impecunious match would mean the end of his financial support, and Bentham abandoned the plan. Lind died in 1781, and Bentham worked hard to secure a pension for his widow and his sisters. There is no conclusive evidence as to Bentham’s sexuality, which Twining characterizes as ‘ambiguous’ (1984: 44). In arguing for the decriminaliz­ation of consensual homosexual sex in the 1780s, he explicitly denied any propensity to homosexuality, a ‘depraved appetite’ (UC lxxii. 204), but it should be remembered that not doing so might have been read as a public confession. In 1805, in his late fifties, after a chance meeting, he proposed marriage to Lady Caroline Fox, whom he had met and befriended at Bowood in 1781, when she was thirteen. Very gently, she declined (1988: 332–4).

      3  3 Bentham’s intention had been for his own head to be used, but the preservation process discoloured and tightened the skin, making it unsuitable. It is currently in the care of UCL Museums.

      4  4 Gideon Rosen recognizes Bentham’s employment of this spatial metaphor, but sees it as ‘obviously a mad, mad view’ (2005: 53–4). Mad or not, for Bentham the deployment of fictitious entities in language is predicated upon just such a figurative construction.

      5  5 Bentham explained archetypation as finding ‘that real appearance of real entities that served as a pattern for the appearance suggested by any of those sentences of which an improper substantive makes a part’ (2016b: 386; see also 1983c: 272n). Many modern discussions view archetypation as a hangover from Locke’s focus on the centrality of images to understanding (1975: 402–4; and see Harrison 1983: 62–4). For Jackson (1998: 525–6), however, archetypation was essential to addressing narrative structure, on which the sense of fictitious propositions depended. The present writer inclines to the received view (Quinn, 2012c), but lacks space to pursue the issue, except to point out that Bentham provided two different archetypal images of obligation, which made not for clarity, but confusion.

      6  6 Schofield’s suggestion that it is ‘more straightforward’ to assume that Bentham limits the category of perceptible real entities to ‘substances’ (2006: 16) manages to disqualify from real entity status all the psychical real entities, including the sensations of pleasure and pain.

      7  7 Similarly, Bentham consistently insisted that law is a real entity, but excepting the materiality of the document containing the authoritative written statement of will expressed in a law, that is of a mandate produced by a fictitious entity, it is difficult to reconcile the insistence with his basic distinction between the real and the fictitious.

      8  8 For discussions of the relationship between utility and truth see Quinn 2012a, Schofield, 2015. For my own part, I do not think Bentham regarded the principle of utility as true. He was himself generally careful to differentiate between truth and utility, while truth was ‘the knowledge of what facts really did exist’ (1983b: 354), and often thus advanced a correspondence theory of truth. He regarded utility as the only rationally defensible foundational moral principle, but moral principles were statements of approbation or approval (1996: 11–12n) rather than statements capable of correspondence with reality. Certainly, it is the rooting of utility in the real entities of pleasure and pain, that is to say the exposition of the fictitious entity utility in terms of alleged facts themselves capable of empirical verification or falsification, to which the principle of utility owes all its utility.