Bentham rejected Cesare Beccaria’s humanism, proposing instead a criminology and reform agenda that was based on the ‘scientific’ view of people as rational choice actors. Nevertheless he was not amoral. Accepting that ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number … is the measure of right and wrong’, Bentham assumed morality could be liberated from religion and narrow prejudice and itself rendered scientific: good and evil could be calculated on the basis of the utilities of any action.
Strongly affected by Helvetius’ vision of law as the principal tool for creating the good society, and by Beccaria’s Enlightenment proposals for reform of penal order, Bentham set out to create a new vision of law as the scientific foundation of a prosperous and free society. To this end he promoted codification of laws, both because this would reduce the arbitrariness and chicanery of common law and because law could then be understood by ordinary people.
He drew from Beccaria and from contemporary theorists of political economy, such as Adam Smith, the vision of people as rational choice actors. In the felicity calculus, human actions were assumed to follow a mental calculation of the ratio of pain to pleasure delivered by projected courses of action. Put simply, the delivery of pain could be rationally calculated and universally applied to prevent wrong. Penal law was thus to be the central tool of government. Applied with certainty, punishment would guide subjects away from harmful activities.
At the same time, Bentham stressed that all punishment was a necessary evil, a form of government coercion, and thus to be delivered minimally. To this end, he followed Beccaria in urging that punishments should be graduated according to the crime. They should follow the principal of economy in delivering as little pain as is necessary for crime prevention – for punishment in the form of retribution he regarded as irrational and oppressive.
Yet in all of this, the central aim of law does not emerge as ‘justice’. Rather, Bentham took the view that the central object of law is security. Security may broadly be defined as that condition of society in which the future is known in key respects, in particular with respect to the protection of life and property. Only if security exists can people make plans, and Bentham regarded the generalisation of this capacity as what differentiated an Enlightened society from one populated by barbarous hordes. Of the four ‘ends of law’ – security, abundance, subsistence and equality – Bentham was only secondarily interested in the last two.
Bentham was a major contributor to shaping ‘bourgeois’ philosophy and nineteenth-century liberalism more generally. And with the resurgence of liberal individualism in the past thirty years, Bentham’s thought once again has had a profound influence in fields such as crime prevention, he law and economics movement and ‘neo-classical’ criminology.
This model prison afforded guards’ views of each individual prisoner’s behavior at all times, while the prisoners could see neither each other nor the guards. The Panopticon provides the prototype of a form of correction and training that constantly but gently works to create obedient subjects by the application of a minimum of physical coercion.Much to Bentham’s everlasting chagrin, various attempts to have the British and the French governments build his panoptic prison stalled and collapsed during the 1790s, and the Panopticon gradually drifted from his attention.
留言列表
讀書筆記 (7)