PHIL 123 AI & Ethics
Black-and-white photograph of a round relief portrait of Jeremy Bentham in left-facing profile.
Jeremy Bentham, relief by David d'Angers, photographed by Eck et Durand.Image: Jeremy Bentham MET 268348 · David d'Angers / Eck et Durand. CC0. Modified: Locally auto-oriented, metadata-stripped, resized without enlargement to at most 720px wide, and encoded as WebP quality 82. Wikimedia Commons record, reviewed revision 1163195363.

Permanent scholarly record

Jeremy Bentham

1748–1832

Jeremy Bentham was an English legal and political reformer who gave utilitarianism one of its first systematic modern forms. He proposed that laws and policies should be judged by their effects on pleasure, pain, and the interests of those affected, rather than by inherited rank or unexamined custom. Bentham used that standard to criticize punishment, legal procedure, and political exclusion. His felicific calculus asks decision-makers to attend to intensity, duration, probability, downstream effects, and the number of people affected. In an AI-policy case, his approach turns a vague claim about efficiency into a disciplined question about whose welfare improves, whose risks are shifted, and what evidence supports the comparison.

In PHIL 123

Why this thinker matters

Bentham gives students a way to map consequences and test welfare claims in institutional AI decisions.

Primary texts
Introduction Principles Morals Legislation