In many ways, Jeremy Bentham was all about equality. As the father of utilitarianism, he believed that all social policy should be designed to maximize the happiness and pleasures of humans’ experience while minimizing the pains and miseries. And in espousing this theory of justice, he didn’t distinguish between upper class and lower class and men or women. He strove for politics that maximized human happiness. Nevertheless, when he first read the Declaration of Independence, he scoffed at the idea that all men are created equal:
“’All men,’ they tell us, ‘are created equal.’ This surely is a new discovery; now, for the first time, we learn, that a child, at the moment of its birth, has the same quantity of natural power as the parent, the same quantity of political power as the magistrate.”
I guess Bentham missed the idea that when Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, he meant equal in terms of the rights they hold in front of their governments.
(Click here to view comments)