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Exploring Bentham’s fallacies, then and now
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In 1809, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, set to work on “The Book of Fallacies.” His goal was to expose the fallacious arguments used to block reforms like the abolition of “rotten boroughs.”
Bentham collected examples of fallacies, often from parliamentary debates. By 1811, he had sorted them into nearly 50 different types, with titles like “Attack us, you attack Government,” the “No precedent argument,” and the “Good in theory, bad in practice” fallacy.
Bentham was thus a pioneer of an area of science that has made considerable progress in recent years. He would have relished the work of psychologists showing that we have a confirmation bias; that we systematically overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs; and that we have a propensity to respond to the plight of a single identifiable individual rather than a large number of people about whom we have only statistical information.
Some of the fallacies Bentham identified still make frequent appearances.
One fallacy popular both in Bentham’s day and in ours is what he characterized as “What? More jobs?” By “jobs,” he meant government spending, and he considered this a fallacy because blanket opposition to more government spending fails to take into account the good that the extra employees will be able to achieve.
The “fallacies” that really challenge the modern reader, however, are those that characterize arguments that today are widely accepted even in the most educated and enlightened circles. One of these, Bentham says, in a jarring juxtaposition, “may be termed Anarchy-preacher’s fallacy or The Rights of Man fallacy.”
When people argue against a proposed measure on the grounds that it violates “the rights of man” — or, as we would say today, human rights — they are, Bentham claims, using vague generalities that distract us from assessing the measure’s utility.
Bentham accepts that it may be to the advantage of the community that the law should confer certain rights on people. What threatens to bring us closer to anarchy, he argues, is the idea that I have certain rights already, independent of the law. Whereas the principle of utility calls for inquiry and argument, Bentham believes that those who advocate such pre-existing rights disdain both and are more likely to stir people up to use force.
Bentham’s objection to “natural rights” is often cited. Less frequently discussed is what he calls “the Posterity-chainer’s device.” One example is the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which requires all succeeding sovereigns of the United Kingdom to take an oath to maintain the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. If future generations feel themselves bound by such provisions, they are, Bentham thinks, enslaved by long-dead tyrants.
Bentham’s objection to such attempts to bind posterity applies not only to the union that created the UK, but also the one that formed the US: Why should the current generation consider itself bound by what was decided hundreds of years earlier?
In the case of the unification of two or more previously sovereign states, Bentham is sensitive to the problem of providing assurances to the smaller states that the larger ones will not dominate them.
He places his trust in the belief that sooner or later, after having been under one government, “the two communities will have become melted into one.” Public support for independence in Scotland and Catalonia shows that this is not always the case. Bentham, of course, would have accepted that he might be mistaken. After all, the “Authority-worshipper’s argument” was another of the fallacies he rejected.
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2015.
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