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To the Death: Fortitude and Judgment in Bentham’s Deontology

Quinn, Malcolm (2024) To the Death: Fortitude and Judgment in Bentham’s Deontology. In: 17th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, 18-20 June 2024, Faculty of Laws, UCL.

Type of Research: Conference, Symposium or Workshop Item
Creators: Quinn, Malcolm
Description:

This paper was presented at the 17th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, 18–20 June 2024, UCL Faculty of Laws.

The paper discusses Bentham’s writing on fortitude, part of a sustained period of work on logic and language that Bentham undertook between 1813 and 1815. My analysis shows how Bentham works between two vantage points. The first decides whether or not someone acted the part of a person of fortitude. The second emerges
when the first vantage point is seen to fail to deliver a judgment on fortitude. If logic is allowed to ‘take the command and give direction to the course of Ethics itself’ a new standpoint for fortitude is revealed. The fictitious entity of fortitude is situated in relation to the real entities of pleasure and pain, allowing us to follow a judgment ‘to the death’.

Bentham begins by asking how someone can be judged to be a person of fortitude. He argues that asking this question can lead us astray, first, because it can direct someone to act against their own interest, second, because it can be a way of avoiding exposure to actual pain or danger. If a judgment on whether someone is a person of fortitude is ‘a mere question of words’, then, paradoxically, ‘words are everything’ because, if a person is seen to have justice on their side, they can play the part of a person of fortitude without any act of fortitude taking place. Bentham suggests, instead, that we can follow our judgments on fortitude ‘to the death’, for example in cases where people accept death in defence of their personal liberty, as the price that must be paid for a benefit to oneself or to others. He goes further, arguing that, in contrast with the established church that prohibits suicide, the doctrines of Jesus ask us to encounter the reality of actual pain or danger, up to and including a self-willed death.

Official Website: ttps://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/sites/laws/files/isus_2024_abstracts_arranged_by_panel.pdf
Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: utilitarianism
Your affiliations with UAL: Colleges > Chelsea College of Arts
Date: 20 June 2024
Event Location: Faculty of Laws, UCL
Date Deposited: 13 Jan 2025 11:30
Last Modified: 13 Jan 2025 11:30
Item ID: 23230
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/23230

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