Did he though?

Nov 29th, 2022 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

I’m looking for more on this claim by anthropologist Dan Hicks that Bentham “contested immediate emancipation.”

It’s certainly possible in the abstract, given utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness of the greatest number” principle. The obvious objection is that lots of people can be made happy about the sufferings of a smaller number of people, so let’s not do it that way. Actual utilitarians wrestled with the problem; working imperialists, not so much. How about in the concrete? Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has a relevant article:

Classical Utilitarianism, on one reading, is the view according to which an action, rule, policy or social institution is right if and only if it is designed to advance aggregate well-being, hedonistically construed. Relying on some version of this moral framework, the Classical Utilitarians — Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick — advocated for a wide range of social, political and legal reforms.

Both their reformist agenda and the time at which they lived led each of the Classical Utilitarians to intellectual entanglements with British imperialism, colonialism and related issues (e.g., race and slavery). However, the nature and extent of their involvement with and relationship to the British imperial project and colonialism in general has not yet been properly or fully analysed. The purpose of this nicely assembled and timely volume is to remedy this situation and, as the editors state in their introduction, ‘to bring out, to engage with, the different aspects of the utilitarian legacy that bear directly on questions of race and empire’.

Sounds like a good read.

The two papers on Bentham are among the most interesting and illuminating in this volume. In his article, “Jeremy Bentham on Slavery and the Slave Trade”, Fred Rosen responds to the view that Bentham failed to have the appropriate moral reaction to slavery and slave trading. Bentham’s error, it is claimed, is that he held that the security of the property of slave owners had to be balanced against equality in deciding the right public policy to have regarding slavery. This problem is seen clearly, critics contend, in Bentham’s advocacy of a gradual rather than immediate emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.

In reply, Rosen demonstrates that Bentham’s position is both more sophisticated and more plausible than critics acknowledge. Relying on a little-known letter published in the Public Advertiser on June 6, 1789, Rosen shows that Bentham was clear on the issue of slave trading: it should end without compensation to slave traders. He advocated gradual emancipation, not because he wrongly gave weight to the security and protection of private property, Rosen continues, but out of concern for the protection of slaves: he wanted to ensure that the abolition of slaveholding did not make slaves worse off. For in conjunction with emancipation, what is needed is another economic and social system not based on slavery, ‘one that provided subsistence and security for the newly freed slaves and did not leave them in a worse position in relation to their former masters’.

You know what? He was not wrong about that. US history from 1865 on is an infinite encyclopedia on the subject. Many “freed” slaves absolutely were in a worse position in relation to their former masters, which is why David Oshinsky titled his book about what happened after Reconstruction was killed off Worse Than Slavery.

So it looks as if Hicks’s remark is less than fully accurate.

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