Utilitarian Democracy

• In Event: Bentham and Mill on Democracy, Despotism, and Liberalism

Abstract

Every now and then there appears an obituary for democracy: the people have mistaken their interest (in electing far-right politicians to office, for example); the people have voted for their particular interests rather than the common interest (in electing far-right politicians to office, for example). This somewhat glib example points to the relationship between interest and judgement in democratic governance. This paper suggests that this relationship is at the heart of Jeremy Bentham’s democratic thought, and that this is still a useful way to think about democracy today.

There are at least two different aspects of democracy in Bentham’s political thought: a more technocratic aspect, which comes through in the emphasis on official aptitude (active, moral and intellectual) and intellectual authority, and a more democratic aspect, in the emphasis on the universal interest instead of particular interests, and appropriate judgement instead of judgements made from sinister interest or interest-begotten prejudice. The idea is that although these two aspects seem to map onto judgement and interest respectively, both interest and judgement are entangled in both aspects. What matters is not just the right judgement of the proper interest, on the part of both the government and the people, but the ways in which interest and judgement are generated.

The argument proceeds by way of two main comparisons. The first comparison is with John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, where there is (arguably) a similar focus on the relationship between interest and judgement, but different emphases on the epistemic and deliberative aspects of democracy. The second comparison is to situate a utilitarian, and in particular a Benthamite, conception of democracy in the landscape of democratic theory. This is not, or not only, to rehash Bentham’s criticism of the universal rights of man, but to suggest that what is needed is a rethink of the relationship between interest and judgement – a popular conception of interest and judgement, perhaps, that does not succumb to populism.

Author

• Tsin Yen Koh, National University of Singapore