Joseph Priestley
historical figure · 1 work · 3 mentions · 3 anchored passages · author page
Priestley
in the texts
Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England
Author whose pamphlet supplied Bentham with the utilitarian formula.
“It was by that pamphlet and this phrase in it,” writes Bentham, “that my principles on the subject of morality, public and private, were determined.
In early manhood he was “converted”—I use the term deliberately, as it better gives my meaning than does any other expression—to an unshakeable faith in that form of utilitarianism which places the object of life in the promotion of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
This principle, obtained as we have seen from Priestley, is the formula with which popular memory has most closely connected the name of Bentham.