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Jeremy Bentham ) (February 15, 1748 – June 6, 1832) was an English gentleman, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He is best known as an early advocate of utilitarianism and animal rights.

Bentham was one of the most influential (classical) liberals, partially through his writings but particularly through his students all around the world, including John Stuart Mill and several political leaders (and Robert Owen, who later became the founder of socialism).

He argued in favor of individual and economic freedom, including the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, animal rights, the end of slavery, the abolition of physical punishment (also of children), the right to divorce, free trade, and no restrictions on interest. But, he was not a libertarian, and supported inheritance tax, restrictions on monopoly power, pensions, and health insurance.

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Bentham was born in Spitalfields, London, into a wealthy Tory family. He was a child prodigy and was found as a toddler sitting at his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England. He began his study of Latin at the age of three.

He went to Westminster School, and in 1760 his father sent him to Queen's College, Oxford, where he took his Bachelor's degree in 1763 and his Master's degree in 1766. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1769. He became deeply frustrated with the complexity of the English legal code, which he termed the "Demon of Chicane".

Among his many proposals for legal and social reform was a design for a prison building he called the Panopticon. Although it was never built, the idea had an important influence in later generations of thinkers and influenced the radial design of Pentonville Prison as well as several other prisons. The Panopticon also inspired French philosopher Michel Foucault's work on the role of prisons and metaphorical social prisons in where Foucault directly refers to Bentham's ingenious prison design and how it applies to various forms of societal controls.

Bentham was in correspondence with many influental people. E.g., Adam Smith had opposed free interest rates before Bentham's arguments convinced him on the subject. Due to his correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution, he was declared an honorary citizen of France, but then he strongly criticized the violence that had already arisen when the jacobins took power (1792).

In 1823, he co-founded the

Bentham is frequently associated with the foundation of the University of London, specifically University College London, though in fact he was 80 years old when the university opened in 1828, and had no part in its establishment. However, he strongly believed that education should be more widely available, particularly to those who were not wealthy or who did not belong to the established church, both of which were required of students by Oxford and Cambridge. As University College London was the first English university to admit all, regardless of race, creed, or political belief, it was largely consistent with Bentham's vision, and he oversaw the appointment of one of his pupils, John Austin, as the first Professor of Jurisprudence in 1829.

As requested in his will, his was preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet, termed his "Auto-Icon," at University College London. It has occasionally been brought out of storage at official functions so that his eccentric presence can live on.

The Auto-Icon has always had a wax head, as Bentham's head was badly damaged in the preservation process. The real head was displayed in the same case for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks including being stolen on more than one occasion. It is now locked away securely.

There is a plaque on Queen Anne's Gate, Westminster commemorating the house where Bentham lived, which at the time was called Queen's Square Place.

a defense of pederasty, remained unpublished during his lifetime for fear of offending public morality. It was finally published in for the first time in 1978 (summer and fall issues of Journal of Homosexuality).

John Bowring, a British politician who had been Bentham's trusted friend, was appointed his literary executor and charged with the task of preparing a collected edition of his works. This appeared in 11 volumes in 1843.

Bentham is the first and perhaps the greatest of the "philosophical radicals" — not only did he propose many legal and social reforms, but he also devised moral principles on which they should be based. This philosophy, utilitarianism, argued that the right act or policy was that which would cause "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" — a phrase of which he is generally, though erroneously, regarded as the author — though he later dropped the second qualification and embraced what he called "the greatest happiness principle." Bentham also suggested a procedure to mechanically estimate the moral status of any action, which he called the Hedonic or felicific calculus. Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's student, John Stuart Mill. In Mill's hands, "Benthamism" became a major element in the liberal conception of state policy objectives.

It is often said that Bentham's theory, unlike Mill's, faces the problem of lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice. Thus, some critics object, it would be moral, for example, to torture one person if this would produce an amount of happiness in other people outweighing the unhappiness of the tortured individual. (Compare "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas".) However, as P. J. Kelly argued in his book , Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such consequences. According to Kelly, for Bentham the law "provides the basic framework of social interaction by delimiting spheres of personal inviolability within which individuals can form and pursue their own conceptions of well-being." (, p. 81) They provide security, a precondition for the formation of expectations. As the hedonic calculus shows "expectation utilities" to be much higher than natural ones, it follows that Bentham does not favour the sacrifice of a few to the benefit of the many.