Open AccessBentham's Utilitarian Critique of the Death Penalty
Author(s) -
Hugo Adam Bedau
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
the journal of criminal law and criminology (1973-)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 2160-0325
pISSN - 0091-4169
DOI - 10.2307/1143143
Subject(s) - psychology
During a long and productive life, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) twice undertook to apply his general utilitarian principles of punishment to a critique of the death penalty.' The earlier and by far the more thorough effort was in 1775, when at the age of twenty-seven he provided an extensive discussion of capital punishment in two chapters of Book II of his Rationale ofPunishment.2 This 1775 essay (as I shall henceforth refer to these chapters) contains about eight thousand words and is
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