Bentham on Private Ethics: Delusion and Deontology

Abstract

It is well known that Bentham outlined his theory of private ethics in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation（1789）and developed it in a more detailed way in a later work titled Deontology. However, both questions -----ʻWhy did he address the problem of private ethics again in the early 1810s?ʼ and ʻWhat brought about some conspicuous differences between the moral theory expounded in An Introduction and that expounded in Deontology?ʼ -----have so far received insufficient attention. This paper is an attempt to answer these questions by clarifying the impact of Benthamʼs discovery of ʻsinister interestʼ and ʻdelusionʼ on his theory of private ethics. It concludes that both Deontology and A Table of the Springs of Action are the works in which his developed theory of private ethics are embodied.