Audiobook · read by volunteers
Offences Against One's Self: Paederasty
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
Read by Carl Manchester, Leon Mire, ML Cohen, BoltOfTash, Cori Samuel · 6 chapters · 1 h 48
About the book
Jeremy Bentham was a thinker who liked to ask what a law was actually for, and to answer by counting the harm it prevented against the harm it caused. In this essay on offences against one’s self, written in the eighteenth century, he applies that test to the laws against homosexual acts, a subject on which the law and public opinion of his day were severe. His method is rational and his tone is dry and analytical. He examines the arguments commonly made for punishing certain private acts and weighs them one by one, concluding that they do not hold up. The text is short, argumentative and historically important as an early example of utilitarian reasoning on questions of morality and the law. Six recordings, about an hour and three quarters.
Introduction
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English jurist, philosopher and reformer. He is best known as an early advocate of utilitarianism, the view that actions and laws should be judged by their consequences for human happiness, and he was also a leading theorist of the philosophy of law. His thought had a wide influence on the development of liberal ideas in the English-speaking world.
The essay recorded here dates from about 1785. It argues against the laws of Bentham’s time that punished homosexual acts, and it subjects the reasons for punishing them to a cool and systematic analysis; Bentham kept it unpublished, fearing to offend public morality, and it was not printed until 1931. Whatever one’s own opinion, the text is of historical interest because it shows how a thinker of the Enlightenment applied the principle of utility to a sensitive topic and how far his conclusions stood from the common view of his age.
Listeners should expect a work of argument rather than of narrative. The reasoning proceeds in stages, and it is helpful to pay attention to the way Bentham defines his terms and anticipates objections. The language is that of the late eighteenth century, with long sentences, but it is orderly.
The recording is in six parts and lasts nearly two hours. It was read by LibriVox volunteers. It will interest students of philosophy, of legal history, and of the history of ideas about liberty and morality. The text is a useful reminder that arguments about law and morality have a long history, and that the way an issue is reasoned can be as revealing as the conclusion reached.
Public domain
Jeremy Bentham died in 1832: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text