# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/jeremy-bentham
# Generated: 2026-08-31T17:37:14.139Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/jeremy-bentham"
name: "Jeremy Bentham"
slug: "jeremy-bentham"
description: "He built a moral calculus where right and wrong collapse to a single measure: the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That cold axiom — utilitarianism — rewired Anglo-American law and still governs how we argue about policy, punishment, and what governments owe their citizens."
tagline: "British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer (1748–1832)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Jeremy_Bentham_by_Henry_William_Pickersgill_detail.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
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  isoCode: "GB"
category:
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  slug: "academics"
profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1748-02-15"
deathDate: "1832-06-06"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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  momentum:             0
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  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "FALLING"
ranks:
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  category: 236
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born in 1748, Bentham trained as a jurist but spent his life demolishing the scaffolding of English law — dismissing natural rights as "nonsense upon stilts" while campaigning for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment, and physical punishment of children, and arguing (in secret) for decriminalizing homosexuality. His 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation laid the foundation for modern utilitarianism and made him a leading theorist in legal philosophy and a quiet architect of welfarism. His students included James Mill and the latter's son John Stuart Mill, and his ideas shaped reforms to prisons, schools, poor laws, and Parliament itself. When he died in 1832 he left instructions for his body to be dissected and preserved as an "auto-icon" — a self-image in place of a statue — and it still sits on display at University College London, where the philosopher who rejected fictions became one himself.