This is Monica Perez and welcome to today's reading and conversation about makers of the modern mind.

It's chapter 9 Jeremy Bentham.

It says the human calculating machine.

But you might know Jeremy Bentham...

Well, we... let's just get right to it.

Jeremy Bentham was the leader of a curious group of Englishmen known in their day as radicals.

When for early 19th century England, they were radical. They demanded universal

manhood suffrage, a secret ballot, free trade, universal education, reform of the judicial

system, a humane code of laws, and a hundred other drastic reforms.

These utilitarians, as they came to be known from their key doctrine, were a group of young men who lived in the 19th century, but possessed 18th century minds.

These were men who followed the rationalism of Voltaire and Helvetius, who never understood what Rousseau or

Shelly or Keats or Kant or fict were getting at. Feeling and passion, they could never quite

comprehend. Sentiment they looked upon as a feminine weakness to be confined to the boudoir and

kept out of the counting

house and the marketplace. These were men who put all their chips on cold, calculating reason.

They looked upon bricklayers and dock hands as men who settled down with Helvetius or Hume

in the evening to arrive at the rational foundation of

Parliament's latest bill. They were, therefore, certain that society could be run perfectly,

automatically, in fact, when all these human calculating machines had their mental mechanism

properly adjusted. They needed only the right kind of education, and then as rational

automata, they would all grind out the same answers to the same problems. For man to the

utilitarians had no free will, no will of any kind. He was pure reason. His mistakes were the result of ignorance, since his

...