The Question Bentham Left Behind

Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and founder of utilitarianism, died on 6 June 1832 at his home in Queen Square Place, Westminster, London, at the age of 84. Decades earlier, in his 1789 book "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation," he had argued that the capacity to suffer, not the capacity to reason or speak, was what should decide who counts morally. He asked for his own body to be preserved and dressed, seated in a chair, as an "auto-icon" after death, and that preserved figure still sits on public display at University College London. The line about suffering outlasted the century it was written in and became one of the founding arguments of the modern animal rights movement.