Jeremy Bentham

Bentham argued that laws and actions should be judged by how much pleasure or pain they produce for the people affected. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in 1789, he treated utility as a guide for legal and moral reform.

Bentham is usually treated as the founder of classical utilitarianism because he gave it a systematic form before Mill. Mill later revised utilitarianism in his 1861 essay by emphasizing differences in the quality of pleasures.

The panopticon was Bentham's proposed prison design in which inmates could be watched from a central point without knowing exactly when they were being observed. Michel Foucault later made the design famous in Discipline and Punish as a model for modern surveillance and discipline.

Bentham requested that his body be preserved as an auto-icon after his death in 1832. UCL displays the clothed skeleton with a wax head, while the original preserved head has usually been kept separately because of its condition.