Bentham and the Ethics of Today by David Baumgardt (review)

406 BOOK REVIEWS Messiah and the Messianic age which is heaven on earth as well as throughout the entire book, Herberg cannot be said to represent the common Jewish view on these topics. In the fourth and final section on the "Mystery of Israel" Jewish faith is presented as redemptive history. The author, again following Franz Rosenzweig, explains his relativistic view of Revelation, and treats the Torah as Teaching and law. The influence of Christian ideas is evident in his ,view of the nature and destiny of Israel as a supernatural community constituted by the divine Covenant as the operative instrumentality of redemption. Thus he foresees the loss of Jewish identity when its vocation is completed. As Rosenzweig, he admits a divine mission for Christianity, which is appointed with Judaism to work out the salvation of mankind. Herberg's book contains ample bibliography which reveals, as do other sources such as Runes' Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization, a considerable contemporary Jewish literature. Herberg himself writes with clarity, a certain objectivity, sincerity and a persuasive reasonableness. He has a marked tendency for systematic thought which, together with his honesty and fortrightness, giv:es a foundation for our hope that he will discover and resolve the inconsistencies of his philosophic and religious position. St; Joseph's Abbey Spencer, Mass. Fr. M. RAPHAEL SIMoN, 0. C. S. 0. Bentham and the Ethics of Today. By DAVID BAUMGARDT. Princeton University Press, 195fl. Pp. 584 with index. $9.00. " I have tried to make fruitful the consistent ethical position of Jeremy Bentham and to comment in detail on the importance (of his writings) for contemporary systematic ethics." In this manner does David Baumgardt announce his intention in this scholarly attempt to re-evaluate and repopularize the work of Bentham. As to the fact that Bentham is an identifiable progenitor of modern ethics there can really be no doubt, and the thesis of Professor Baumgardt is therefore entirely tenable and of considerable importance, to philosophy, to history and to jurisprudence. But that his influence has been a happy and a healthy one we ought seriously to question. Indeed it is ironic that the very success of the Baumgardt position will inevitably lead a defender of traditional philosophy to a more determined opposition to Benthamite ethics and jurisprudence. For the author has done more than to prove his case. He has laid bare the soul of modern ethics, repeating over and over again, sometimes in his BOOK REVIEWS 407 own words, sometimes in the words of Bentham himself, the postulates, the dicta, the unchallenged first principles and the clear-cut animosities of contemporary ethical thought. We find already present in the works of the eighteenth-century Bentham, as those works are meticulously weighed and edited and annotated by Professor Baumgardt, all the major insights of modem thought: the cult of the practical, a militant opposition to speculation and to speculative principles , the confounding of the practical with the speculative, a tendency to judge the higher order by the lower, the identification of law and morals together with a proportionate exaltation of human positive law, a continued insistence upon the parallel between ethics and natural science and as a corollary to this the apotheosis of experimental knowledge and the scientific method, a prevailing mathematicism, a materialistic concept of the common good, and finally an affirmation of the absolute universality of the critical or censorial method. Bentham and his disciples, in private non-ecumenical session, have issued all the anathemas of a positivist culture : first, a crushing repudiation of tradition and authority, especially the authority of conventional terminology, then a long list of specific maledictions against the natural law and the law of nations, against right reason and the natural rights of man, against divine law and theology and the theonomic foundation of morals, against Aristotle, against poetry, against the common law, against dogmatic moralists and all the works and pomps of their " essentialist " morals, such as the principle of asceticism, common sense, moral sense, natural justice, good order, conscientiousness, etc. Alone in the midst of the ruins of this destructive, anarchic system stands " the principle of utility," "the happiness principle," "the greatest good for the greatest number "-a...