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Founder of utilitarianism, greatest happiness principle
Bentham held that pleasure and pain are the only real guides to right and wrong, and that an action's morality should be calculated by the total pleasure or pain it produces for everyone affected — the "greatest happiness of the greatest number". This founding version of utilitarianism treated all pleasures as equal and measurable, reducing ethics to a kind of arithmetic.
English jurist and social reformer who campaigned for prison reform, animal welfare and the decriminalization of homosexuality long before these were mainstream causes.