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Bart Schultz , The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2017), pp. 456.
Book Review
Any serious practical philosopher will probably ask the following three questions during his or her lifetime: 'Is my argument consistent and cogent?'; 'How is my theory applicable to the actual issues in this world?'; and 'Will my theory continue to be, in whole or in part, deemed valid even after my death?'. Bart Schultz's The Happiness Philosophers vibrantly depicts the acts, lives, thoughts, passions and even frailties of four such serious thinkers -- William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, the great classical utilitarians in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. No one but Schultz could so meticulously elaborate on the four great thinkers' writings and lives in remarkable detail in a single book. In fact, this is part of the reason why the present review had to be written by three researchers, Kodama (whose specialism includes the study of Godwin and Bentham), Suzuki (J. S. Mill), and Nakano-Okuno (Sidgwick), who used to constitute the Kyoto utilitarian school in Japan.
Readers of this book will be overwhelmed by the amount of information that Schultz presents. It is rich in citations from diverse sources, including the four thinkers' major writings, journals, correspondences, their friends' or family members' writings, and commentaries by recent researchers. Because some of these quotations are one to two pages long, readers may possibly find it a little difficult to follow the flow of Schultz's original analyses. Through Schultz's complex yet candid portrayals, however, the four thinkers come to life dramatically.
Godwin was one of the first truly secular utilitarians to adopt the greatest happiness principle for emancipating individuals from regulatory burdens largely imposed by governing bodies and conventions, even though an idealistic feature of his utilitarian philosophy may have made him rather vulnerable to his own financial predicaments later in life. Bentham lived the life of a penetrating thinker with extraordinary foresight, who arduously investigated the basic principles of criminal justice, poor relief and education by appealing to 'the social bases of self-respect' (p. 93). He also unhesitatingly criticized religious superstitions as well as colonialism and racism and envisioned a future of extraordinarily liberal sexual morality....