Monday, March 9, 2009

Jeremy Bentham

I'm sure we can find other sources that have brought this up, but Jeremy Bentham was a philosopher who lived 1748-1832. He was a believer in Utilitarianism.

"Utilitarianism is the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility"

aka "the ends justify the means"

This is more for trivia than anything else. I'm reading Richard Dawkins and he mentioned Jeremy Bentham.

It's interesting how they choose the names for these folks. The fact that there is a Lost: Philosophy book in paperback at your local bookstore is probably evidence enough for that.

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham

2 comments:

  1. Richard Alpert was an actual person too, a lot of similarities between him and organizations he worked with paralleling Darhma and Hanso foundation, it's interesting.

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  2. Yeah, well the majority of characters are named after someone famous...

    Locke
    Rosseau
    Faraday
    (Desmond) Hume
    Hawking

    and others of course.

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