One of the main tasks that Bentham set himself in the last two decades of his life was to unmask the forms of exploitation that were being concealed by 'artifice' and 'delusion', and to spike the ideological guns of the élite by exposing the fallacious arguments and tricks of language that it commonly employed. One such trick criticized in the Book of Fallacies was the practice of instilling an automatic respect for certain categories of people in authority, irrespective of their behaviour, by saying that respect was owed to some impressive abstraction such as 'the Law' (instead of lawyers) or 'the Church' (instead of churchmen). Another was the tendency to appeal to 'the wisdom of old times' as if it was analogous to the wisdom of old people: in fact, said Bentham, 'old times' had less experience to draw on than later periods and ought in this sense to be called 'young times'. . . .
It should be added that Bentham himself was liable to be accused—as he was by the young F. D. Maurice and by the logician (and later archbishop) Richard Whately—of using modes of argument which he branded as fallacious when used on the other side. In his sweeping and caustic condemnations of whole classes of people as irredeemably committed to the protection of abuses, he could be seen as using the kind of vituperative and 'passion-kindling' expressions which he had warned his readers to distrust. He did in fact anticipate this charge. In one of the last chapters of his Book of Fallacies . . . he suggested that the opponents of a pernicious policy might sometimes be driven to employ counter-fallacies against fallacies, and might defend this course on the grounds that it was the 'weakness of the public mind', rather than the weakness of their own cause, that compelled them to use such weapons as supplements to points of real substance. Whatever the merits of this argument (and it seems a dangerous one), there were certainly friends of his, such as the moderate reformer Sir Samuel Romilly, who felt that his own stridency in his later years detracted from the contribution he was making to the cause of reform.
(John Dinwiddy, Bentham, Past Masters, ed. Keith Thomas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 88-9 [italics in original; ellipses added])
Note from KBJ: Bentham was a progressive. As such, he viewed any sort of conservatism as anathema. He refused to believe that there could be wisdom in established ways of doing things, including the common law. He thought that his own wisdom exceeded the accumulated wisdom of many generations. So confirmed was this belief that when people defended established ways of doing things, or even argued that there should be a (weak) presumption in favor of established ways of doing things, Bentham saw only "artifice" and "delusion." Lawyers and churchmen, he believed, were out to thwart the goal of promoting the greatest happiness. Their aim was sinister: to promote their own interests, while seeming to promote the interests of all.
There are anticipations of Marx and Freud in Bentham. All three committed a blatant fallacy: mistaking causes for reasons. (Contemporary philosophers call this a "howler.") Instead of taking people at their word, they questioned people's motives. Instead of asking whether there are grounds for what was asserted, they inquired into the motives for asserting it. Instead of asking whether a given argument is sound, they asked why it was made (and often "discovered" a sinister motive behind it). Instead of evaluating beliefs on their merits, they asked why and how the beliefs were formed; and if they came to the conclusion that the beliefs originated in suspicious ways, they dismissed the beliefs. (This is known as the genetic fallacy.) The main difference between philosophy and science is that philosophy is concerned with the grounds of belief, whereas science is concerned with the causes and consequences of belief. Bentham, Marx, and Freud were not philosophers. They were, at best, scientists. I would argue that they were bad scientists, for their hypotheses (some of which make reference to unconscious or subconscious mental states, or to nebulous constructs such as "false consciousness") are untestable. Testability is the hallmark of science.
