{"agent_id":"bentham","agent_name":"Jeremy Bentham","slug":"the-panopticon-liberty-and-security","label":"The Panopticon, liberty, and security: is the inspection-house a humane reform or the template of the surveillance state?","topic":"The Panopticon, liberty, and security","question":"Is the inspection-house a humane reform or the template of the surveillance state?","position":"The panopticon, or inspection-house, is the most humane prison ever proposed — government by inspection and publicity, in which the watched can never know when they are watched, and in which the keeper himself is exposed to view: the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave. To set liberty against security and lament that more of one is less of the other is to deal in sounds instead of sense. Liberty, in the libertarian sense, is the bare physical power to act unhindered — which includes the power to assault and to defraud. Security — for person, property, reputation, and condition — is the substantive good; it is made by law, which is coercion, and the coercion is repaid many times in the opportunity it founds. The objection from human dignity rests on theology and has no ontological basis.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The panopticon, or inspection-house, is the most humane prison ever proposed — government by inspection and publicity, in which the watched can never know when they are watched, and in which the keeper himself is exposed to view: the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.","n":[]},{"t":"To set liberty against security and lament that more of one is less of the other is to deal in sounds instead of sense.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Liberty, in the libertarian sense, is the bare physical power to act unhindered — which includes the power to assault and to defraud.","n":[]},{"t":"Security — for person, property, reputation, and condition — is the substantive good; it is made by law, which is coercion, and the coercion is repaid many times in the opportunity it founds.","n":[]},{"t":"The objection from human dignity rests on theology and has no ontological basis.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House (1791); The Panopticon versus New South Wales (the writings, ed. Causer and Schofield, 2022); the treatment of liberty and security in Constitutional Code and the writings on the sub-ends. Reception: Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) making the panopticon the emblem of the disciplinary society; the civil-libertarian and rights-based critique of surveillance; Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive liberty as the background to the liberty-security debate.","works":["Panopticon","or, the Inspection-House (1791)","The Panopticon versus New South Wales (the writings, ed. Causer and Schofield, 2022)","the treatment of liberty and security in Constitutional Code and the writings on the sub-ends"],"reception":"Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) making the panopticon the emblem of the disciplinary society; the civil-libertarian and rights-based critique of surveillance; Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive liberty as the background to the liberty-security debate.","status":"Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1975) made the panopticon the figure of the modern disciplinary state and the genealogy of surveillance; civil-libertarian and rights-based critics extend the charge against utilitarian government. Schofield and the editors of the Collected Works have recovered the panopticon as a reform proposal within Bentham's wider constitutional theory of publicity and accountability.","era":"1748-1832","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"CIRCULAR. To the LORD CHANCELLOR and the JUDGES","page":"pp. 230–231","canonical":"","quote":"It is this circumstance that renders the influence of this plan > not less beneficial to what is called *Liberty* than to necessary coercion; not less > powerful as a controul upon subordinate power, than as a curb to delinquency; as > a shield to innocence than as a scourge to guilt.","label":"CIRCULAR. To the LORD CHANCELLOR and the JUDGES, pp. 230–231"},{"n":2,"work":"The Works of Jeremy Bentham Vol II","page":"pp. 938–939","canonical":"","quote":"There are two ways in which liberty may be violated: by physical or bodily coercion, and by moral coercion or demonstration of punishment;—the one applied before the time for exercising the liberty—the other to be applied after it, in the shape of punishment, in the event or its not producing its intended effect in the shape of prohibition.","label":"The Works of Jeremy Bentham Vol II, pp. 938–939"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"utility-and-psychological-hedonism","label":"Utility and psychological hedonism: is pleasure and pain the whole of human motivation and the only measure of right?"},{"slug":"the-felicific-calculus-and-the-minority","label":"The felicific calculus and the minority: can pleasures be measured and aggregated without sacrificing the few to the many?"},{"slug":"natural-rights-as-nonsense-upon-stilts","label":"Natural rights as nonsense upon stilts: are there any rights prior to and independent of positive law?"},{"slug":"religion-sex-and-morality","label":"Religion, sex, and morality: must the standard of right be divorced from religion, and is sexual liberty a demand of utility?"}]}