Those who have studied philosophy and the history of science know Bentham chiefly as the founder of the scientific school of Benthamism, or as the author of the ethics of utilitarianism

Bentham wished to bring order to the laws of England, argued for the equality of women and men, and called for the repeal of the laws against homosexuality.

According to Bentham, Western man lives within the bounds of utilitarian ethics. Asking himself "what is utility?", he explained that a person strives to maximise pleasure and minimise suffering. This is what is called the principle of utility. But Bentham did not stop there, turning his attention to the subject of moral arithmetic. Can a person calculate the quantity of pleasure and the quantity of suffering? Undoubtedly he can, and he can likewise reach a rational decision on the basis of that calculation.

Bentham's humane views assumed, for instance, that a criminal is not a bad person, but simply one who has miscalculated. Thus, according to Benthamism, such a person can be reformed. In fact, for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this was a revolutionary thought, and in some respects it remains so to this day.

Bentham's moral arithmetic literally involves calculation. Before taking a given decision, a person must draw up a table, writing all its advantages in one column and its disadvantages in the second. Each item must be assigned a numerical value. Natalya Ivanovna Kuznetsova explains this with the example of the problem of buying beer in Moscow in the 1970s, which took into account not only the pleasure of a mug in good company, but also the necessity of travelling to the other end of the city, where the best beer was on tap.

Benthamism was the hit of its day, and Bentham won international recognition. Darwin, for example, drew up a calculation on the scheme of moral arithmetic on the question of his own marriage. And his archive preserves an amusing paper in which he sets out the advantages of having a wife, such as tasty cooking and domestic comfort, and the disadvantages, such as the necessity of befriending a mother-in-law and putting up with a woman in his house.