ABSTRACT
This introduction aims to outline a theoretical path from the contemporary debates on normativity to Bentham’s treatment of ethics and – particularly – of its constitutive idea of obligation. Normativity consists in the prerogative of practical notions, such as norms and values, to make a guidance claim on human conduct in order to influence and direct it. The current understanding of the notion of normativity has its natural and distinctive point of departure in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British moral philosophy, which is characterized by a crucial turn in conceiving the idea of obligation. It begins to be related to the idea of the autonomy of the moral agent, since it is seen as springing from the agent’s judgment on what to do. Bentham is certainly one of the prominent figures in this process of the rethinking of moral entities: one of his major contributions lies in conception of obligation as a fictitious construction of the human mind based on sensory experience and in applying this idea to the legal field. Nonetheless, Bentham’s original contribution to the normative question has largely been overlooked and is sometimes minimized.
