E. M. S. Anno II n. 3 Settembre-Dicembre 2010 Ricerche/Articles

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2. The uses of emulation: Bentham’s early reflections on punishment and reward

Bentham deals with emulation in his early writings on reward. The origins of his reflection on this subject can be traced back to different sets of manuscripts written between 1775 and 1787, later edited by Etienne Dumont and published as the second part of Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811). The first English edition of the Rationale of Reward, edited by Richard Smith, was published only in 1825. This date is significant, since at that time Bentham was working to Constitutional Code. In chapter IX of this work, Bentham examines the functioning of the state bureaucracy, and his early reflections on reward re-emerge as arguments employed to solve the problem of maximising the ‘aptitude’ of civil servants and minimising the ‘expense’ of taxpayers.

Many changes had intervened in Bentham’s thought since the time of his early manuscripts on reward. The enthusiastic admirer of enlightened monarchs had become a staunch supporter of representative democracy based on ‘virtually universal’ suffrage. The ‘Remarks by Mr. Bentham’ prefaced to Rationale of Reward reveal Bentham’s uneasiness with the hierarchical and anti-egalitarian arguments developed in his earlier texts. Addressing the editor, Bentham states:

As to Catherine and her ranks, they rank not quite so high with me now as then. Pensions of retreat would be invited to make their retreat from your pages, were it not for my respect for editors and readers. In my own work [i.e. Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized] may be seen a picture of them, painted in those colours which now appear to me the proper ones (Bentham 1825: 191).
These remarks apply to a passage of Bentham’s early work on reward that is strictly connected to the use of emulation as an instrument of public management. In book I, chapter 2 of Rationale, Bentham examines the ‘sources’ of reward. One of them is ‘honour’, a modification of pleasure generated by the ‘popular or moral sanction’, one of the basic ‘sources of motivation’ in Bentham’s moral philosophy (Bentham 1789: ch. 3). Here Bentham praises Catherine II for extending to the civil service the ‘scale of honours’ formerly reserved to the army:
A graduated scale of ranks, especially when its gradations are determined by merit, and depend upon actual service, is an excellent institution. It creates a new source of happiness, by means of a tax upon honour, almost imperceptible by those by whom it is paid: it augments the sum of human enjoyment; it increases the power of government by clothing its authority with benignity; it opens new sources for the exercise of hope, the most precious of all possessions; and it nourishes emulation, the most powerful of all incentives to virtuous action (Bentham 1825: 194).
The fundamental question of Bentham’s theory of reward could be summarized as follows: in managing an organisation, what are the best incentives to maximise the agents’ labour at minimum cost? Bentham’s answer to this question is grounded on his theory of motives, presented in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789: ch. X). Individuals act in every circumstance with a view to maximising pleasure and minimising pain, under the constraints provided by external circumstances and by the choices of other individuals. A motive to action is the expectation of some future pleasure (ibid.: 98-9), and this expectation is in itself pleasurable, since it includes a ‘pleasure of expectation’ (ibid.: p. 45)^².

It is the intensity of the ‘pleasure of hope’ that justifies the employment of emulation, defined as competition among many individuals for a scarce number of honorary rewards – a competition equalled to a ‘lottery’:

At a comparatively small expense, a large mass of expectation is created, and prizes are offered which every man may flatter himself with the hope of obtaining. And what are all the other sources of enjoyment, when put in competition with hope?^³ [...] To the individual himself, active is more conducive to his happiness than idle hope: the one develops his talents, the other renders them obtuse; the first is naturally allied to virtue, the second to vice (ibid.: 201-2).
Nourished by hope, emulation stimulates human industry, minimising organisation costs. As in Empress Catherine’s ‘scale of ranks’, its ‘prizes’ basically consist of appointments to offices of higher rank. Bentham takes into account, among the social costs of emulation, the ‘pain of disappointment’ generated in the mass of competitors when a reward is attributed to one of them. However he concludes that the balance of happiness is still on the positive side:
If there be the pain of disappointment after trial, there has been the pleasure of expectation before trial; and the latter, there is reason to believe, is upon an average much greater than the former. The pleasure is of longer continuance; it fills a larger space in the mind: and the larger, the longer it continues. The pain of disappointment comes on in a moment, and gives place to the first dawning of a new hope, or is driven out by other cares. If it be true, that the principal part of happiness consists in hope, and that but few of our hopes are completely realized, it would be necessary, that men might be saved from disappointment, to shut them out from joy (Bentham 1825: 226-7).
However the expectation of future advantages is not sufficient to generate effort. A ‘participation constraint’ is also necessary, which is provided by the ‘fear’ of being unsuccessful^⁴. In the last resort, then, the mobile of emulation depends on the level of competition: incentives must be sufficiently attractive and numerous to excite hope; but the number of competitors must be sufficiently large to oblige participants to work hard if they want to have a chance to get the prize (ibid.: 226). Bentham adds that emulation is possible only when there are no entry barriers for potential competitors, i.e. when the market for emulation is contestable. This is guaranteed by freedom of participation and formal equality among competitors. Under the Hindu system of castes, by contrast, ‘emulation is [...] reduced within the narrowest bounds, and the energies of people are stifled’ (ibid.: 227).

Emulation is useful especially for those actions that require ‘a given degree of excellence’ (ibid.: 226), for which punishment would not be a sufficient incentive.

It is the property of hope, one of the modifications of joy, to put a man, as the phrase is, into spirits; that is, to increase the rapidity with which the ideas he is conversant about succeed each other, and thus to strengthen his powers of combination and invention, by presenting to him a greater variety of objects. The stronger the hope, so that it have not the effect of drawing the thoughts out of the proper channel, the more rapid the succession of ideas; the more extensive and varied the trains formed by the principle of association, the better fed, as it were, and more vigorous, will be the powers of invention. In this state, the attention is more steady, the imagination more alert, and the individual, elevated by his success, beholds the career of invention displayed before him, and discovers within himself resources of which he had hitherto been ignorant.

On the one hand, let fear be the only motive that prompts a man to exert himself, he will exert himself just so much as he thinks necessary to exempt him from that fear, and no more: but let hope be the motive, he will exert himself to the utmost (Bentham 1825: 205).

In most cases, however, reward must be combined with punishment. In the management of labour, for example, the positive effect of hope must be strengthened by the fear of being dismissed or fined if minimum conditions are not respected or if damages are caused (ibid.: 207-8).

In Catherine the Great’s ‘scale of ranks’ the goal of emulation was honour and status. However emulation or ‘competition for rewards’ could indifferently be aimed at any ‘modification’ of the ‘matter of reward’: ‘1. The matter of wealth; 2. Honour; 3. Power; 4. Exemptions’ (ibid.: 194). A case of emulation for pecuniary rewards is for example piece-work:

Hope, and perhaps emulation, are the motives which actuate the labourer by the piece: the motive which actuates the labourer by the day is fear – fear of being discharged in case of manifest and extraordinary idleness (ibid.: 214).
An application of this analysis can be found in A View of the Hard Labour Bill (1778), Bentham’s earliest exploration in the topic of prison management. Bentham (1778: 3) relates in the preface to this pamphlet that at that time he ‘was employed in finishing a work of some bulk, in which [he treated] the subject of punishment more at large’. But he was also working to a manuscripts on reward^⁵, and A View clearly reflects his ideas of this subject (Guidi 2004).

Bentham agreed with one of the clauses of the bill, which stipulated that convicts should be divided into different classes. Higher classes roughly implied greater proximity to the time of liberation, determined by both the duration of detention and the degree in which the convicts revealed the signs of their reformation. Prisoners could ascend from one class to an higher one for special merits. This contrivance was therefore not dissimilar from Catherine’s ‘scale of ranks’: Bentham concluded that such a system ‘seems extremely well contrived for exciting emulation; for making a standing and palpable distinction betwixt good and ill behaviour, and for keeping their hopes and fears continually awake’ (ibid.: 27).

Another interesting application of the principle of emulation concerned the recruitment of the board of ‘visitors’ who supervised the management of prisons. The bill specified that no visitor could be in office for more than two consecutive years, but could be re-elected after an interval of one year. According to Bentham, this rule was well contrived because it stimulated emulation:
If the same two visitors were to be continued for life, the degree of discipline kept up in the house might come to depend more upon the notions and temper of those two persons, than upon settled rules. Having no emulation to animate them, they might grow torpid and indifferent: they might contract too close an intimacy with the governor and other officers, so as to be disposed to connive at their negligence or peculation: they might make what is called a job of their office, looking upon the emoluments of it as an establishment for life (ibid.: 25).
It is clear from these examples that emulation is crucial in social relationships of the principal-agent type, in which the agent has many opportunities to conceal information on skills and efficiency. The connection between information asymmetries and emulation is evident in Rationale of Reward. The following passage is probably the most telling:
[An] advantage which reward has over punishment [...] is, that by means of the former, the value of the service may be brought to an indefinitely high degree of perfection. But this can only be effected by means of a free competition [...]. Were the reward proposed to one only, having rendered the degree of service sufficient to entitle him to the reward, he would stop there: to make the exertions necessary to carry it to any higher degree of perfection, would be to trouble himself to no purpose. But let a reward be offered to that one of two competitors, for example, who best performs the service: unless either of them knows exactly the degree of skill possessed by the other, and know it to be clearly inferior to his own, each will exert himself to its utmost, since the more perfect he makes his work, the better chance he has of gaining the reward (Bentham 1825: 226).
According to Bentham, this is an example of ‘union of interest with duty’ (ibid.: 199-200), in which the principal exploits the incomplete information among agents to reduce the unfavourable consequences of information asymmetry between agents and herself.

More in general, Bentham’s analysis in Rationale of Reward focusses on the problem of how to stimulate those agents’ actions that are in the interest of the principal but entail ‘imperfect obligations’ that cannot be enforced by punishment. While principals can oblige their agents not to harm or destroy their property, they cannot compel them to maximise their skills and efforts. Reward is the appropriate instrument to encourage people to perform these actions, and emulation is the mechanism that maximises their outcomes^⁶^.

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