Jeremy Bentham was born in London in 1748 and trained as a lawyer, then dedicated his life to systematizing ethics. His central principle: the right action is whichever produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. He called this the utility principle. His followers founded the philosophical school we now call utilitarianism — still one of the dominant ethical frameworks in policy, economics, and bioethics.

Bentham was, in his time, an intellectual radical. He argued for the abolition of slavery. He argued for women's suffrage. He argued for the decriminalization of homosexuality. He proposed a model prison — the Panopticon — designed for total surveillance, an idea Foucault would later turn into a metaphor for the modern state. He wrote with such ferocious productivity that 80,000 of his manuscript pages still exist, and University College London is still transcribing them two centuries later.

When he died in 1832, his will included an unusual request. His body was to be dissected by his friends as a public anatomy lesson — a demonstration that medical research need not be macabre. Then his skeleton was to be reassembled, dressed in his clothes, padded with hay, and placed on display at University College London.

The full body — minus a real head, replaced by a wax replica after the original mummified poorly — has sat in a glass case at UCL for nearly 200 years. The Auto-Icon, as he called it, was wheeled into a college board meeting in 2013, and recorded as 'present, not voting.' It remains one of the strangest tributes to systematic philosophy in the world.

The principle of greatest happiness, embodied — literally.