 Bentham wanted to abandon what he considered to be a nonsensical mythology of natural rights and duties—that is, moral rights and duties that people have regardless of whether anyone is prepared to enforce them. He wanted, instead, to explain the nature of law by reference to ‘sensible’ phenomena (Bentham 1782, 251–2, 283n.). Linguistic acts struck him as respectably empirical phenomena, and he made them an essential element of his theory of law. He based his  ‘legal positivism’  on his claims about the meaning and use of words.