Early modern Europe · 1789 – today
Utilitarianism
The right action is the one that produces the greatest total happiness, with everyone’s happiness counting equally.
What makes an action or a law right?
Late eighteenth-century Britain had a chaotic legal system full of savage punishments defended by custom and tradition. Bentham, a legal reformer who had read Hume, Helvétius and Beccaria, wanted a single rational test by which every law and institution could be judged.
Pleasure and pain are what we all, in the end, care about, so the sensible measure of a law or act is its effect on happiness. Since no one’s happiness matters more than anyone else’s, we should add up the consequences for all affected and choose the greatest net good. Mill refined this, holding that some pleasures are higher than others and that liberty itself serves the general good.
- Only consequences matter in judging actions and laws.
- Each to count for one, and none for more than one.
- Any being that can suffer deserves moral consideration.
It drove reforms of law, prisons, voting and welfare, underlies cost–benefit reasoning in economics and policy, and through Peter Singer inspired the animal-rights and effective-altruism movements.
Thinkers
1748–1832Jeremy BenthamEnglish legal reformer who founded utilitarianism1806–1873John Stuart MillEnglish philosopher of liberty, utility and women’s equalityborn 1946Peter SingerAustralian utilitarian of animal liberation and effective givingKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofBritish empiricismHume showed how much of morality rests on utility, and Bentham wrote that reading Hume made him feel “as if scales had fallen from my eyes”.Grew out of
EpicureanismLike Epicurus, utilitarians take pleasure and freedom from pain as the only things good in themselves, but they count everyone’s happiness, not just one’s own.Grew out of
The EnlightenmentBentham took the “greatest happiness” formula and the drive for rational legal reform from Enlightenment writers such as Beccaria and Helvétius.
What it led to
Opposed byLiberal theories of justice (Rawls and after)A Theory of Justice was written as an alternative to utilitarianism, which Rawls said “does not take seriously the distinction between persons”.Opposed by
Virtue ethics revivalAnscombe coined the word “consequentialism” in 1958 to attack the idea that acts are right purely because of their outcomes.
Its answers to the big questions
EthicsHow should one live?Do what produces the most happiness, counting everyone’s happiness equally.On the record
Bentham wrote that reading Hume made him feel “as if scales had fallen from my eyes”.
In a footnote to A Fragment on Government (1776) Bentham says that the third volume of Hume’s Treatise demonstrates that the foundations of all virtue lie in utility, and that on reading it he “felt as if scales had fallen from my eyes”.
Sources: Bentham, A Fragment on Government (1776), Early Modern Texts edition