Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism represents an old and distinguished tradition in moral philosophy, the influence of which extends to law, economics, public policy, and other realms and is evident in much of our everyday moral thinking. Two fundamental ideas underlie utilitarianism: first, that the results of our actions are the key to their moral evaluation and, second, that one should assess and compare those results in terms of the happiness or unhappiness they cause (or, more broadly, in terms of their impact on people's well-being). Both these ideas have been around for a long time; one can glimpse hints of them in philosophical and religious writings going back thousands of years. However, as an explicitly and self-consciously formulated ethical theory, utilitarianism is just over 200 years old.

By the 18th century, several philosophers were promulgating an essentially utilitarian approach to ethics. However, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is generally considered the founder or at least the first systematic expounder of utilitarianism. In politics and ethics, Bentham and his followers saw themselves as fighting on behalf of reason against dogmatism, blind adherence to tradition, and conservative social and economic interests. They were social reformers who used the utilitarian standard as a yardstick for assessing and criticizing social and economic policies and the political and legal institutions of their day. Among Bentham's backers were his friends James Mill and Mill's son, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), who went on to become the most important English philosopher of the 19th century. Ardently interested in economics and public affairs, Mill was an articulate defender of utilitarianism and used the doctrine to champion individual liberty and to urge the emancipation of women. Mill, in turn, was followed by Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), the last of the great 19th-century utilitarians. Unlike Bentham and Mill, Sidgwick was a university professor with a strong interest in the history of ethics. His writings developed and refined utilitarianism as a moral philosophy, bringing it to its full intellectual maturity.

Today, the utilitarian tradition is as alive as ever. Although many contemporary philosophers believe that utilitarianism is profoundly flawed, over the years a number of able thinkers have expounded and defended the theory, honing and elaborating it in surprisingly subtle ways. Nevertheless, utilitarianism's guiding impulse is simple and transparent: Human well-being is what really matters and, accordingly, the promotion of well-being is what morality is, or ought to be, all about.