Utilitarianism

The philosophical doctrine known as utilitarianism was the creation of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, who felt the need for a rule-of-thumb guideline for legislators that would improve the quality of the legislation that they produced. Its central tenet was that legislation would be good insofar as it served to increase the general happiness of society, or alleviated its suffering (which is another way of saying the same thing). Bentham assumed that human beings had two basic driving motivations, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This idea can be traced back to the Greeks, and is known as hedonism (a variant of which is associated with Epicurus). Bentham thought that the resulting level or quantity of happiness could be worked out by what he termed the felicity calculus.

The most famous name associated with the term utilitarianism, however, and the person responsible for having cast it as an important ethical doctrine, is John Stuart Mill, who was brought up on this diet by his father James, and by Bentham, his Godfather. Mill refined the idea further by noting that it was not only the quantity that mattered, but also the quality of the pleasure involved, famously arguing that

“it is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”

Utilitariansim’s concern with the results of actions makes it part of a wider approach to ethics known as consequentialism, which shares the concern with consequences, but allows that there may be other goods that are sought after, not merely, or even principally, pleasure or pain.