Classical Utilitarianism
from 1789
The right action is the one producing the most happiness, everyone counts equally, and reform follows from applying that consistently.
- Active
- from 1789
- Where
- London
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Anglo American
The claim
The greatest happiness of the greatest number. Consequences are what matter morally, and each person's happiness counts for one and nobody's for more than one.
What it held
Bentham's principle is simple and its consequences were not. If pleasure and pain are what matter, then anything capable of them counts — which is why he wrote, in a footnote, that the question is not whether animals can reason but whether they can suffer. It is the founding sentence of animal ethics and it was written in 1789.
The equality clause did as much work as the principle. If everyone counts for one, then legal privileges, disenfranchisement and the criminalisation of consensual conduct all need justification in terms of harm — and mostly cannot supply it. Bentham wrote against the criminalisation of homosexuality in the 1780s and did not publish it; it was too dangerous.
Mill's revision addresses the obvious objection that the theory is fit for pigs. He distinguishes higher from lower pleasures, judged by those who have experienced both, and On Liberty adds the harm principle: the only ground for coercing anyone is preventing harm to others.
Harriet Taylor Mill's part in that work was substantial and Mill said so repeatedly, and it has been discounted ever since.
How it argued
Calculation of consequences, applied to law and institutions as much as to individual acts, with a strong bias toward reform.
What it was arguing against
Natural rights, which Bentham called nonsense upon stilts; and moral intuition treated as self-justifying.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether happiness can be aggregated across people. Whether the theory permits monstrous acts when the sums favour them, which is the standing objection and has never been fully answered.
Common misconceptions
That it licenses using people as means. Mill's harm principle is one of the strongest defences of individual liberty ever written, and it is derived from the theory rather than imposed on it.
How it began
Bentham was a legal reformer before he was a philosopher, and the principle was a tool for testing whether a law did any good.
What became of it
Living, and the dominant framework in public policy, health economics and effective altruism, whatever its standing in academic ethics.
Lasting influence
The reform of British law, prisons and suffrage. Cost-benefit analysis. Animal ethics through Singer, who is Bentham's direct heir.
Why it still matters
Every allocation decision in public health uses a version of it, and the objections to it are also live.
Put another way
A ledger in which every person's entry is the same size.
Where to start
On Liberty. It is short, it is superbly written, and it shows what the theory is for.
The surprising bit
Bentham's body was dissected publicly at his own request and his preserved skeleton, dressed and topped with a wax head, sits in a cabinet at University College London.
In their own words
The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
Connections
- Answers
- British Empiricism
- Opposed by
- Nietzscheanism, Communitarianism
- Influenced
- Classical Pragmatism
The verdict
The most practically consequential moral theory ever devised, and the one with the most persistent unanswered objection.