Act and rule utilitarianism Bentham tended to deal with the consequences of acts.
Albee's History of English Utilitarianism (1902), a complete and painstaking survey.
Among such theories utilitarianism especially is the natural result of the application to the phenomenon of conduct of the Baconian experimental method.
An agent can be told by utilitarianism to do something terrible in order to avoid something even worse, as Jim and George are.
An important step further in political utilitarianism was taken by Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature (1739).
And although Dr Hastings Rashdall (The Theory of Good and Evil, Oxford, 1907) is not in agreement with Sidgwick's own particular type of hedonistic theory in his own philosophical position, he occupies a point of view somewhat similar to that of Sidgwick's main attitude of Rational Utilitarianism.
And if the controversy which this school has conducted with utilitarianism had turned principally on the determination of the matter of duty, there can be little doubt that it would have been forced into more serious and systematic effort to define precisely and completely the principles and method on which we are to reason deductively to particular rules of conduct.'
Beginning particularly with John Stuart Mill, bourgeois science differentiated itself into an Ethics called utilitarianism and a science called Economics.
Beginning particularly with John Stuart Mill, bourgeois science differentiated itself into an Ethics called Utilitarianism and a science called Economics.
Benthamite utilitarianism does involve a commitment to individual welfare, but not to personal freedom.
Christian belief must pass over not into a complacent scientific utilitarianism, but into the ecstasies of uninhibited wastage.
Even before the appearance of Sidgwick's book utilitarianism had entered upon its third or evolutional phase, in which principles borrowed from biological science make their entrance into moral philosophy.
Finally, side by side with a theory of the nature of moral obligation thus fundamentally empirical and a posteriori in its outlook, he maintains in his account of justice the existence of the idea of justice as distinct from a mere sentiment, carrying with it an a priori belief in its existence and identical in its a priori and intuitive character with the ultimate criterion of Utilitarianism itself.
From Bentham the leadership in utilitarianism passed to James Mill, who made no characteristic addition to its doctrine, and from him to John Stuart Mill.
From the side of literature the way was prepared for it by the genius of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle; from the side of morals and politics by the profound discontent of the constructive spirit of the century with the disintegrating conceptions inherited from utilitarianism.
He began by disclaiming any affinity to Utilitarianism on the part of his own philosophy.
He may be said to have cleared the ground for the coming utilitarianism.
His doctrine is a kind of utilitarianism, with a strong leaning on the speculative side to the modified literary scepticism of Cicero, for whom he had unbounded admiration.
His suggestions were developed by Hutcheson into one of the most elaborate systems of moral philosophy which we possess; through Hutcheson, if not directly, they influenced Hume's speculations, and are thus connected with later utilitarianism.
His theory is a sort of reconciliation of utilitarianism with intuitionism, a position which he reached by studying Mill in combination with Kant and Butler.
His Utilitarianism (published in Fraser's in 1861) was a closely-reasoned systematic attempt to answer objections to his ethical theory and remove misconceptions of it.
In 1814 he wrote a number of articles, containing an exposition of utilitarianism, for the supplement to the fifth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the most important being those on "Jurisprudence," "Prisons" and "Government."
In philosophy his chief work was to systematize and expound the utilitarianism of his father and Bentham (see Utilitarianism).
In the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham the proper rules of conduct, moral and legal, are determined by comparing the imaginary consequences of different modes of regulation on men and women, conceived as specimens of a substantially uniform and unchanging type.
In unity, consistency and thoroughness of method, Bentham's utilitarianism has a decided superiority over Paley's.
It is commonly said that in making this distinction Mill has practically given up utilitarianism, because he has applied to pleasure (alleged to be the supreme criterion) a further criterion which is not pleasure.
It is only possible to allude briefly here to the different conclusions that he has attained in treating the various problems, as for example in Aesthetic, the unity of art and language, of intuition and expression, the negation of particular arts, the refutation of literary and artistic classes, the criticism of rhetoric, of grammar and so forth; and in the Philosophy of the Practical or of Practice, the conciliation of the antitheses of utilitarianism and moralism, the critique of precepts, of laws and of casuistry, the new conception of judgments of value, the constitution of a philosophic economy side by side with the science of Economy, the resolution of the Philosophy of rights in the Philosophy of economic, and so forth.
It neither affirms nor denies the theistic premises of religion, and is thus a particular variety of utilitarianism.
Mill, who did more than any other member of the school to spread and popularize utilitarianism in ethics and politics.
On the pivot of this distinction Hutcheson turns round from the point of view of Shaftesbury to that of later utilitarianism.
So far he may be fairly called the precursor of later utilitarianism.
Spencer as much as Mill, then, advocates indirect utilitarianism by featuring robust moral rights.
Such a view is almost diametrically opposed to Bentham's conception of normal human existence; the newer utilitarianism of Mill represents an endeavour to find the right middle path between the two extremes.
Such reasoning supports, I then argue, conclusions about value that support an account of the concept broadly consistent with classical utilitarianism.
The Comtist system is utilitarianism crowned by a fantastic decoration.
The denial of a fixed human nature also corrodes an ethics based on human pleasure or happiness, like hedonism and utilitarianism.
The further development of theological utilitarianism was conditioned by opposition to the Moral Sense doctrine of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson.
The history of utilitarianism (if we may use the term for the earlier history of a philosophic tendency which appeared long before the invention of the term) falls into three divisions, which may be termed theological, political and evolutional respectively.
The most famous of the systematic exponents of evolutional utilitarianism is, of course, Herbert Spencer, in whose Data of Ethics (1819) the facts of morality are viewed in relation with his vast conception of the total process of cosmic evolution.
The rise of political utilitarianism illustrates most strikingly the way in which the value and dignity of philosophical principles depends on the purpose to which they are applied.
The self-love theory of Hobbes, with its subtle perversions of the motives of ordinary humanity, led to a reaction which culminated in the utilitarianism of Bentham and the two Mills; but their theory, though superior to the extravagant egoism of Hobbes, had this main defect, according to Herbert Spencer, that it conceived the world as an aggregate of units, and was so far individualistic. Sir Leslie Stephen in his Science of Ethics insisted that the unit is the social organism, and therefore that the aim of moralists is not the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," but rather the "health of the organism."
Theological and political utilitarianism alike had been individualistic. But Darwin shows how the moral sense or conscience may be regarded as derived from the social instincts, which are common to men and animals.
This relation to a "good" must not, however, be construed as a doctrine of ethics in the narrower sense; nor is its "utilitarianism" to be confused with the hedonism of the British associationists.
This shift of emphasis was originally the work of economists looking for a way of making utilitarianism operational.
This substitution of hypothetical history for direct analysis of the moral sense is really older than the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham, which it has so profoundly modified.
Those who perceived a narrow utilitarianism as dominant took the opposite view.
Thus we pass from Egoistic to Universalistic hedonism, Utilitarianism, Social Ethics, more especially in relation to the still broader theories of evolution.
Utilitarians will claim that an ideal public should at least consider utilitarianism a plausible doctrine.
Whether Spencer actually envisioned his liberal utilitarianism this way is unclear.
While in prison he translated Bentham's Utilitarianism.
Why bother with substitute sources of stand-in obligation when, thanks to having become moral saints, act utilitarianism will fortunately always do?