Utilitarianism: From Bentham and Mill to Singer — The Greatest Happiness and Its Critics

Few moral theories have been as influential — and as attacked — as utilitarianism. Its central idea is disarmingly simple: the right action is the one that produces the greatest amount of well-being for the greatest number of those affected. Born as a reforming philosophy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, it shaped criminal law, welfare economics, public policy and, more recently, animal ethics and the fight against global poverty. This article lays out its structure, its main authors, and the objections that dog it.

1. The principle of utility: Bentham

The founder is Jeremy Bentham. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), he formulates the principle of utility: to approve or disapprove of every action according to its tendency to increase or diminish the happiness of those concerned. Happiness, for Bentham, is pleasure and the absence of pain — a hedonism (see hedonism as a principle) that is at once psychological (we are governed by “two sovereign masters,” pain and pleasure) and ethical.

Bentham proposes to measure the good by a felicific calculus: the intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent (how many people it reaches) of pleasures and pains. Hence his radical egalitarianism, in the maxim Mill attributes to him: “each to count for one, and none for more than one.” And hence too his provocative anti-elitism — he is said to have held that, if it gives equal pleasure, the game of push-pin is “as good as” poetry. A tireless reformer, he used the principle to criticize criminal law and ridiculed the doctrine of natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts”: only consequences count, not metaphysical entities.

2. The higher pleasures: Mill

John Stuart Mill, educated by Bentham and by his own father, gave utilitarianism its most sophisticated version. In Utilitarianism (1863) he accepts the principle but rejects the master’s purely quantitative hedonism: there are higher pleasures (intellectual, aesthetic, moral) and lower ones (bodily), and the former are worth more not because they are greater but because they are qualitatively better — as attested by those who know both. Hence his famous line: “It is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

Mill also attempted a “proof” of the principle (what each person desires is their own happiness; therefore the general happiness is desirable) — a passage much criticized for confusing the desirable with the desired. In On Liberty (1859) he formulated the harm principle: the only legitimate ground for limiting someone’s liberty is to prevent harm to others — a defense of individual freedom that many read as “rule” utilitarianism. Later, Henry Sidgwick, in The Methods of Ethics (1874), gave the theory its most rigorous formulation and exposed the “dualism of practical reason”: the unresolved tension between rational egoism and utilitarianism.

3. The anatomy of the theory

Utilitarianism is a combination of theses worth distinguishing:

• Consequentialism: what makes an act right or wrong is solely its consequences, not the intention or the rule in itself.
• Welfarism: the only thing good in itself is well-being (pleasure, happiness, or the satisfaction of preferences).
• Aggregation: the well-being of all those affected is summed.
• Impartiality: each person’s well-being counts equally — mine is worth no more than a stranger’s.

From these theses derive important variants. Act utilitarianism evaluates each individual action by its result; rule utilitarianism evaluates rules by the utility of their general adoption (do not lie, even when a particular lie would bring more happiness). Preference utilitarianism (R. M. Hare, the early Singer) replaces pleasure with the satisfaction of preferences. And negative utilitarianism (suggested by Popper) gives priority to reducing suffering over maximizing happiness.

4. Practical ethics: Peter Singer

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, utilitarianism found its most influential exponent in Peter Singer. In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972), he argues that if we can prevent something very bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, it is our duty to do so — whence a strong demand to give to those dying of hunger. Applying impartiality beyond the species, he holds that what matters is sentience (the capacity to suffer), not membership in the human species: to ignore it would be speciesism (see animal welfare). His work inspired the effective altruism movement, which seeks to do the most good possible with limited resources.

5. The major objections

Utilitarianism concentrates one of the richest debates in ethics. The main criticisms:

• Demandingness: if I must always maximize the general good, morality invades my whole life and obliges me to continual sacrifices for strangers, leaving no room for projects of my own.
• The separateness of persons: for John Rawls, in summing well-being as though humanity were a single subject, utilitarianism “does not take seriously the distinction between persons” — it could justify sacrificing some for the benefit of the aggregate.
• Justice and rights: the classic counterexamples — convicting an innocent to calm a mob, or “redistributing” the organs of a healthy patient to save five — suggest that utilitarianism would permit atrocities if the balance of happiness made up for them. Robert Nozick adds the “utility monster,” who would absorb all resources by deriving more pleasure from them.
• Integrity: Bernard Williams (profile) argues that, by requiring me to act always for the best impersonal outcome, utilitarianism alienates me from my deepest commitments and projects — from what makes me myself.
• Measurement: how are pleasures and pains so different, and across distinct persons, to be compared and summed?

To these objections the rival traditions respond: the deontology of Kant, for whom certain acts are wrong regardless of consequences, and the virtue ethics of Aristotle, centered on character rather than calculation. The utilitarians, for their part, reply (with rule or “two-level” utilitarianism) that a morality well informed by consequences would, in practice, rarely recommend the imagined atrocities.

6. Legacy

Despite the criticisms, utilitarianism remains one of the great living options in normative ethics. Its demand for impartiality and for taking seriously the suffering of all those affected has shaped welfare economics, cost-benefit analysis, bioethics, animal ethics, and the debate on global poverty. More than a closed doctrine, it is a method for thinking through the consequences of our choices — a method whose strength and whose limits remain at the center of moral philosophy.

Essential reading

• Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).
• John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863) and On Liberty (1859).
• Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1874).
• J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973).
• Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (1979).

← Articles