The ethical and political tradition founded by Jeremy Bentham, which holds that the rightness of actions and policies should be evaluated by their consequences for overall human happiness. Utilitarianism in various forms has shaped modern public policy, economics, and law more thoroughly than perhaps any other single moral framework, though almost all later utilitarians have modified Bentham's original version in significant ways.
Tradition
Utilitarianism
The ethical view that actions should be evaluated by their consequences for overall human happiness.
Thinkers
Thinker
Harriet Taylor Mill
1807–1858
Harriet Taylor Mill was a British liberal philosopher of women's rights whose collaboration with John Stuart Mill shaped On Liberty and whose Enfranchisement of Women was one of the century's most radical feminist arguments
ThinkerJeremy Bentham
1748–1832
Jeremy Bentham was the English founder of utilitarianism, a legal reformer who tried to reduce every moral and political question to a single calculation of pleasure and pain
ThinkerJohn Stuart Mill
1806–1873
John Stuart Mill was the liberal philosopher and 19th-century reconciler who humanized utilitarianism and rescued liberalism from its colder instincts, giving the modern world its sharpest defense of free speech
ThinkerJames Mill
1773–1836
James Mill was a Scottish utilitarian philosopher who organized Bentham's ideas into the Philosophical Radicals movement and designed the formidable education of his son John Stuart Mill
ThinkerCass Sunstein
Cass Sunstein is a liberal legal scholar of technocratic, welfare-oriented governance whose “libertarian paternalism” and the nudge reshaped debates over regulation and behavioral policy
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