Utilitarianism "Utilitarianism" can most generally be described as the doctrine that states that the rightness or wrongness of actions is determined by the goodness and badness of their consequences. This general definition can be made...

Utilitarianism [addendum] J. J. C. Smart's advocacy of utilitarianism has been perhaps the most influential since Henry Sidgwick's nearly a century earlier. Nevertheless, there have been some significant developments since Smart's...

Ethics and Economics Economics is linked to both ethics and the theory of rationality. Economics complements and intersects with moral philosophy in both the concepts it has constructed and in its treatment of normative problems. Rationality, Utility...

in normative ethics, a tradition stemming from the late 18th- and 19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill that an action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it tends to produce the reverse...

. Moral theories about what we ought to do are commonly, if not uncontroversially, divided into deontological and teleological ones (see ETHICS). The main, though not the only, teleological (or CONSEQUENTIALIST) theory is utilitarianism, which in its...

Utilitarianism is the moral, social and political theory originated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, and further developed by John Stuart Mill. At its core is a simple equation between ‘the good’, and ‘happiness’ or pleasure....

Utopianism is a form of social theory which attempts to promote certain desired values and practices by presenting them in an ideal state or society. Utopian writers do not normally think of such states as realizable, at least in anything like their...

Utilitarianism is the doctrine that decisions should promote good consequences. It is a normative theory, meant to guide conduct and to serve as the basis of sound evaluations. It does not assume that actual decisions or judgements always satisfy that...

According to the ethical theory of utilitarianism, an action is right if it promises to produce better results than—or maximize the expected utility of—other action possible in the circumstances. Although there are earlier examples of...

Ethical principle according to which an action is right if it tends to maximize happiness, not only that of the agent but also of everyone affected. Thus, utilitarians focus on the consequences of an act rather than on its intrinsic nature or the...

An approach to moral philosophy popularized by BENTHAM and originally devised by Beccaria and Helvetius and later used by Godwin and John Stuart MILL. It is concerned to show that the rightness of an action is to be judged by its consequences in terms...

Utilitarianism is the ethical doctrine that the moral worth of an action is solely determined by its contribution to overall utility. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome—the...