Utilitarianism

Bentham’s proposal scandalized his age: good and evil lie not in motives or doctrines but in the total pleasure and pain of consequences — so morality can be computed, and law rewritten by utility (he used it, in passing, to argue against torture and for decriminalizing homosexuality). Mill inherited the mantle with one decisive amendment: pleasures differ in quality — better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied — and On Liberty drew a line no happiness-calculation may cross: individual freedom. Utilitarianism remains the default algorithm of public policy, and the most-attacked target in every ethics classroom.

Who belongs to it

Whom it opposed — and who opposed it