Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the moral theory holding that the rightness of an act depends only on its consequences for the welfare of all affected, and that the right act is the one producing the greatest balance of good over bad, counted impartially across everyone. It descends from the English philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806 to 1873) through the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838 to 1900) and into the late-twentieth-century work of Peter Singer and Derek Parfit. Its maximizing, quantifying structure supplied the reasoning method of Effective Altruism and longtermism.¹²

Bentham, Mill, and the Felicific Calculus

Jeremy Bentham set out the doctrine in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), grounding morality on the "principle of utility," that an action is approved as it tends to increase the happiness of the party affected, and famously took as the standard "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He proposed the felicific or hedonic calculus, a procedure for weighing a prospective pleasure or pain by its intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent, the last being the number of persons affected. The calculus made moral evaluation a matter of summation and treated each person's happiness as counting equally, a commitment Bentham expressed in the maxim "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one."³

John Stuart Mill, raised by his father and Bentham on the doctrine, defended and revised it in Utilitarianism, first published as three articles in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863. Mill held that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they produce its reverse, but argued against Bentham that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, ranking the "higher" intellectual and moral pleasures above bodily ones and writing that it is better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig. This qualitative move answered the charge that utilitarianism was a doctrine fit only for swine while keeping the maximizing structure intact.⁴

Sidgwick and the Point of View of the Universe

Henry Sidgwick gave utilitarianism its most rigorous formulation in The Methods of Ethics (1874), which Parfit judged to contain more true and important claims than any other work in the history of ethics. Sidgwick derived the impartial core of the theory from what he called the "point of view of the universe," the self-evident principle that the good of any one person is, from that standpoint, no more important than the good of any other, so that a rational agent should aim at the universal good. He distinguished the "methods of ethics," egoism, intuitionism, and utilitarianism, and conceded a "dualism of practical reason," an unresolved standoff between the rational claims of self-interest and those of universal benevolence.⁵¹

Sidgwick's impartial standpoint is the ancestor of what Thomas Nagel later called "the view from nowhere," the attempt to evaluate the world from no particular person's perspective. Sidgwick was also a founder and first president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, and his teaching at Cambridge carried the utilitarian tradition into the twentieth century, where it was revived in analytic form by Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) and by Singer, who with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek wrote a 2014 book defending Sidgwick's position.⁵⁶

Singer and the Path into Effective Altruism

Peter Singer carried the impartial maximizing logic into applied ethics, arguing in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972) that if a person can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance they are obligated to do it, and that distance and nationality make no difference to the obligation. For decades he defended a preference utilitarianism, on which good is the satisfaction of the preferences of all affected, before returning in 2014 to the hedonistic utilitarianism of Sidgwick. The same impartial weighing of all interests underlay his case in Animal Liberation (1975) that the suffering of animals counts equally with that of humans.⁷²

Effective altruism took utilitarianism's structure as a method: rank causes by the expected good per dollar, count distant and future beneficiaries equally with near ones, and direct resources to wherever the marginal return in welfare is highest. Toby Ord and William MacAskill built Giving What We Can and the cause-prioritization apparatus on this quantitative footing, and Nick Bostrom and Ord extended the impartial counting of persons across time so that the welfare of vast future populations dominates the calculation, the premise of longtermism. The theory's "ends justify the means" tendency drew renewed scrutiny after Sam Bankman-Fried, who had embraced utilitarian reasoning, was convicted of fraud in 2023, and critics including Émile P. Torres traced the movement's quantifying impulse, alongside the hereditarian currents around its Oxford institutions, back to nineteenth-century roots.²⁸