Between the 1770s and the 1840s, British abolitionism moved from anti-capitalist utilitarianism to free trade. In this process, the identification of the “real slave” was crucial: Not only slave owners, but also some trade unions and workers’ associations considered the wage earner to be the real slave. This process also responded to the development of French abolitionism, which was mostly top-down and less concerned with ethics than with economic and social considerations. The profitability of slavery and the survival of the poor on the continent were constantly intertwined and helped to explain Napoleon’s restoration of slavery and the uncertainties of the 1848 revolution regarding the fate of former slaves.

Bentham gave utilitarianism its name and put it on the map, both as a philosophical theory and as a reforming social and political doctrine. In all of his philosophizing, Bentham was most fundamentally concerned with its relevance for law and, ultimately, for a distinctive kind of legal, social, and political reform. Bentham was unalterably opposed to legal and political doctrines whose only grounding was in tradition and any common sense tradition informs. This extended also to his views about morality. His defense of the principle of is not grounded, as Sidgwick will argue any moral principle must be, in intuition. But neither does Bentham ground his utilitarianism in an empiricist-naturalist metaethics, as do Cumberland and Mill, though his metaphysics certainly has that character. Bentham holds that the ultimate grounding of utilitarianism must be political. According to Bentham, the utility principle is the only one that can play the role that a moral principle must be able to play in informed noncoercive public debate. In this way, Bentham anticipates Rawls’s “political liberalism.” This chapter argues that Bentham could accept Rawls’s an emended version of Rawls’s slogan: “the principle of utility: political, not metaphysical.”

The forms that utilitarianism took before Sidgwick were almost invariably empiricist and naturalist. To such positions, Sidgwick poses a challenge similar to, but ultimately deeper than, Moore’s more famous charge that such positions inevitably commit a “naturalistic fallacy.” In Sidgwick’s version, empiricist-naturalist theories that attempt to understand ethical concepts and properties in empirical-natural terms all fail to account for their normativity. That can be done, Sidgwick argues, only by recognizing that all ethical judgments contain “the fundamental notion represented by the word ‘ought.’” Sidgwick holds, against Mill and his empiricist predecessors like Hutcheson, that the method of ethics must be “intuitive” rather than “inductive,” in Mill’s terms. Sidgwick’s intuitionism is not, however, the sort that Mill most ardently opposes; it is a “philosophical intuitionism,” by contrast with the complacent commonsense intuitions that Mill seeks to reform with his inductive utilitarianism. This is where Sidgwick’s “dualism of practical reason” comes in. Sidgwick holds that there are two potentially conflicting ultimate rational intuitions: (a) the “axiom of Prudence,” which counsels agents to pursue their own greatest good and (b) the “axiom of Rational Benevolence.” And both of these are hedonistic, yielding rational egoistic hedonism and hedonistic utilitarianism, respectively.

Although Mill learned Bentham’s utilitarianism literally at his father James Mill’s knee, Mill’s own version of utilitarianism departed from Bentham’s at key points. When Mill tried to live Bentham’s utilitarian doctrine as a youth, he was sent into a deep depression from which he was saved by reading the Romantic poetry and a romantic relationship with Harriet Taylor. This led him to reject Bentham’s “quantitative hedonism” in favor of a “qualitative hedonism” that emphasized intrinsic differences between different kinds of pleasures and held that some pleasures are “higher,” and therefore more valuable, than others. Here Mill’s view recalls Aristotle’s that pleasures resulting from exercising higher, distinctively human faculties and sensibilities are intrinsically better. Unlike Aristotle, however, Mill persisted in holding that his view is a version of hedonism, defended on nonteleological, empirical naturalist grounds. A second important departure from Bentham, was Mill’s holding that the deontic ideas of moral right and wrong are conceptually connected to accountability. This made him a “modern moral philosopher” by Anscombe’s definition and led him to defend, on these grounds, a utilitarian theory of rights and justice as well as a version of utilitarianism that was more like rule utilitarianism than act utilitarianism.

When Nietzsche disparaged the “English utilitarians” in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, he was referring to followers of Jeremy Bentham, most prominently to John Stuart Mill, whose Utilitarianism was published in 1861 and 1863. Mill took the term “utilitarianism” from Bentham. There was, however, a lot of utilitarian theorizing before Bentham, much of it quite sophisticated. That is the subject of the present chapter. The leading figures with whom we are concerned are Richard Cumberland, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, George Berkeley, John Gay, and William Paley. Hutcheson and Hume are especially important figures, although both are known as virtue theorists. Hutcheson was the first to formulate the “greatest happiness principle” in English, and Bentham wrote that he read the proto-utilitarian passages in Hume’s Treatise, he felt as if the “scales had fallen from his eyes.” Another important influence on Bentham was Paley. The inspiration for Mill’s utilitarianism in his turn, however, was decidedly Bentham. This chapter surveys the roots of nineteenth-century utilitarianism in the natural law theory of Cumberland, the theological voluntarism of Berkeley, and the virtue theories of Hutcheson and Hume. Hutcheson put forward a sophisticated utilitarian theory of rights, and Berkeley, a version of rule utilitarianism.

The chapter investigates the complexities of defining the human right to family planning in regards to conflicts between collective and individual rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Various perspectives from such UN organizations as the Commission on the Status of Women, UNESCO, FAO, and ECLA are analyzed regarding responsible parenthood, state intervention in family planning, and the balance between individual rights and communal well-being. The chapter further investigates the relationship between aspirations of sexual liberation and the human right to family planning, the role of the Vatican and Catholic Church, and attempts by the Population Council to establish a form of human rights utilitarianism that justified grave violations of individual reproductive rights by promises of a better future for all. The document also discusses the political conflicts at the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, emphasizing the complex interplay between individual reproductive rights, economic development, and global justice within the framework of human rights discourse.

Hume’s critique and English revulsion at the French Revolution dampened interest in social contract theorizing. The rise of utilitarianism was another factor. The cause of a universal franchise was taken up by Jeremy Bentham, a founding utilitarian who was dismissive of the social contract idea as an “anarchical fallacy.” The Chartists, who demanded universal manhood suffrage, held up both Bentham and Tom Paine as heroes. The Reform Act of 1832 expanded the power of the propertied in the burgeoning English manufacturing centers. The reformed Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which introduced the hated workhouse system. The Chartists’ million-plus petition for universal manhood suffrage was finally received by Parliament, but ignored. John Stuart Mill, another utilitarian, dismissed Locke’s theory as a fiction but found a truth in the social-contract idea: a principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity requires government to benefit all. Mill advocated votes for women and an expanded electorate but retention of the property qualification until workers could be educated sufficiently not to vote for unwise laws favoring their class. As a safeguard, he proposed plural votes for the educated. On the European continent the social contract tradition succumbed to the idealism of Hegel and the materialism of Marx.

Rawls’s primary aim was to show that his two principles are superior to utilitarianism. Utilitarianism does not take individuals seriously, treating them as mere “container persons” in the “calculus of social interests.” Rawls emphasized that the original position was one of uncertainty, not mere risk. Harsanyi had earlier derived the utilitarian principle from an original position much like Rawls’s. The difference was that Rawls applied the maximin principle of choice under uncertainty, which picks the option having the least bad worst outcome. Harsanyi instead assumed the equiprobability of all outcomes and maximized expected utility. Rawls recognized that maximin is not a good choice strategy in general use, but argued that special features of the original position favored it over the equiprobability assumption. Chief among these are those that he argued establish the lexical priority of the equal basic liberties. In the 1999 revision of A Theory of Justice, Rawls recast the argument by appealing to two moral powers – a capacity to share a sense of justice and a capacity to choose and revise one’s life plan – and a highest-order interest in setting one’s own aims and in shaping the social world in which they must be pursued.

This introductory chapter explores the foundation of intellectual property (IP) in the United States, specifically focusing on the history and purpose of copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret. It highlights how these pillars have maintained their utilitarian character despite major technological revolutions and emphasizes the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence (AI). As AI technologies increasingly influence creative processes, they raise significant questions about the nature of human contribution and the value of IP. This chapter introduces some of the legal implications of generative AI, including concerns over copyright infringement and the potential need for new IP protections for AI-generated works. It outlines how the rise of AI challenges the traditional metrics of progress and the standards by which human contributions are evaluated. The author suggests that rather than resisting these changes, society should adapt its understanding of IP in a way that reflects the evolving technological landscape. Ultimately, the author argues for a nuanced approach to IP law that recognizes the shifting boundaries of what constitutes valuable innovation, advocating for humility in navigating the complexities of this ongoing transformation. The discussion sets the stage for the rest of the book.

This chapter of the handbook posits utilitarianism as a standard of rational moral judgment. The author does not directly defend utilitarianism as a theory but investigates cases of apparent contradiction between people’s moral decisions (sometimes grounded in nonutilitarian principles) and the consequences of those decisions that they themselves would consider worse for themselves and everybody else. For example, when some people use a moral principle (e.g., bodily autonomy) to assertively make a decision (e.g., to not get vaccinated), it has negative moral consequences for others (e.g., infecting people) and for themselves (risking infection). The author asks whether such contradictions in moral reasoning can provide insights into some of the determinants of such reasoning. These insights, importantly, are valuable even for those who do not adopt utilitarianism as a normative model. From over a dozen candidate moral contradictions, the author concludes that many deviations from utilitarian considerations in moral contexts are reflections of familiar nonmoral cognitive biases, but some arise from adherence to strong moral rules or principles (e.g., protected or sacred values).

This chapter of the handbook introduces some core elements of moral decision making by framing it from one particular perspective: expected utility theory. In its classic form, expected utility theory focuses on the outcomes of actions: the expected utility of a decision is the sum of the values associated with the different possible outcomes of the decision weighted by the probability of their occurrence. As such, expected utility theory is well suited to explain the moral choices recommended by utilitarianism, which characterizes right actions in terms of the maximization of aggregate utility. As the authors point out, however, expected utility theory can be also used to model nonutilitarian decision making by assigning utilities to actions themselves, not just their outcomes. This action-based form of expected utility theory can readily accommodate the fact that people tend to assign low utility to actions that violate moral norms. Further, action-based expected utility theory can explain a wide range of phenomena revealed by empirical research on moral decision making, such as interpersonal disagreement about fairness, in-group bias, and outcome neglect.

Discussing ethics within the highly competitive technology sector can be complex. Although companies outwardly express their commitment to ethical practices, internally, the topic is often regarded as uncomfortable due to its implications for corporate finances. In digital behavior design, ethical consideration begins with defining the various drives and reinforcers that will guide the design process. As a sub-field of Human Factors and Engineering Psychology, digital behavior design can draw from their established Codes of Ethics and Codes of Conduct. However, beyond incorporating the ethical principles that govern Human Factors and psychology, it is also imperative to acknowledge unique ethical principles that highlight the particularities of their application. In seeking these specific ethical norms, it is important to identify the essential desirable value inherent in the professional practice of digital behavior designers. Primarily, the genuine value provided by digital behavior design is utilitarian in nature; that is, it fulfills user needs through satisfaction. From this continuous satisfaction may arise a dependency on these digital services for happiness, leading to problematic online behaviors. Therefore, poor design or the unethical use of discriminative stimuli (nudges) and reinforcers can be highly hazardous for populations with certain psychosocial and neural vulnerabilities. This chapter introduces certain standards to guide ethical and responsible conduct for designers when creating digital services. It also proposes a solution in the form of an algorithm that could be implemented in digital services to detect and support compulsive behaviors.

In the early years of neoclassical economics, agents were pleasure-seekers and their marginal utility for a good diminished continuously as consumption increased. This psychology ensured that agents could optimize and identify smooth trade-offs. Later generations abandoned this utilitarian inheritance in favor of a theory of rationality, but they had no replacement explanation for why agents can always order their options from best to worst. The same pattern has recurred in the theory of choice under uncertainty. In early theories, agents have preferences over lotteries where outcomes have known or objective probabilities. But once economists recognized the primacy of idiosyncratic risks, they turned to theories where agents form preferences based on their judgments of the likelihood of outcomes. These theories of subjective probability cannot explain why agents are capable of making these judgments. And if agents cannot pin down subjective probabilities they will not able to order their options. More broadly, agents face different classes of decisions, some where they are guided by an ordering principle that shows how to weigh their options and others where agents cannot judge trade-offs and form preferences.

The social welfare function furnishes the primary tool of normative economics: It aggregates the utilities of different agents, by summing them for example. That technique is no longer available when preferences are incomplete since agents then cannot be modeled by utility functions. Agents can however have well-defined utility functions for groups of goods, though they will not know how to weigh the functions for different groups against one another. A policymaker can aggregate these utilities across agents and thus pin down a unique normatively optimal allocation for each group of goods. Government policies are usually debated in this fashion. Rather than solve a global welfare optimization problem, governments and advocates attack each domain of policymaking separately, whether it be education or health. The chapter’s approach illustrates Sen’s criticisms of welfarism.

The first chapter traces the notion of “art for art’s sake” to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who first engaged with questions of aesthetics in the early 1850s. In their attempts to account for the evolution of the sense of beauty – an adaptation with no obvious survival value – both writers exempted a wide swath of aesthetic activities from the natural laws of scarcity and struggle that governed other areas of biological life. This chapter argues that their evolutionary explanations for beauty (the theories of sexual selection and “play," respectively) thus laid the scientific groundwork for later conceptions of aesthetic experience as escapist, salutary, and therefore beneficial for the species. The chapter concludes with an analysis of selected literary works by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith, whose respective corpuses illustrate the diffuse impact of these ideas on literary evocations of the beautiful.

This chapter examines the aversion to theories and programs of natural rights in much mainstream nineteenth-century British political discourse. Following on the heels of their Enlightenment and revolutionary efflorescence, writers in Great Britain articulated various critiques of natural rights philosophies and declarations. Moving from early critics such as Burke and Bentham to later Victorian writers and statesmen – most importantly, J. S. Mill – the chapter traces several threads of skepticism toward natural rights. British writers, it argues, were preoccupied less with the unsound conceptual foundations of natural rights theories than with the perceived consequences of belief in natural rights, which was seen as leading in anarchic, destabilizing, and antinomian directions. Natural rights platforms, it was contended, appealed to passion, ignored context and the weighing of costs and benefits, and undermined both the rule of law and state authority. In addition, natural rights theories were perceived by critics to be connected to a range of worrying trends (democratization and the rise of socialism, among others). Natural rights theories, furthermore, stood in stark contrast to the utilitarian and historicist attitudes towards law and government which prevailed in Britain during these decades. Finally, the conclusion offers a glance at nineteenth-century France, contrasting the loyalty toward natural rights across the Channel with British hostility, and revealing that many of the fears that Britons articulated about the dissemination of natural rights ideas were harbored by the French with regard to the spread of consequentialism.

How we should treat nonhuman animals is one of the most important environmental questions that we face. Although most people think of humans as having a qualitatively different moral status than nonhuman animals, there is no morally significant criterion for membership in the moral community that is satisfied by all and only humans. If the criterion is demanding enough (e.g., language), it excludes some humans; if it is permissive enough to include all humans (e.g., sentience), it includes some nonhumans. The discovery that “speciesism” is indefensible opens the door to a range of strong animal-protection philosophies – for example, Peter Singer’s “animal liberation,” which is founded on utilitarianism, and Christine Korsgaard’s “fellow creatures” view, which has a Kantian foundation. These views converge in concluding that many of the ways that we treat animals are wrong.