Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Henry Sidgwick

This book has explored some of the doubts and possibilities for different readings of the classical utilitarians, both positive and negative. It has shown how William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and others were forever engaged in tackling both the reasons—or the pleasures and pains—and the persons together, instead of separating them, in often breathtaking visions of a future of maximally happy beings who had through education and personal growth achieved their utilitarian potential. It has also discussed how utilitarianism had become more entangled in imperialistic politics at precisely the point when it lost its foundational philosophical confidence, when it was forced to confront the incoherence of its own accounts of such fundamental notions as happiness, reason, pleasure, and pain.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Positive Side ◽  
Classical Utilitarianism ◽  
Henry Sidgwick

This book presents biographical/philosophical sketches of the founders of classical utilitarianism such as William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. The great irony of the legacy of utilitarianism is that its name has long been an obstacle to its message, an irony compounded by the infatuation, in recent decades, with work in the area of “happiness studies,” an offshoot in many respects of the “positive psychology” movement that emphasizes the positive side of human nature. The influx of recent books on happiness has mostly not been matched by a serious interest in utilitarianism. This book revisits classical utilitarianism with the goal of highlighting some important aspects of it that have tended to be neglected or underestimated by both the critics and the professed supporters of utilitarianism, including many economists of the twentieth century.

The Happiness Philosophers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The Past ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
The People ◽  
Henry Sidgwick

This book tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism—one of the most influential yet misunderstood philosophies of the past two centuries. Best known for arguing that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,” utilitarianism was developed by the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Together, they had a profound influence on nineteenth-century reforms. Their work transformed life in ways we take for granted today. Bentham even advocated the decriminalization of same-sex acts, decades before the cause was taken up by other activists. As Bertrand Russell wrote about Bentham in the late 1920s, “There can be no doubt that nine-tenths of the people living in England in the latter part of last century were happier than they would have been if he had never lived.” Yet in part because of its misleading name and the caricatures popularized by figures as varied as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault, utilitarianism is sometimes still dismissed as cold, calculating, inhuman, and simplistic. By revealing the fascinating human sides of the remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, this book provides a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives—one that also helps explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and is again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems.

The Great Classical Tradition, 3

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Living Standard ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Pronounced Difference ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Low Wages

This chapter examines the ideas elaborated specifically in the refinement and defense of the classical tradition in economics. There were points of vulnerability and fault that required a defense of the classical tradition, including the pronounced difference between the wages and resulting living standard of the workers and those of the employers or capitalists, the unequal distribution of power inherent in the system, and the phenomenon referred to as a panic, crisis, depression or recession, with its associated unemployment and general despair. The chapter considers how the classical tradition dealt with inequality and oppressive power, focusing on the initial defense advanced for the low wages of the laborer in comparison with the revenues of the employer and landlord. It also discusses the defense from Utilitarianism, led by Jeremy Bentham, and the views of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Nassau Senior, and William Stanley Jevons.

“Utility”

1991 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Broome
Keyword(s):  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Human Conduct

“Utility,” in plain English, means usefulness. In Australia, a ute is a useful vehicle. Jeremy Bentham specialized the meaning to a particular sort of usefulness. “By utility,” he said, “is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered” (1823, p. 2). The “principle of utility” is the principle that actions are to be judged by their usefulness in this sense: their tendency to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness. When John Stuart Mill (1969, p. 213) spoke of the “perfectly just conception of Utility or Happiness, considered as the directive rule of human conduct,” he was using “Utility” as a short name for this principle. “The greatest happiness principle” was another name for it. People who subscribed to this principle came to be known as utilitarians.

The Background to Bentham on Evidence

Utilitas ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. D. E. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Central Core ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Easy Task ◽  
Related Material

The path of those who would approach the study of Bentham's writings on Evidence has been considerably smoothed by the recent publication of William Twining's work on the evidence theories of Bentham and Wigmore. The material on evidence is now being tackled by the Bentham Project. It presents no easy task. The central core, The Rationale of Judicial Evidence, edited and published by John Stuart Mill in 1827, exists only in the printed version, the MSS from which Mill worked having disappeared. But a substantial body of related material which survives has yet to be thoroughly investigated, though William Twining has made a gallant start. A new edition of the work hitherto known as ‘An Introductory View of the Rationale of Evidence’, first printed in full in the Bowring edition of the Works of Jeremy Bentham is in preparation. The first fruits of this endeavour is that the title of that work as it should appear in due course in the new Collected Works will be Introduction to the Rationale of Evidence: An Introductory View for the Use of Lawyers as well as Non-lawyers, the title in fact given to the work by Bentham. It is intended that what follows should similarly be of use to non-lawyers as well as lawyers.

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