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Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism and altruism, utilitarianism considers either the interests of all humanity or all sentient beings equally.
Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." [6] [7] He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism.
In economics, utility is a measure of the satisfaction that a certain person has from a certain state of the world. Over time, the term has been used in at least two different meanings. In a normative context, utility refers to a goal or objective that we wish to maximize, i.e. an objective function.
t. e. Act utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics that states that a person's act is morally right if and only if it produces the best possible results in that specific situation. Classical utilitarians, including Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, define happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain. [1]
This principle is so well established that economists call it the "law of diminishing marginal utility" and it is reflected in the concave shape of most utility functions. [13] This concept is fundamental to understanding a variety of economic phenomena, such as time preference and the value of goods .
The term E-utility for "experience utility" has been coined [2] to refer to the types of "hedonistic" utility like that of Bentham's greatest happiness principle. Since morality affects decisions, a VNM-rational agent's morals will affect the definition of its own utility function (see above).
William Stanley Jevons FRS (/ ˈdʒɛvənz /; [2] 1 September 1835 – 13 August 1882) was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher described Jevons's book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy (1862) as the start of the mathematical method in economics. [3] It made the case that economics, as a science concerned with ...
t. e. Rule utilitarianism is a form of utilitarianism that says an action is right as it conforms to a rule that leads to the greatest good, or that "the rightness or wrongness of a particular action is a function of the correctness of the rule of which it is an instance". [1] Philosophers Richard Brandt and Brad Hooker are major proponents of ...