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Utilitarianism is an 1861 essay written by English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, considered to be a classic exposition and defense of utilitarianism in ethics. It was originally published as a series of three separate articles in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 before it was collected and reprinted as a single work in 1863. [ 1 ]
Sidgwick's book The Methods of Ethics has been referred to as the peak or culmination of classical utilitarianism. [42] [43] [44] His main goal in this book is to ground utilitarianism in the principles of common-sense morality and thereby dispense with the doubts of his predecessors that these two are at odds with each other. [43]
In ethics, Smart was a defender of utilitarianism. Specifically, he defended "extreme", or act utilitarianism , as opposed to "restricted", or rule utilitarianism . The distinction between these two types of ethical theory is explained in his essay Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism .
Utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethical theory, meaning that it holds that acts are justified insofar as they produce a desirable outcome. The overarching goal of utilitarianism—the ideal consequence—is to achieve the "greatest good for the greatest number as the result of human action". [82]
His book Sorting Out Ethics might be interpreted as saying that Hare is as much a Kantian as he is a utilitarian, but other sources [14] disagree with this assessment. Although Hare used many concepts from Kant, especially the idea of universalisability , he was still a consequentialist , rather than a deontologist , in his normative ethical views.
In a series of books, R.M. Hare (who introduced the term into philosophical literature [2]) made moral supervenience the basis of his derivation of a version of utilitarianism, but this was actually a universal applicability condition combined with the criterion that the universalized behavior would not produce a greater balance of satisfied ...
Two-level utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics according to which a person's moral decisions should be based on a set of moral rules, except in certain rare situations where it is more appropriate to engage in a 'critical' level of moral reasoning.
Williams's work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), Problems of the Self (1973), Utilitarianism: For and Against with J. J. C. Smart (1973), Moral Luck (1981) and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), outlined his attacks on the twin pillars of ethics: utilitarianism and the moral philosophy of ...