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The book contains several of Bentham's most best-known quotations. In Chapter 1, "Of the Principle of Utility," Bentham describes how actions are motivated by the desire for pleasure and are right insofar as they create utility or happiness: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.
The word utility is used to mean general well-being or happiness, and Mill's view is that utility is the consequence of a good action. Utility, within the context of utilitarianism, refers to people performing actions for social utility. With social utility, he means the well-being of many people.
The concept of measuring hedonic utility arose in Utilitarianism, with Classical Utilitarians acknowledging that the actual pleasure might not be easy to express quantitatively as a numeric value. Bentham, the early proponent of the concept, declared that the happiness is a sequence of episodes, each characterized by its intensity and duration ...
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.
Act utilitarianism is based on the principle of utility, which is the basis of all utilitarian theories and is best summed up in Bentham's well-known phrase, "the greatest happiness for the greatest number".
This is what Bentham and Mill call "the principle of utility" or "the greatest-happiness principle." Both Bentham and Mill thus endorse "classical" or "hedonistic" forms of utilitarianism. [4] The key distinction between Mill- utilitarianism- and Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, is quantity and quality of happiness. Here Mill ...
Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780) [1] begins by defining the principle of utility: "II. The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work: it will be proper therefore at the outset to give an explicit and determinate account of what is meant by it.
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.