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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]
On Liberty is an essay published in 1859 by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill.It applied Mill's ethical system of utilitarianism to society and state. [1] [2] Mill suggested standards for the relationship between authority and liberty.
Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's student John Stuart Mill, who sharply criticised Bentham's view of human nature, which failed to recognise conscience as a human motive. Mill considered Bentham's view "to have done and to be doing very serious evil."
According to Harsanyi, "preference utilitarianism is the only form of utilitarianism consistent with the important philosophical principle of preference autonomy. By this I mean the principle that, in deciding what is good and what is bad for a given individual, the ultimate criterion can only be his own wants and his own preferences."
According to this, moral terms such as 'good', 'ought' and 'right' have two logical or semantic properties: universalizability and prescriptivity. By the former, he meant that moral judgments must identify the situation they describe according to a finite set of universal terms, excluding proper names , but not definite descriptions .
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.
In On Liberty, J. S. Mill writes that his principle does not apply to persons judged as mentally ill, "barbarians" (which he assimilated to minors) and minors [5] while the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen did not concern women, slaves, foreigners and minors, as they were not citizens.
Utilitarianism provided British governments with the political justification to implement economic liberalism, which was to dominate economic policy from the 1830s. Although utilitarianism prompted legislative and administrative reform and John Stuart Mill 's later writings on the subject foreshadowed the welfare state , it was mainly used as a ...