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The felicific calculus is an algorithm formulated by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) for calculating the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to induce. Bentham, an ethical hedonist, believed the moral rightness or wrongness of an action to be a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it ...
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.
The now-forgotten significance of Paley can be judged from the title of Thomas Rawson Birks's 1874 work Modern Utilitarianism or the Systems of Paley, Bentham and Mill Examined and Compared. Apart from restating that happiness as an end is grounded in the nature of God, Paley also discusses the place of rules, writing: [21]
The utilitarian design of a safety pin changed little since its invention in 1849 and over time acquired multiple symbolic meanings, including the rejection of mainstream beauty [1] Utilitarian design is an art concept that argues for the products to be designed based on the utility (as opposed to the "contemplated pleasure" of beauty).
Bentham's "hedonistic" theory (a term from J. J. C. Smart) is often criticised for lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice. In Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Gerald J. Postema states: "No moral concept suffers more at Bentham's hand than the concept of justice. There is no sustained, mature analysis of the ...
Earlier neoclassical welfare theory, heir to the classical utilitarianism of Bentham, often treated the law of diminishing marginal utility as implying interpersonally comparable utility. Irrespective of such comparability, income or wealth is measurable, and it was commonly inferred that redistributing income from a rich person to a poor ...
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is a book by the English philosopher and legal theorist Jeremy Bentham "originally printed in 1780, and first published in 1789." [1] Bentham's "most important theoretical work," [2] it is where Bentham develops his theory of utilitarianism and is the first major book on the topic.
This is an incomplete list of advocates of utilitarianism and/or consequentialism This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources .