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This chapter examines Jeremy Bentham's doctrine of utilitarianism and the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Bentham is known for his radical critique of society, which aimed to test the usefulness of existing institutions, practices and beliefs against an objective evaluative standard, as well as his advocacy of law reform and his utilitarian justification for democracy. The chapter considers Bentham's views on subjects ranging from happiness and pleasure to social reform, “theory of fictions,” and sex and sexuality. It also discusses some of Bentham's writings, including Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (published under the pseudonym Philip Beauchamp), Chrestomathia, Defense of Economy against the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Finally, the chapter looks at Bentham's proposals for reform of the Poor Laws and his influence on the Poor Law Amendment Act.

Critics who were sceptical of the particular fusion of law and history in natural jurisprudence launched their assaults in the later eighteenth-century from within established religious denominations, or asserted the view that the anticipated reforms would fail, being insufficiently grounded on an accurate portrayal of human nature. The latter approach has been especially associated with Jeremy Bentham, who for many scholars has become the most prominent opponent of rights-based theories. This chapter reconsiders this view, charting Bentham’s view of natural rights from his earliest writings to the summary Constitutional codes developed for post-Napoleonic Europe. The Bentham who emerges, rather than being a consistent enemy of the kinds of declarations of rights that marked the American and French Revolutions, was instead building upon much of the jurisprudence he condemned in his rhetoric. The chapter revises the commonplace view of Bentham and his intellectual origins in consequence.

This essay examines the relation between law and morality with respect to a particular concept – a right. In opposition to the view defended by Jeremy Bentham and, more recently, Raymond Frey and L. W. Sumner that only institutionally conferred rights are real rights, the argument here is that moral rights are common parts of the conceptual apparatus of most, if not all, people when they make moral and political judgments. The point is not simply that many of these rights are ones people feel ought to be legal rights (their appropriateness as legislation is an additional feature); rather, the point is that people recoil at the violation of these rights as moral rights. This defense of moral rights, which invokes moral principles to establish truth claims about rights that have nothing necessarily to do with human institutions, is not guilty of reinterpreting those noninstitutional principles as if they were special institutional rules.

This chapter examines John Stuart Mill's legacy as an advocate of utilitarianism. Mill championed an open society, critical thinking, human dignity, and women's equality and produced immortal works such as Utilitarianism, On Liberty, On the Subjection of Women, and the thirty-three volume Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. The chapter first provides an overview of Mill's early life and education before discussing the ways that he was influenced by his father James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. It then considers how Mill, together with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, succeeded in framing a vision of a vibrant, individualistic liberalism replete with a healthy public sphere and grounded on the progress of civilization and happiness. It also explores Mill's views on subjects ranging from pleasure and the principle of utility to hedonism, liberty, colonization, poor relief, death penalty, and religion.

Is happiness compatible with suffering? The answer is complicated. Nothing can protect us from tragedies that destroy what we cherish most, and thereby undermine happiness. Yet much suffering can be integrated into happy lives, depending significantly on our attitudes. As is often said, suffering can deepen joy and meaning. Not surprising, philosophical perspectives on the value of suffering in good lives both reflect and shape conceptions of happiness. Examples include John Dewey, Jeremy Bentham, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

J. S. Mill’s famous ‘Mental Crisis’ is argued to have been prompted by editing Jeremy Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence. The Crisis, it is suggested, was brought on by Mill’s specifically aesthetic response to Bentham’s manuscripts.

A survey is presented of consequentialist views about the deontic relevance of motives, starting with Bentham's utilitarianism. Austin, Sidgwick and especially Mill seem to contend that motives are relevant to other moral judgments, but never to judgments about rightness or wrongness. However, it is argued that in fact a consequentialist can and should say that sometimes its motive makes a difference in an action's deontic status. This is because the motive of an action can (i) change the intrinsic value of the action itself; (ii) affect how an action is done, and thus alter its consequences; (iii) be of interest to others. Consequentialism can therefore assert that motives are sometimes relevant deontically because of their extrinsic relations, that is, their effects or consequences. An example is presented of how the motive of racism could be wrong‐making.

Presents some typical textbook formulations of hedonism. Shows that they are unacceptable as formulations of the view—they fail to state the intended view in a coherent and consistent way. A simple form of sensory hedonism—‘Default Hedonism’—is then presented. This formulation does not have the defects of typical textbook formulations. Default Hedonism provides a starting point for all the other forms of hedonism to be discussed in the book. Concludes with a somewhat speculative discussion of the hedonism of Aristippus.

This book presents biographical/philosophical sketches of the founders of classical utilitarianism such as William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. The great irony of the legacy of utilitarianism is that its name has long been an obstacle to its message, an irony compounded by the infatuation, in recent decades, with work in the area of “happiness studies,” an offshoot in many respects of the “positive psychology” movement that emphasizes the positive side of human nature. The influx of recent books on happiness has mostly not been matched by a serious interest in utilitarianism. This book revisits classical utilitarianism with the goal of highlighting some important aspects of it that have tended to be neglected or underestimated by both the critics and the professed supporters of utilitarianism, including many economists of the twentieth century.

Jeremy Bentham asserted, as a consequence of his hedonism, that push-pin is as good as poetry, push-pin being a popular but trivial game of his time. The question raised in Chapter 9 is: Is the push-pin player as good as the poetry reader in some moral sense of “good”? It might be argued that the poetry reader is better than the push-pin player, in some moral sense of better in that she is a better person, leading a life more worthy of a human being, by reading poetry rather than playing push-pin. But to argue thus is to be convinced that, as a matter of fact, poetry is better than push-pin, or one would have no grounds for claiming the poetry reader a “better” human being than the push-pin player. And if one believes that, then, it is argued, we have an explanation for disputes about taste.

This chapter reviews the book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography (2004), by Bart Schultz. If social good for all or most people is to be achieved, it will be because somehow or other the selfish decisions of many people combine to produce it. Such Utilitarian ideas, however, are but an amputated limb of the radical philosophy that once went by that name. For the three great British Utilitarians—Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick—the proper social goal was the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Sidgwick domesticated Utilitarianism and made it both academically and socially respectable, in the process smoothing its rough edges. Unlike Bentham and Mill, Sidgwick wanted badly to believe in conventional religion. He tried to prove the existence of a life after death scientifically, co-founding the Society for Psychical Research and devoting a great part of his later life to experiments that tested the claims of mediums, clairvoyants, and hypnotists. Sidgwick was also profoundly unconventional in matters of gender and sexuality.

This chapter deals with the facets of universal human rights, how they came to be, and to whom do they pertain to. It also argues that if human rights do exist, then as a consequence, human obligations come into play. The issue being addressed here, according to Bernard Williams, is regarding the implementation of human rights. Another contention indicated by Jeremy Bentham and Alasdair MacIntyre is the absurdity of human rights and the question of their ontological state which the chapter aims to analyze. It also includes discussions about positive and negative rights and the issue of freedom of speech, as cited from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.

This chapter deals with the value perspectives of the Cārvākas. Against the popular view that Cārvākas have no moral stand-point, it argues how they do have one. Yet, corresponding to the diversity in the Cārvāka epistemology, one has to acknowledge diversity in the value perspectives of the Cārvākas. The centrality of hedonism in the Cārvāka axiology is acknowledged, though such hedonism need not be restricted to its sensuous variety. This chapter also uses the parameters of pleasure used by Jeremy Bentham in his Hedonistic calculus in order to understand the nature of Cārvāka hedonism. Another important theme in the Cārvāka approach to values is their theory of puruṣārthas (human goals). This chapter argues that though Cārvākas do not accept dharma (religious morality based on scriptures) and mokṣa (emancipation) as substantial puruṣārthas they can be accepted as ‘modal goals’ in the Cārvāka scheme, whereas artha (wealth) and kāma (pleasure) would remain the substantial goals.

This book has explored some of the doubts and possibilities for different readings of the classical utilitarians, both positive and negative. It has shown how William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and others were forever engaged in tackling both the reasons—or the pleasures and pains—and the persons together, instead of separating them, in often breathtaking visions of a future of maximally happy beings who had through education and personal growth achieved their utilitarian potential. It has also discussed how utilitarianism had become more entangled in imperialistic politics at precisely the point when it lost its foundational philosophical confidence, when it was forced to confront the incoherence of its own accounts of such fundamental notions as happiness, reason, pleasure, and pain.

J. S. Mill’s argument for the Principle of Liberty is shaped by a concern with moral freedom. ‘Genius’—figuring things out for yourself—fosters moral freedom; Mill understands originality as a higher pleasure, because it will experienced as such by both ‘poetic’ and ‘analytic’ minds. However, the institutions Mill designed have failed to create the strong-willed individualists that he anticipated.