Utilitarianism

An ethical theory that evaluates actions by their consequences for overall well-being. It holds that the best choice produces the greatest net benefit across everyone affected.

Utility: A measure of the value, benefit, or satisfaction associated with an outcome. Utilitarian judgments compare outcomes by the well-being or benefit they produce.
Deontology: An ethical approach that assesses actions through duties, rules, or constraints rather than only their outcomes. It can forbid acts that utilitarian calculations might endorse for their aggregate benefits.
Jeremy Bentham: An English philosopher and legal reformer who developed a systematic form of utilitarianism. Bentham formulated utility as a basis for legislation and moral judgment.
Cost–benefit analysis: A decision method that compares the monetary value of a policy’s expected benefits and costs. It translates welfare comparisons into a practical tool for evaluating public policies.
Interpersonal utility comparison: The problem of comparing the well-being or utility of different people. Aggregation requires some account of how one person’s gain compares with another’s loss.
Consequentialism: The ethical view that an action’s rightness depends on its consequences. Utilitarianism belongs to this broader family of consequence-based theories.
Kantian ethics: An ethical theory grounding moral duties in rational principles, especially respect for persons as ends. Kantian ethics rejects treating people merely as containers of aggregate welfare.
John Stuart Mill: A nineteenth-century English philosopher who defended utilitarianism and distinguished higher from lower pleasures. Mill revised the theory to address objections about the quality of pleasure.
Welfare economics: The branch of economics that studies how resource allocation affects social well-being. Its measures and criteria formalize questions about aggregate welfare and policy.
The repugnant conclusion: A population-ethics result in which a sufficiently large population with lives barely worth living outranks a smaller, very happy population. Total-welfare maximization can favor population outcomes many find deeply troubling.

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