utilitarianism

The name given by John Stuart Mill to a leading tradition of economic liberalism in political and moral philosophy and social theory. As a political and moral philosophy, utilitarianism is epitomized by a famous slogan coined by Jeremy Bentham , ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. The most sophisticated version is to be found in the work of the philosopher David Hume , but Hume's arguments equating goodness and utility are rejected by Adam Smith in his moral writings, even though Smith is often misleadingly cast as a utilitarian in modern sociological literature. Utilitarianism flourished in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain, but European and American thinkers propounded similar notions. Bentham and his followers argued that the respective ‘happinesses’ of each individual are additive (the so-called utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain) and that the test of the rightness of individual or social action is to maximize the sum of individual utility .

Utilitarians often erroneously justified both their moral doctrines and their advocacy of laissez-faire politics by means of an embryonic rational exchange theory of society, which goes back at least as far as the writings of Thomas Hobbes , and which is sometimes known as egoistic hedonism. It asserts that individual action is always the product of the pursuit of (implicitly selfish or self-referencing) pleasure and avoidance of pain. Later utilitarians include Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill himself, whose father James Mill had been a leading representative of the school in its heyday. John Stuart Mill struggled to retrieve some of the ambiguities and banalities to which the moral and social theory led, and because of his writings both on method and on substantive issues, he is sometimes considered as an early sociologist. However, most of the acknowledged founders of sociology were critical of the tradition of liberal political economy within which utilitarianism emerged, and which it helped to develop. As a result the label utilitarian is often somewhat indiscriminately applied (for example by Talcott Parsons in The Structure of Social Action) to the whole tradition of economistic methods and theories in social science.