8 - UTILITARIANISM AND INTERNATIONAL ETHICS

Summary

Utilitarianism, in its modern form, is the detailed articulation of two basic premises. The first is that the only thing that is intrinsically good, or good in itself, is well-being. Other things may be good, of course, but only because they are conducive to well-being (or utility, as it is sometimes expressed). Over the question of what constitutes well-being utilitarians have differed. The most famous have identified it simply with happiness, but recent utilitarians, as we shall see, tend to reject this view. The second premise, whose modern theoretical articulation is known as consequentialism, is that that the only relevant factor in deciding whether any action or practice is morally right or wrong is its overall consequences, viewed impersonally. The agent is morally obliged to perform any action, no matter what, if and only if it has the best consequences or, as it is also put, if and only if it maximizes the good. These two thoughts yield the idea that all of our moral duties can be reduced to one: that we should try to maximize well-being or utility. The history of utilitarianism has been the attempt to articulate these thoughts in detail.

The Origins of Utilitarianism

Although utilitarianism is popularly thought of as a nineteenth-century British tradition, utilitarian thinking can be found as early as the late seventeenth century in the work of Richard Cumberland (1672).