# Utilitarianism **Utilitarianism** is the species of Consequentialism that identifies the good with **aggregate welfare**: an act is right insofar as it maximizes total happiness, preference-satisfaction, or well-being across all affected parties, counting each party's interests equally. Bentham gave it its calculating form — "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," with pleasure and pain as the measurable currency. Mill softened it by distinguishing higher from lower pleasures. Sidgwick made it rigorous. [[Peter Singer]] carried it into applied ethics and, through him, into [[Effective Altruism]]. ## The core moves - **Aggregation.** Welfare is summed across persons. One person's severe loss can be outweighed by many people's small gains. - **Impartiality.** No one's welfare counts extra, including your own and that of people near you. This is the source of both its moral power and its psychological difficulty. - **Maximization.** The right act is not a good-enough act; it is the *best available* act. There is no ceiling on obligation. - **Expected value.** Under uncertainty, multiply outcome by probability. This is the hinge on which [[Longtermism]] turns — vast hypothetical future populations dominate the arithmetic. ## Variants - **Act vs. rule** — evaluate each individual act, or evaluate the rule the act instantiates - **Hedonic vs. preference** — maximize pleasure, or maximize satisfied preferences - **Total vs. average** — maximize the sum of welfare, or the mean per person (these diverge sharply on population questions) ## Why it sits in this knowledge base Utilitarianism is not a right-wing doctrine and most utilitarians are not political actors. It appears here because it supplied the **operating logic** for the [[TESCREAL]] cluster and for [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]'s self-justification — a framework in which sufficiently large projected future payoffs can license nearly any present act. The critique is developed in [[Utilitarian Ethics and Its Discontents]]. ## Cross-references - Parent model: Consequentialism - Companion critique: [[Utilitarian Ethics and Its Discontents]] - Machinery: Utility, Trolley Problem - Rival model: Universal Law - Applications: [[Effective Altruism]], [[Longtermism]], [[Peter Singer]], [[William MacAskill]] > [!note] Stub > Expand: the demandingness objection, Rawls on the separateness of persons, Williams on integrity, the repugnant conclusion, and Bentham/Mill primary passages.