Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the moral view that actions are right if they promote overall happiness and wrong if they produce pain.

John Stuart Mill defines happiness in Utilitarianism as pleasure together with the absence of pain. Unhappiness is pain and the lack of pleasure. For Mill, happiness is the only thing desirable. Everything else is good only as a means to producing pleasure or preventing pain.

Utility or usefulness in morality is measured by how much an action increases this balance of pleasure over pain for everyone affected, not just for the person acting.

Mill insists that happiness is not just any pleasure. Intellectual, moral, and aesthetic pleasures are more valuable than purely bodily pleasures. He distinguishes intellectual, moral, and aesthetic pleasures from bodily or purely sensory pleasures. He argues that intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic pleasures are qualitatively better than sensory pleasures. He claims that competent people prefer pleasures with higher quality.

Each person’s happiness counts equally. No one’s happiness is more important than anyone else’s. Moral agents should consider the total and average happiness of their actions’ effects. It makes utilitarianism a broadly impartial and consequence‑focused theory.

Humans naturally care not only about their own pleasure but also about others, especially loved ones. Concern for others’ happiness is an integral part of each person’s own happiness. It narrows the gap between ‘my good’ and ‘the general good’. People eventually desire general happiness as a constituent of their own well-being.