ABSTRACT
The primary British utilitarians are Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. They were extraordinarily successful in the UK in promoting the utilitarian doctrine as an ethical alternative to the theory of natural rights and the social contract. The principle of utility holds that an action is right if it will produce a greater amount of utility than any alternative and wrong if the contrary holds. Since one cannot know exactly what the consequences of actions will be, one must rely on probabilistic calculations. By utility the original theorists meant happiness, and by happiness they meant pleasure and the absence of pain. So, right actions will be ones that maximize the net amount of pleasure produced. However, Mill was very generous in what he thought could be included in that end. Anything that is, at first, only a means to pleasure can through a psychological process become part of the end. Thus accumulating money is a means to pleasure because of the uses to which money can be put. But the miser comes to love the money for its own sake and gets pleasure from merely possessing it. Mill believes that virtue and individuality can and should be desired for their own sake and thus become part of the end that people pursue. Obviously, he does not think that money should 154have this status. Furthermore, one can include in the idea of utility anything that one thinks is a good in itself. So if one believes that autonomy is a good in itself, one can adopt the consequential structure of utilitarian thinking and hold that right actions are those that maximize the actualization of autonomy. Utilitarianism is in this respect a maximizing or totalizing doctrine. Individuals and actions are good or bad depending on their contribution to a total amount of something. This contrasts with ethical doctrines that attach value to individuals in themselves. On such a view individuals may have rights quite independently of their contribution to a total and you are not entitled to violate those rights in order to increase the total. The pursuit of the good is subject to the constraint of a principle. One example would be a natural right to liberty.
