ABSTRACT
The origins of utilitarian thinking can be found in the fifth-century BC in Plato's dialogues with Protagoras, a Thracian philosopher, this moral theory was most famously advanced by Jeremy Bentham as he argued that moral actions are those which produce 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' of people. Utilitarian philosophy establishes appropriate behaviour – 'what is good to do' – on the grounds of social usefulness, and it judges actions by their consequences. It stipulates that 'the good' is human happiness, not some abstract metaphysical property like the idea of 'natural rights', which Bentham famously dismissed as 'nonsense on stilts' or an empirically unknowable object, as in the will of God. The utilitarian justification of punishment is that the wrong experienced by the offender is outweighed by the compensating good effects for overall human well-being. Utilitarian philosophy also informed Bentham's famous Panopticon prison design in 1787.
