ABSTRACT
"Utilitarianism" is the name of a family of ethical theories that take as the yardstick of moral appraisal the propensity of acts to increase or decrease human well-being. Emerging to prominence in the European Enlightenment, utilitarianism was, and continues to this day to be, a secular, pragmatic and humane philosophy which favours reason and experience rather than religion or tradition as the paramount guides to the ethical life. The important thing is to advance "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" – an uncompromising egalitarian stance that predictably raised enemies for utilitarianism from the start. Radical, ambitious and optimistic, early utilitarianism aimed to reform or, in the irremediable cases, eliminate institutions and practices that impeded human happiness. Utilitarianism has sometimes been accused of being a philosophy of the head rather than of the heart – and even, to its fiercest critics, a source of greater evils than it aims to fix.
