ABSTRACT
The utilitarian theory examines from various points of view may be summarized that happiness is the only thing that is good in itself. The resistance to the utilitarian theory and its premiss that happiness is the only thing that is morally good in itself seems to stem largely, if not entirely, from the capacity that people have to misunderstand and caricature what the theory involves and leads to. The main purpose of these opening chapters has been to introduce the theory in such a way as to enable to point out the misconceptions involved in traditional criticisms of utilitarianism, so that the reader may conclude: 'the premiss is as plausible as any Dr Robin Barrow can think of, and the theory that derives from it turns out to be intuitively convincing, and its implications far from the counter-intuitive set of prescriptions and practices that have popularly been supposed to follow from it'.
