Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Political Theory and Conceptual Change
- 2 Political Theory and the Problem of Anachronism
- 3 Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy
- 4 Rational Choice Political Theory
- 5 Republican Political Theory
- 6 Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Oppression
- 7 Postcolonialism and Political Theory
- 8 Legal Positivism and Political Power
- 9 Political Theory, International Theory, and the Political Theory of International Relations
- 10 Method Matters: Feminism, Interpretation and Politics
- 11 The Political Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari
- 12 The Object of Political Theory
- Index
3 - Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Political Theory and Conceptual Change
- 2 Political Theory and the Problem of Anachronism
- 3 Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy
- 4 Rational Choice Political Theory
- 5 Republican Political Theory
- 6 Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Oppression
- 7 Postcolonialism and Political Theory
- 8 Legal Positivism and Political Power
- 9 Political Theory, International Theory, and the Political Theory of International Relations
- 10 Method Matters: Feminism, Interpretation and Politics
- 11 The Political Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari
- 12 The Object of Political Theory
- Index
Summary
Utilitarianism is a doctrine which, in its standard nineteenth-century formulation, directs us to produce ‘the greatest happiness’. In its most useful modern reformulation, it is ‘the moral theory that judges the goodness of outcomes – and therefore the rightness of actions insofar as they affect outcomes – by the degree to which they secure the greatest benefit to all concerned’ (Hardin 1988: xv).
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory with political consequences. It is an ethical theory in the sense that it tells us what is right and wrong, good and bad. It is political in that some of its most central pronouncements touch upon the conduct of public life. Indeed, it purports to provide a complete political theory, a complete normative guide for the conduct of public affairs.
An ‘ethic’ is, strictly speaking, a theory of the good and bad, right and wrong. The term, however, has come to connote more narrowly a theory of right conduct at the level of personal conduct. Ethics has come to be seen, quintessentially, as an answer to the question of ‘What should I do?’ What is central to ethics thus understood is our intimate, individual affairs. What it is that is right for us to do jointly, in the conduct of our public lives, is seen to derive from that.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Political TheoryTradition and Diversity, pp. 67 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997