UTILITARIANISM • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Utilitarianism

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

Listen

Utilitarianism

noun

Doctrine that the useful is the good; especially as elaborated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; the aim was said to be the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

See images of 'Utilitarianism'

Etymology of 'Utilitarianism'

Share |

"Utilitarianism" Quotes from Famous Books

... themselves in minute details. Mill became the leader of Bentham's bodyguard; or, rather, the mediator between the prophet in his 'hermitage' and the missionaries who were actively engaged on the hustings and in committee-rooms. The special characteristics of English Utilitarianism in the period of its greatest activity were thus more affected by Mill than by any other ...

— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... (of the Manners and Principles of the Times), the author was a clergyman noted also for his defence of utilitarianism in answer to Shaftesbury (Lecky, Hist. Eng. in ...

— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Utilitarianism has extinguished in Mars the use of compliment and circumlocution; and until I concluded, their looks of mild perplexity showed that neither Zulve nor her husband caught my purpose. I fancied—for, not daring to look them in the face, I had turned my downcast ...

— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... peoples who built them! Even the sound of their names expresses a certain racial difference. Paris is the concrete expression of the gaiety, regard for symmetry, love of art, and, I might well add, of the morality of the French people. London stands for the conservatism, the solidarity, the utilitarianism, and, I might well add, the hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon. It may sound odd to speak of the morality of the French, if not of the hypocrisy of the English; but this seeming paradox impresses me as a deep truth. I saw many things in Paris which were immoral ...

— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... judging whether I myself correctly apprehend the doctrine which I am about to criticise. If, then, I were myself an Utilitarian, and, for the sake either of vindicating my own belief, or of making converts of other people, had undertaken to explain what Utilitarianism is, I should set about the task somewhat in ...

— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... [Footnote 1: The narrow utilitarianism of the governmental policy in the Jewish question may also be illustrated by the official attitude towards the promotion of agriculture among the Jews. Under Alexander I. and Nicholas I. Jewish agricultural colonization in the South of Russia ...

— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

Words linked to "Utilitarianism" : school of thought, ism, philosophical system, doctrine, philosophy