Everybody happier: we all want that, but at what cost?

The utilitarians Bentham and Mill came up with measuring the moral value of behaviour by its contribution to human happiness. An ambitious idea, but with serious shortcomings.

In addition to virtue ethics and deontology of the previous episodes, utilitarianism is the third classical ethical theory. Utilitarianism is an ethical movement that measures the moral value of an action by the contribution that action makes to the well-being and happiness of all people.

Without Immanuel Kant we probably would not have had deontology. T…