For as long as I can remember, it has seemed obvious to me that our fundamental moral obligation is to do the best we can – to make the world as good as we can make it. Naturally, I was delighted when I discovered that many others – the utilitarians – maintained approximately the same view. However, my delight turned to consternation when I began to look more closely at the philosophical literature on utilitarianism. One tremendous problem was that the received formulations of the view fail to express the utilitarian insight. Indeed, most received formulations fail to express any insight – they are simply incoherent, as Hector-Neri Castafieda showed in a series of brilliant papers published in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Utilitarianism has been linked to hedonism since the time of Bentham and Mill. The fundamental insight of hedonism (“pleasure is The Good”) seemed attractive, too. Yet again when I took a look at the literature on hedonism I discovered near chaos. There was enormous confusion about the nature of pleasure, and equally great confusion about precisely what hedonists would want to say about pleasure, assuming that they could reach any agreement about what it is. I could not find a clear statement of the intended theory of value.

Furthermore, even if these underlying conceptual difficulties could be solved, it appeared that the resulting normative theory would surely confront the most troublesome of moral objections.