How original was the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham? In John Stuart Mill's opinion, not very original at all. Bentham maintained that pleasure and pain should provide our chief criteria of the moral quality of actions, because they are important above all other things in making our lives go well or ill. But two thousand years before Bentham defended the doctrine of utility that ‘all things are good or evil, by virtue solely of the pain or pleasure which they produce”, a gentle and cultivated man had taught in a garden at Athens that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the most fitting objectives in the life of the wise man. The name of this sage, who endeavoured to provide in his own career an exemplar of his doctrine, was Epicurus of Samos. On Mill's reading of history, utilitarianism and Epicureanism were in essential respects the same.

On certain plausible views, if humanity were to unanimously decide to cause its own extinction, this would not be wrong, since there is no one whom this act would wrong. We argue this is incorrect. Causing human extinction would still wrong someone; namely, our forebears who sacrificed life, limb and livelihood for the good of posterity, and whose sacrifices would be made less morally worthwhile by this heinous act.

This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor's essay, Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually allowed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely a liberal defence of legal equality; it is a positive statement of the inadequacy of ‘male” conceptions of reason and its powers. So understood, I shall argue, it coheres with Mill's other moral and political writings, and draws much of its persuasive power from the doctrines advanced in Harriet Taylor's Enfranchisement of Women.

It is plausible to think that there exist acts of supererogation (acts that are morally optional and morally better than the minimum that morality demands). It also seems plausible that there is a close connection between what we are morally required to do and what it would be morally good to do. Despite being independently plausible these two claims are hard to reconcile. My aim in this article will be to respond to a recent solution to this puzzle proposed by Dale Dorsey. Dorsey's solution to this problem is to posit a new account of supererogation. I will argue that Dorsey's account fails to succeed in achieving what an account of supererogation is supposed to achieve.

In his recent book, Killing in War, Jeff McMahan sets out a number of conditions for a person to be liable to attack, provided the attack is used to avert an objectively unjust threat: (1) The threat, if realized, will wrongfully harm another; (2) the person is responsible for creating the threat; (3) killing the person is necessary to avert the threat, and (4) killing the person is a proportionate response to the threat. The present article focuses on McMahan's second condition, which links liability with responsibility. McMahan's use of the responsibility criterion, the article contends, is too restrictive as an account of liability in general and an account of liability to be killed in particular. In order to defend this claim, the article disambiguates the concept of liability and explores its role in the philosophical analysis of the permission to cause harm to others.

Act-consequentialism is usually taken to be the view that we ought to perform the act that will have the best consequences. But this definition ignores the possibility of various non-maximizing forms of act-consequentialism, e.g. satisficing theories that tell us to perform the act whose consequences will be good enough. What seems crucial to act-consequentialism is not that we ought to maximize value but that the normative status of alternative actions depends solely on the values of their outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to spell out this dependency claim and argue that it should be seen as the denning feature of act-consequentialism. In particular, I will defend the definition against certain objections that purport to show that the definition is too wide and too narrow.

Why is pain bad? The most straightforward theory of pain's badness, dolorism, appeals to the phenomenal quality of displeasure. In spite of its explanatory appeal, the view is too straightforward to capture two central puzzles, namely pain that is enjoyed and pain that is not painful (e.g. pain asymbolia). These cases can be captured by conditionalism, which makes the badness of displeasure conditional on an agent's attitude. But conditionalism fails where dolorism succeeds with explanatory appeal. A new approach is proposed, reverse conditionalism, which maintains the explanatory appeal of dolorism, but gives attitudes a value-defeating role. It is argued that this view does best in fulfilling the desiderata and capturing the cases.

Agnes's brakes fail. Should she continue straight into the busy intersection or should she swerve into the field? Add to the story, what Agnes does not and cannot know, that continuing into the intersection will cause no harm, whereas swerving into the apparently empty field will cause a death. I evaluate arguments for the claim that she should enter the intersection, i.e. for objectivism about right and wrong; and arguments for the claim that she should swerve, i.e. for subjectivism about right and wrong, and conclude that subjectivism is more plausible. I also consider the view that ‘ought’ and ‘wrong’ are systematically ambiguous, that she subjectively ought to swerve and that she objectively ought to enter the intersection. I argue that most versions of this suggestion are unworkable, and that even the best version is less plausible than pure subjectivism.

In a recent article, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve present an argument against the so-called ‘Priority View’ of distribution. According to that view, as stated by Derek Parfit, ‘benefiting people matters more the worse off these people are’, by virtue of the fact that a person's utility has ‘diminishing marginal moral importance’ the better off she is. Otsuka and Voorhoeve claim that, because this view fails to reflect a significant difference between the intrapersonal and the interpersonal, it should be rejected.

Richard Arneson has proposed that prioritarianism be adjusted to incorporate considerations of individual desert. For those inclined to accept prioritarianism, this refinement seems intuitive: Shouldn't we give priority both to those who are worse off and to those at a higher desert level? This article considers the viability of desert-modulated prioritarianism using the framework of claims-across-outcomes (‘claims’). I have previously used this framework to provide a unified defence of the Pareto and Pigou–Dalton axioms. With further, plausible, axioms, we arrive at prioritarianism. Should the strength of an individual's claim depend upon her desert? If so, we should accept a new axiom, Priority for the More Deserving. But Priority for the More Deserving can conflict with the Pareto axioms, if desert is intrapersonally variable rather than fixed. We should therefore reject Priority for the More Deserving and conclude that desert-modulated prioritarianism is a non-starter.

Bentham and J. S. Mill can be regarded as utilitarian tax-reformers distinguished from political economists who were simply averse to taxation. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the difference between Bentham's and Mill's tax reform programmes. Bentham proposed the law of escheat and a tax on bankers' and stock dealers' profits, subject to the principle of least sacrifice of enjoyment. He also planned to correct the inequality of the land tax by extending it into a general income tax. Mill proposed an income tax on the basis of the principle of equal sacrifice of enjoyment. He also proposed a progressive inheritance tax and a variable land tax, regarding unearned income as a fit subject for a special tax. Consequently, Mill used Bentham's ideas and tools to take a step towards a more egalitarian programme.

According to a widely held view, people's commitments to laws are dependent on the existence in their community of a conventional practice of complying with certain fundamental laws. This conventionalism has significantly hampered our attempts to explain the normative practice of law. Ronald Dworkin has argued against conventionalism by bringing up the phenomenon of persistent fundamental legal controversies, but neither Dworkin nor his legal positivist respondents have correctly understood the real significance of such controversies. This article argues that such controversies pose a deep challenge to any conception of our legal practice as a genuinely normative, rule-mediated, practice. The article also argues that what is needed to deflect this challenge is a new understanding – different from the widely held conventionalist understanding – of how people's commitments to laws are predicated on their fellows’ like commitments.

In the years 1829 and 1830 there appeared in Geneva a short-lived journal called l'Utilitaire, edited by Antoine-Élysée Cherbuliez. In the preface to the first issue, the editor wrote that he was working ‘in the spirit of Bentham’, but did not wish to found a party tied to Bentham's name. He wished to emulate Bentham's thinking in so far as it was synonymous with a detached, neutral perspective on the world, a viewpoint superior to the strife of factions. Having spoken eulogisti-cally of Bentham in these terms, the writer added that a well-merited share of the Englishman's glory belonged to Dumont. The names of Jeremy Bentham and Étienne Dumont ‘must no more be separated than those of Kepler and Newton’. After giving some consideration to the question of why Dumont's work was so important for Bentham, I shall concentrate in this article on why the Genevan became so committed to the task of disseminating the utilitarian thought of his English mentor. I will be focusing on the initial stages of Dumont's editorial and translation work in the 1790s and will not be attempting here to give a comprehensive history of a relationship that lasted nearly forty years.

Utilitarianism continues to vex its critics even in the absence of generally respected arguments in its favour. I suggest that utilitarianism survives largely because of its welfarism. This explains why it survives without the backing of respected arguments. It survives without such arguments because justifying the value of welfare requires no such argument.

It is widely held that it is only contingent that the sensation of pain is disliked, and that when pain is not disliked, it is not intrinsically bad. This conjunction of claims has often been taken to support a subjectivist view of pain's badness on which pain is bad simply because it is the object of a negative attitude and not because of what it feels like. In this article, I argue that accepting this conjunction of claims does not commit us to this subjectivist view. They are compatible with an objectivist view of pain's badness, and with thinking that this badness is due to its phenomenal quality. Indeed, I argue that once the full range of options is in view, the most plausible account of pain is incompatible with subjectivism about value.

This article examines Bentham's contribution to anti-colonial thought in the context of the development of the British radical movement that attacked colonialism on the grounds that it advantaged what Bentham called the ‘Few’ at the expense of the ‘Many’. It shows that Bentham was influenced as much by Josiah Tucker and James Anderson as by Adam Smith. Bentham's early economic critique is examined, and the sharp changes in his arguments after 1800 assessed, in the context of the American and French Revolutions and the effects of British industrialization. The article also highlights the importance of Bentham's writings inspired by the Spanish colonial crisis of the early 1820s. They show developments in his economic analysis and include some very acute discussions of the psychological satisfactions that elites could gain from colonialism. The article ends with a brief comparison between Bentham and later radical thinkers to put his ideas in context.

It is well known that John Stuart Mill (JSM) repeatedly acknowledges Harriet Taylor Mill's (HTM) substantial contribution to On Liberty. After her death, however, he decides to publish the book under his name only. Are we justified in continuing this practice, initiated by JSM, of refusing unequivocal co-authorship status to HTM? Drawing on stylometric analyses, we make a preliminary case that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM had a hand in formulating it. Drawing on plausible standards for authorship ascription, we further point out that authorship status requires, in addition to a substantial contribution, the approval by all contributors. We discuss potential reasons to assume that HTM did not approve the published version of On Liberty and would have objected to including her name on the title page.

Between 1787, and the end of his life in 1832, Bentham turned his attention to the development and application of economic ideas and principles within the general structure of his legislative project. For seventeen years this interest was manifested through a number of books and pamphlets, most of which remained in manuscript form, that develop a distinctive approach to economic questions. Although Bentham was influenced by Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he neither adopted a Smithian vocabulary for addressing questions of economic principle and policy, nor did he accept many of the distinctive features of Smith's economic theory. One consequence of this was that Bentham played almost no part in the development of the emerging science of political economy in the early nineteenth century. The standard histories of economics all emphasize how little he contributed to the mainstream of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century debate by concentrating attention on his utilitarianism and the psychology of hedonism on which it is premised. Others have argued that the calculating nature of his theory of practical reason reduced the whole legislative project to a crude attempt to apply economics to all aspects of social and political life. Put at its simplest this argument amounts to the erroneous claim that Bentham's science of legislation is reducible to the science of political economy. A different but equally dangerous error would be to argue that because Bentham's conception of the science of legislation comprehends all the basic forms of social relationships, there can be no science of political economy as there is no autonomous sphere of activity governed by the principles of economics. This approach is no doubt attractive from an historical point of view given that the major premise of this argument is true, and that many of Bentham's ‘economic’ arguments are couched in terms of his theory of legislation. Yet it fails to account for the undoubted importance of political economy within Bentham's writings, not just on finance, economic policy, colonies and preventive police, but also in other aspects of his utilitarian public policy such as prison reform, pauper management, and even constitutional reform. All of these works reflect a conception of political economy in its broadest terms. However, this conception of political economy differs in many respects from that of Bentham's contemporaries, and for this reason Bentham's distinctive approach to problems of economics and political economy has largely been misunderstood.

Aristotle's ethical theory is often seen as instructing agents in the prudent pursuit of their own well-being, and therefore labeled egoistic. Yet it is also subject to the opposing charge of failing to direct agents to their well-being, directing them instead to perfection. I am here concerned chiefly with the second criticism, and proceed as follows: I first articulate Sumner's version of the criticism, and second assess his argument for his own (subjective) account of well-being. Third, I present reasons motivating a more objective account of well-being, reasons for taking another look at Aristotle. Finally, granting that Aristotle does indeed direct agents to pursue their perfection, I argue that perfection includes well-being within it. This shows how Aristotle escapes the second criticism, while at the same time pointing the way toward a defense against the first.

This article argues that, contrary to the received view, prioritarianism and egalitarianism are not jointly incompatible theories in normative ethics. By introducing a distinction between weighing and aggregating, the authors show that the seemingly conflicting intuitions underlying prioritarianism and egalitarianism are consistent. The upshot is a combined position, equality-prioritarianism, which takes both prioritarian and egalitarian considerations into account in a technically precise manner. On this view, the moral value of a distribution of well-being is a product of two factors: the sum of all individuals' priority-adjusted well-being, and a measure of the equality of the distribution in question. Some implications of equality-prioritarianism are considered.