“Utility”

Abstract

“Utility,” in plain English, means usefulness. In Australia, a ute is a useful vehicle. Jeremy Bentham specialized the meaning to a particular sort of usefulness. “By utility,” he said, “is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered” (1823, p. 2). The “principle of utility” is the principle that actions are to be judged by their usefulness in this sense: their tendency to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness. When John Stuart Mill (1969, p. 213) spoke of the “perfectly just conception of Utility or Happiness, considered as the directive rule of human conduct,” he was using “Utility” as a short name for this principle. “The greatest happiness principle” was another name for it. People who subscribed to this principle came to be known as utilitarians.