This chapter of the handbook posits utilitarianism as a standard of rational moral judgment. The author does not directly defend utilitarianism as a theory but investigates cases of apparent contradiction between people’s moral decisions (sometimes grounded in nonutilitarian principles) and the consequences of those decisions that they themselves would consider worse for themselves and everybody else. For example, when some people use a moral principle (e.g., bodily autonomy) to assertively make a decision (e.g., to not get vaccinated), it has negative moral consequences for others (e.g., infecting people) and for themselves (risking infection). The author asks whether such contradictions in moral reasoning can provide insights into some of the determinants of such reasoning. These insights, importantly, are valuable even for those who do not adopt utilitarianism as a normative model. From over a dozen candidate moral contradictions, the author concludes that many deviations from utilitarian considerations in moral contexts are reflections of familiar nonmoral cognitive biases, but some arise from adherence to strong moral rules or principles (e.g., protected or sacred values).

This chapter of the handbook introduces some core elements of moral decision making by framing it from one particular perspective: expected utility theory. In its classic form, expected utility theory focuses on the outcomes of actions: the expected utility of a decision is the sum of the values associated with the different possible outcomes of the decision weighted by the probability of their occurrence. As such, expected utility theory is well suited to explain the moral choices recommended by utilitarianism, which characterizes right actions in terms of the maximization of aggregate utility. As the authors point out, however, expected utility theory can be also used to model nonutilitarian decision making by assigning utilities to actions themselves, not just their outcomes. This action-based form of expected utility theory can readily accommodate the fact that people tend to assign low utility to actions that violate moral norms. Further, action-based expected utility theory can explain a wide range of phenomena revealed by empirical research on moral decision making, such as interpersonal disagreement about fairness, in-group bias, and outcome neglect.

In the early years of neoclassical economics, agents were pleasure-seekers and their marginal utility for a good diminished continuously as consumption increased. This psychology ensured that agents could optimize and identify smooth trade-offs. Later generations abandoned this utilitarian inheritance in favor of a theory of rationality, but they had no replacement explanation for why agents can always order their options from best to worst. The same pattern has recurred in the theory of choice under uncertainty. In early theories, agents have preferences over lotteries where outcomes have known or objective probabilities. But once economists recognized the primacy of idiosyncratic risks, they turned to theories where agents form preferences based on their judgments of the likelihood of outcomes. These theories of subjective probability cannot explain why agents are capable of making these judgments. And if agents cannot pin down subjective probabilities they will not able to order their options. More broadly, agents face different classes of decisions, some where they are guided by an ordering principle that shows how to weigh their options and others where agents cannot judge trade-offs and form preferences.

The social welfare function furnishes the primary tool of normative economics: It aggregates the utilities of different agents, by summing them for example. That technique is no longer available when preferences are incomplete since agents then cannot be modeled by utility functions. Agents can however have well-defined utility functions for groups of goods, though they will not know how to weigh the functions for different groups against one another. A policymaker can aggregate these utilities across agents and thus pin down a unique normatively optimal allocation for each group of goods. Government policies are usually debated in this fashion. Rather than solve a global welfare optimization problem, governments and advocates attack each domain of policymaking separately, whether it be education or health. The chapter’s approach illustrates Sen’s criticisms of welfarism.

The first chapter traces the notion of “art for art’s sake” to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who first engaged with questions of aesthetics in the early 1850s. In their attempts to account for the evolution of the sense of beauty – an adaptation with no obvious survival value – both writers exempted a wide swath of aesthetic activities from the natural laws of scarcity and struggle that governed other areas of biological life. This chapter argues that their evolutionary explanations for beauty (the theories of sexual selection and “play," respectively) thus laid the scientific groundwork for later conceptions of aesthetic experience as escapist, salutary, and therefore beneficial for the species. The chapter concludes with an analysis of selected literary works by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith, whose respective corpuses illustrate the diffuse impact of these ideas on literary evocations of the beautiful.

This chapter examines the aversion to theories and programs of natural rights in much mainstream nineteenth-century British political discourse. Following on the heels of their Enlightenment and revolutionary efflorescence, writers in Great Britain articulated various critiques of natural rights philosophies and declarations. Moving from early critics such as Burke and Bentham to later Victorian writers and statesmen – most importantly, J. S. Mill – the chapter traces several threads of skepticism toward natural rights. British writers, it argues, were preoccupied less with the unsound conceptual foundations of natural rights theories than with the perceived consequences of belief in natural rights, which was seen as leading in anarchic, destabilizing, and antinomian directions. Natural rights platforms, it was contended, appealed to passion, ignored context and the weighing of costs and benefits, and undermined both the rule of law and state authority. In addition, natural rights theories were perceived by critics to be connected to a range of worrying trends (democratization and the rise of socialism, among others). Natural rights theories, furthermore, stood in stark contrast to the utilitarian and historicist attitudes towards law and government which prevailed in Britain during these decades. Finally, the conclusion offers a glance at nineteenth-century France, contrasting the loyalty toward natural rights across the Channel with British hostility, and revealing that many of the fears that Britons articulated about the dissemination of natural rights ideas were harbored by the French with regard to the spread of consequentialism.

How we should treat nonhuman animals is one of the most important environmental questions that we face. Although most people think of humans as having a qualitatively different moral status than nonhuman animals, there is no morally significant criterion for membership in the moral community that is satisfied by all and only humans. If the criterion is demanding enough (e.g., language), it excludes some humans; if it is permissive enough to include all humans (e.g., sentience), it includes some nonhumans. The discovery that “speciesism” is indefensible opens the door to a range of strong animal-protection philosophies – for example, Peter Singer’s “animal liberation,” which is founded on utilitarianism, and Christine Korsgaard’s “fellow creatures” view, which has a Kantian foundation. These views converge in concluding that many of the ways that we treat animals are wrong.

Normative ethics is divided between ethical theory and practical ethics. Three families of ethical theories are consequentialism, virtue ethics, and Kantianism. Consequentialism is the view that consequences determine what we ought to do. Virtue ethics is the view that right actions should be understood in terms of virtuous agents and their character. Kantianism’s central concern is with how rational agents ought to relate to themselves and to each other. Ethical theory is difficult to disentangle from practical ethics, which is concerned with what we ought to do in particular situations, which – along with the question “How should I live?” – is the most important topic in ethics and perhaps all of philosophy.

Using the essays of John Stuart Mill and other classical utilitarians as touchstones, this essay tracks some of the most politically charged shifts in the Victorian political essay, underscoring the significance of issues of racism and imperialism for coming to terms with the genre. The first two sections provide introductory historical background on the cultural and literary significance of the utilitarians, and detail some important ethical and political dimensions of Mill’s philosophical framework. The remaining sections analyse two singularly revealing essayistic encounters: Mill’s exchanges with Thomas Carlyle over the so-called ‘Negro’ question, and Henry Sidgwick’s assessment of the work of Charles Henry Pearson on national life and character. The striking difference between the political essaying of Mill and that of his utilitarian disciple Sidgwick on matters of imperialistic racism is indicative of some of the evasive literary tactics that have been all too influential, from their era to ours.

This chapter challenges the idea that rural communities have “declined.” It argues that the term, “decline,” discounts how laws and policies have actively facilitated rural marginalization and socioeconomic distress for decades. “Decline” reframes an active phenomenon as one that occurred passively, making current rural challenges seem natural and inevitable. The chapter assesses how twentieth- and twenty-first-century federal and state laws and policies undermined traditional rural livelihoods in agriculture, natural resource and energy development, and manufacturing. The chapter then provides a legal history of transportation and telecommunications deregulation, and the role deregulation played in exacerbating geographic inequality. Overall, the chapter proposes that instead of declining, rural communities have been undermined, as policymakers have consciously traded rural welfare for some other perceived benefit. While those trade-offs may have afforded tangible societal benefits in some fashion, the decline framing discounts how rural communities were in fact knowingly sacrificed in the name of the greater good.

The chapter discusses the influence of utilitarianism on education. It begins by introducing the core principles of utilitarianism. The chapter then argues that it is possible to distinguish between two major strands within the utilitarian view of education: one that focuses on promoting the happiness of each individual, and the other on enhancing the happiness of the greatest number by creating facilitating social conditions for it. Each of these two strands is separately examined. The chapter also maintains that the second strand had a lasting impact on education that finds its clearest current expression in the emphasis on education’s role in economic development. Finally, the chapter suggests that reviving certain traditional forms of utilitarianism has significant potential to improve education.