Timeline of utilitarianism

This is a timeline of utilitarianism.

Sample questions

The following are some interesting questions that can be answered by reading this timeline:

Big picture

Time period	Development summary	More details
Middle age		"Utilitarianism during the Christian Middle Ages was not a philosophy; but it was occasionally a style of argument. St Thomas Aquinas held that a state might legitimately permit prostitution to avert greater ills (he presumably thought the damnation of one prostitute less serious than that of many adulterous wives). And Richard of St Victor employed what we should now call ‘rule-utilitarian’ reasoning to defend the secrecy of the confessional."
18th century		Utilitarianism emerges as a distinct ethical position. In the late century, theological utilitarianism finds important defenders in Joseph Priestley and William Paley.
19th century		Utilitarianism is fully articulated.
20th century		In the 1970s, utilitarian ethics is revived by Peter Singer and Derek Parfit.

Numerical and visual data

Google Trends

The chart below shows Google Trends data for Utilitarianism (Topic), from 2004 to October 2022, when the screenshot was taken. Interest is also ranked by country and displayed on world map.

Full timeline

Year	Event type	Details
341 BC	Notable birth	Epicurus is born. His ethical teachings would have an indirect impact on the philosophy of utilitarianism in England during the nineteenth century.
c.470	Notable birth	Chinese philosopher Mozi is born. The founder of the school of Mohism, he would held a utilitarian status describing heaven as primary moral authority. Mozi would state: "universal love is really the way of the sage-kings. It is what gives peace to the rulers and sustenance to the people."
1672	Literature	English philosopher Richard Cumberland publishes De legibus naturae (On natural laws), which propounds utilitarianism and opposes the egoistic ethics of Thomas Hobbes.
1725		Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson first introduces a key utilitarian phrase in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue: "when choosing the most moral action, the amount of virtue in a particular action is proportionate to the number of people such brings happiness to". Hutcheson is the first to speak of the greatest happiness of the greatest number; more importantly, he is considered the earliest writer to enunciate a philosophy that can without qualification be termed "utilitarian".
1728		Susanna Newcome publishes An Enquiry into the Evidence of the Christian Religion, which contains an early formulation of utilitarian thought. Newcome offers a utilitarian account of the nature of ethics and our moral duties by synthesizing contemporary developments in natural theology and moral psychology.
1730	Literature	English philosopher John Gay publishes essay entitled Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality, in which he argues that he is the first modern philosopher to claim that universal happiness is the aim of moral action. Gay, who claimed to be a disciple of Locke, can be considered as the founder of utilitarian morality.
1731		John Gay publishes In Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality. Some would claim that he developed the first systematic theory of utilitarian ethics.
1739		David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he writes: There is no such passion as the love of mankind, merely as such; yet if we are not capable of loving humanity in the abstract, we are able to feel an altruistic concern even about total strangers once we are brought into contact with them. Hume is considered an early utilitarian, but conservative in politics.
1743	Notable birth	William Paley is born. J. B. Schneewind (1977) would write that "utilitarianism first became widely known in England through the work of William Paley."
1748	Notable birth	Jeremy Bentham is born.
1749	Literature	David Hartley publishes his Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations. While perhaps not definitely preparing the way for the utilitarian doctrine in so far as it would be destined to make possible the formation of autonomous moral sciences, Hartley wishes to found a 'psychology', a theory of human and animal intelligence, a branch of 'natural philosophy', a science which, when once the 'general laws' which govern ' phenomena ' have been discovered by means of ' analysis', will be of a deductive or ' synthetic' character. Hartley openly introduces Newton's method and terminology into psychology.
1751	Literature	David Hume publishes An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in which he views sympathy as the fact of human nature lying at the basis of all social life and personal happiness.
1755		"Hutcheson’s posthumously published book A System of Moral Philosophy (1755) repeats, in essence, the utilitarian content of the Inquiry, but is notable for its more subtle treatment of the nature of the good life, wherein it anticipates not so much Bentham as J.S.Mill. One important feature of the good life is that it will be a virtuous life. In Hutcheson’s view, ‘to maintain the calm and most extensive affection toward the universal happiness, able to control all narrower affections when there is any opposition, and the sacrificing all narrow interests to the most extensive…is the highest perfection of human virtue’ (Hutcheson 1755: vol. 1, 243)."
1764		Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria's influential treatise on the criminal law advocates "the greatest happiness divided among the greatest number".
1774		French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius states that "wise laws would be able without doubt to bring about the miracle of a universal happiness". Helvétius, like François-Jean de Chastellux, exemplifies utilitarianism in pre-revolutionary France. Both are deeply committed to the improvement of the condition of the poor and believe that governments have a duty to foster the general good. For these writers, as for others of their compatriots, utilitarianism is primarily a political philosophy and less a theory of personal morality.
1774		François-Jean de Chastellux writes: "It is an indisputable point, (or at least, there is room to think it, in this philosophical age, an acknowledged truth)" in his essay De la félicité publique, "that the first object of all governments, should be to render the people happy".
1776	Literature	Jeremy Bentham publishes his Fragment on Government, which first attempts to apply the principle of utility in a systematic and methodical manner to the theory of government.
1776	Literature	Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations, which tries to solve the economic problem by taking his stand on the principle of utility.
1780		"Works like An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780) and A Table of the Springs of Action (1815) accordingly discuss the variety of human motivations, and attempt to demonstrate their reducibility to the promptings of the ‘two sovereign masters’, pleasure and pain (Bentham 1789:1)."
1781		According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the neologism ‘utilitarian’ occurs for the first time in a letter of [[wikipedia:Jeremy Bentham|Jeremy Bentham]] of this year, where a certain clergyman is described as ‘a very worthy creature…a naturalist, a chemist, a physician’—and ‘a utilitarian’.
1785	Literature	English philosopher William Paley publishes The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, which applies the principle of utility to the problems of morals and of theology. Paley defines happiness as a sum of pleasures, which differ only in their duration and intensity, or, more exactly, as the excess of a sum of pleasures over a sum of pains. He thinks that moral actions differ from immoral actions by their tendency, and that the criterium of law is utility. Some identify Paley as a co-developer with Bentham of the principles of utilitarianism.
1787		In his first attempt at political economy, Jeremy Bentham adopts the fundamental ideas of Adam Smith.
1789	Literature	Jeremy Bentham publishes An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which defines the principle of utility as “that property in any object whereby it tends to produce pleasure, good or happiness, or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.” Bentham writes "The principle of utility…approves or disapproves of every action according to the tendency it appears to have to increase or lessen—i.e. to promote or oppose—the happiness of the person or group whose interest is in question."
1793		German philosopher Immanuel Kant defines "Enlightenment" (Aufklärung) as the "exit by man from his own selfimposed minority", when he begins to rely on his own understanding and rejects the guidance of others. According to Scarre (1996), utilitarian moral thought would be "enlightened" in this Kantian sense: utilitarians would refuse to be guided by authority, and insisted on working out their own positions from first principles.
1793		"Yet Godwin was a less consistent utilitarian than he aspired to be. He could unblushingly declare that ‘Few things have contributed more to undermine the energy and virtue of the human species, than the supposition that we have a right, as it has been phrased, to do what we will with our own’ (Godwin 1793:86). But he also claimed that ‘Every man has a certain sphere of discretion, which he has a right to expect should not be infringed by his neighbours’ (89). Godwin felt a deep respect for individual liberty of thought and action which he never quite succeeded in squaring with his maximising views."
1794		"Marquis de Condorcet, who believed passionately in the perfectibility of man and the possibility (under suitable arrangements) of true human happiness on earth. Writing in the shadow of the guillotine, Condorcet looked forward to a future epoch of the world in which no one would go hungry, when all illnesses could be cured and life expectancy increased without limit, slaves would be freed and women gain equality with men, war would be abolished and the arts and education flourish (Condorcet 1794)."
1806	Notable birth	John Stuart Mill is born.
1811	Literature	Jeremy Bentham publishes Punishments and Rewards, in which he writes "To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?".
1815		"Works like An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780) and A Table of the Springs of Action (1815) accordingly discuss the variety of human motivations, and attempt to demonstrate their reducibility to the promptings of the ‘two sovereign masters’, pleasure and pain (Bentham 1789:1)."
1817		"A Table of the Springs of Action contains a still more elaborate taxonomy of motives, supplying among other things fifty-four synonyms of the word ‘pleasure’ and sixtyseven of ‘pain’ (Bentham 1817:205–7)"
1819		"James Mill’s Essay on Government (1819), written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1820, is a clear but not very original statement of the utilitarian point of view. Government has the purpose of producing ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, where ‘the lot of every human being is determined by his pains and his pleasures; and… his happiness corresponds with the degree in which his pleasures are great, and his pains are small’ (James Mill 1819:3, 4)."
1824		"In the two volumes of his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind of 1824, Mill showed himself capable of a painstaking study of mental events and dispositions, and, within the restrictions of an unapologetically associationist theory of the mind, even attempted to vindicate the existence of genuinely benevolent feelings."
1825		Jeremy Bentham publishes The Rationale of Reward
1829		"Mill’s Essay presents an undeniably simplified account of human psychology and a naive view of political relationships. It was important, however, in drawing forth one critical response of great acumen and wit which had a profound effect on the younger Mill. T.B.Macaulay’s paper ‘Mill on government’, published in the conservative Edinburgh Review in 1829, prefigures in many of its criticisms the objections which J.S.Mill was to make of Benthamism in his writings of the subsequent decade."
1833		"The peak of his disillusionment with Benthamism was reached in a highly critical essay of 1833 (printed anonymously to avoid offending his father) as an appendix to Edward Lytton-Bulwer’s England and the English. The ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ are a classic example of damnation by faint praise. Mill felt able to commend Bentham for ‘teaching law as no peculiar mystery, but a simple piece of practical business, wherein means were to be adapted to ends, as in any other of the arts of life’; but he firmly dismissed Bentham’s claims to contribute anything of importance to ethical theory (J.S.Mill 1833:10)."
1834		"Bentham offered a somewhat complex response to this problem. Three separate lines of thought can be distinguished. Sometimes he seems inclined to moderate the egoism of his psychological theory and admit, alongside self-interested motives, altruistic ones as well. In the late work Deontology (1834) he conceded the existence of a human disposition to philanthropy and self-sacrifice."
1838		"By 1838 Mill had slightly moderated his criticism, and conceded that Bentham had at least done ethical thought good service by advocating a plain and unmysterious criterion for the moral quality of actions in terms of their propensity to produce pleasure or pain; however inadequate this was, it was a great improvement on the vague and unverifiable appeals to moral intuition that were the stock-intrade of most moral philosophers. Yet the hiatus of omission in Bentham was still vast: Man is never recognized by him as a being capable of pursuing spiritual perfection as an end; of desiring, for its own sake, the conformity of his own character to his standard of excellence, without hope of good or fear of evil from other sources than his own inward consciousness (J.S.Mill 1838:95)."
1843		"An eloquent passage in A System of Logic of 1843 neatly sums up his view: The character itself should be, to the individual, a paramount end, simply because the existence of this ideal nobleness of character, or of a near approach to it, in any abundance, would go further than all things else towards making human life happy; both in the comparatively humble sense, of pleasure and freedom from pain, and in the higher meaning of rendering life, not what it now is almost universally, puerile and insignificant—but such as human beings with highly developed faculties can care to have (J.S.Mill 1843:952)."
1851		British philosopher Harriet Taylor Mill publishes The Enfranchisement of Women, in which she writes: We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion what is and what is not their 'proper sphere'. The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to.
1859	Literature	John Stuart Mill publishes Dissertations and Discussions. Mill writes "That the morality of actions depends on the consequences which they tend to produce, is the doctrine of rational persons of all schools; that the good or evil of those consequences is measured solely by pleasure or pain, is all of the doctrine of the school of utility, which is peculiar to it."
1859	Literature	John Stuart Mill publishes On Liberty. Mill writes: A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. The latter case, it is true, requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion than the former. To make any one answerable for doing evil to others, is the rule; to make him answerable for not preventing evil is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet there are many cases clear enough and grave enough to justify that exception.
1861		"Mill drafted, in the early 1850s, two essays on utility and justice which came to form the basis of the Frazer’s Magazine articles of 1861.4 ‘Utilitarianism’, as it finally appeared in the pages of Frazer’s, is a highly puzzling work. Many of its ideas and arguments could have flowed from the pen of Bentham himself. Mill begins with an unblushing statement of pure Benthamism: the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure (J.S.Mill 1861:210)."
1863	Literature	John Stuart Mill publishes Utilitarianism, which first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861. Mill acknowledges in a footnote that, though Jeremy Bentham believed "himself to be the first person who brought the word 'utilitarian' into use, he did not invent it. Rather, he adopted it from a passing expression" in John Galt's 1821 novel Annals of the Parish. Mill emphasizes in making clear that he included in “utility” the pleasures of the imagination and the gratification of the higher emotions; and to make a place in his system for settled rules of conduct. He also writes: The Greatest Happiness Principle holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.
1868	Notable quote	John Stuart Mill states: It is not human life only, not human life as such, that ought to be sacred to us, but human feelings. The human capacity of suffering is what we should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of existing.
1869	Literature	John Stuart Mill publishes The Subjection of Women, in which he writes: "What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance."
1871	Literature	Charles Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in which he writes: As all men desire their own happiness, praise or blame is bestowed on actions and motives, according as they lead to this end; and as happiness is an essential part of the general good, the greatest-happiness principle indirectly serves as a nearly safe standard of right and wrong.
1873	Literature	John Stuart Mill publishes his Autobiography, in which he writes: The "principle of utility" understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it...fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy...the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine.
1874		English utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick publishes The Methods of Ethics, in which he writes: The good of any one person is no more important from the point of view...of the universe than the good of any other; unless there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to occur in the one case than in the other.
1879	Literature	John Stuart Mill publishes Chapters On Socialism, in which he writes: "No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing."
1879	Literature	John Stuart Mill publishes The Establishment of Ethical First Principles, in which he writes: I may begin by laying down as a principle that 'all pain of human or rational beings is to be avoided'; and then afterwards may be led to enunciate the wider rule that 'all pain is to be avoided'; it being made evident to me that the difference of rationality between two species of sentient beings is no ground for establishing a fundamental ethical distinction between their respective pains.
1900	Literature	English author Leslie Stephen publishes The English Utilitarians.
1902	Literature	Ernest Albee publishes A History of English Utilitarianism.
1903		"Whether we call G.E.Moore (1873–1958) a utilitarian or not depends on how elastically we are prepared to use the term. His highly influential book Principia Ethica of 1903 contains a fierce attack on the hedonistic utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, which Moore believed to travesty human nature in its reduction of all we can care about to species of pleasure.6 Yet Moore’s own account of morality is consequentialist, and it differs from earlier versions of utilitarianism chiefly in its more capacious theory of value. Moore maintained that the good consists not just in pleasure, nor in any other merely human states or qualities, but also in the existence of certain objective features of the universe, pre-eminently the beauty of its constituents."
1906	Literature	American engineer and philosopher James MacKaye publishes The Economy of Happiness. MacKaye writes: Quantities of pain or pleasure may be regarded as magnitudes having the same definiteness as tons of pig iron, barrels of sugar, bushels of wheat, yards of cotton, or pounds of wool; and as political economy seeks to ascertain the conditions under which these commodities may be produced with the greatest efficiency–so the economy of happiness seeks to ascertain the conditions under which happiness, regarded as a commodity, may be produced with the greatest efficiency.
1907	Literature	English philosopher Hastings Rashdall publishes The Theory of Good and Evil. The description of ideal utilitarianism is first used in this book.
1912	Literature	G. E. Moore publishes Ethics. While tending to be overshadowed by his famous earlier work Principia Ethica, it is unique in its detailed discussions of utilitarianism, free will, and the objectivity of moral judgements.
1936		R.F.Harrod publishes paper entitled Utilitarianism revised, which is considered an important attempt to restore a fairer view of utilitarianism.
1949		Serbian political philosopher John Plamenatz claims that "utilitarianism is destroyed".
1949		"Many philosophers believed with H.A. Prichard and W.D.Ross that the rightness of actions was knowable through an intuitive faculty, and that consequentialist reasoning was both unnecessary for moral decision-making and apt to yield conclusions running contrary to the grain of ordinary moral thought (cf. Prichard 1949; Ross 1930)."
1953		British philosopher J. O. Urmson publishes an influential article arguing that Mill justified rules on utilitarian principles. Urmson is, perhaps, the first to argue in any sustained way that Mill was a rule utilitarian.
1958		The term "negative utilitarianism" is introduced by R. Ninian Smart in his reply to Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. Smart also presents the most famous argument against negative utilitarianism: that negative utilitarianism would entail that a ruler who is able to instantly and painlessly destroy the human race would have a duty to do so. Furthermore, every human being would have a moral responsibility to commit suicide, thereby preventing future suffering.
1959		American philosopher Richard Brandt publishes his Ethical Theory defines rule-utilitarianism. "Brandt was a prominent exponent of utilitarianism, the view that morally correct action is action that maximizes utility. His ideas about what utility is changed over the years. In Ethical Theory (1959), he adopted a pluralistic view that included pleasure, knowledge, virtue, and equality of welfare as intrinsic values." "Brandt's most important contribution to normative ethics was his formulation and defense of an ideal rule utilitarianism, or "ideal moral code" theory. According to ideal rule utilitarianism, an act is right if and only if it would not be prohibited by the ideal moral code for a society."
1963	Literature	British moral philosopher R. M. Hare publishes Freedom and Reason, in which he writes: The rules of moral reasoning are, basically, two, corresponding to the two features of moral judgment...When we are trying, in a concrete case, to decide what we ought to do, what we are looking for...is an action to which we can commit ourselves (prescriptively) but which we are at the same time prepared to accept as exemplifying a principle of action to be prescribed for others in like circumstances (universalizability)...[I]f we cannot universalize the principle, it cannot become an 'ought'.
1963		Richard Brandt publishes Towards a credible form of utilitarianism, in which he defends a version of rule utilitarianism.
1965	Literature	William T. Blackstone publishes Francis Hutcheson and Contemporary Ethical Theory.
1966		"In Sir Karl Popper’s words, ‘Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all’"
1969		"Sir Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘John Stuart Mill on the ends of life’ (1969) and Fred Berger’s book Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (1984) are perhaps the most influential of several works which have rightly given centre stage to Mill’s ideas on the ethical centrality of self-development."
1971	Literature	American philosopher John Rawls publishes his antiutilitarian book A Theory of Justice, which rejects utilitarianism as an acceptable foundation for principles of justice. The objection that "utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons" comes to prominence with the publication of this book. Rawls writes: During much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some form of utilitarianism…Those who criticized them [i.e. the great utilitarians such as Hume, Smith and Mill] often did so on a much narrower front. They pointed out the obscurities of the principle of utility and noted the apparent incongruities between many of its implications and our moral sentiments. But they failed, I believe, to construct a workable and systematic moral conception to oppose it. The outcome is that we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. Most likely we finally settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints. Such a view is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. But this is no reason not to try. Rawls calls the ‘primary goods’—‘things that every rational man is presumed to want’—such as health, vigour, intelligence, imagination, political freedoms and social opportunities, adequate income and a basis for self-respect.
1972		English philosopher Stuart Hampshire laments that utilitarianism is no longer the bold, innovative, and even subversive doctrine that it has once been.
1972	Literature	Peter Singer publishes Famine, Affluence, and Morality, in which he presents his view that we have the same moral obligations to those far away as we do to those close to us. This text would rapidly become one of the most widely discussed essays in applied ethics. Singer writes: If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.
1973		In Principles, R. M. Hare accepts that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism but claims that this is a result of allowing the rules to be "as specific and un-general as we please." He argues that one of the main reasons for introducing rule utilitarianism was to do justice to the general rules that people need for moral education and character development and he proposes that "a difference between act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism can be introduced by limiting the specificity of the rules, i.e., by increasing their generality."
1973	Literature	British-Australian philosopher J. J. C. Smart and B. Williams publish Utilitarianism For and Against. Smart writes: The sentiment to which [the utilitarian] appeals is generalized benevolence, that is, the disposition to seek happiness, or...good consequences, for all mankind, or perhaps for all sentient beings.
1973		P.Gay calls utilitarianism the dominant philosophy of the mature Enlightenment.
1974	Literature	Robert Nozick publishes Anarchy, State and Utopia, which claims that utilitarianism ignores the basic fact of human life – namely, our 'separate existences'.
1976		Motive utilitarianism is first proposed by Robert Merrihew Adams. It refers to a normative theory about right motivation, much as act utilitarianism is a normative theory about right action. "R.M. Adams has argued that utility is better promoted by people who act from Utilitarianism and Personality 197 certain kinds of worthy motivation than on the basis of consequentialist reasoning (Adams 1976). He suggests that people who act from praiseworthy motives (for example, love, friendliness, spontaneity, a taste for beauty) will sometimes do things which an act-utilitarian would judge to be wrong, or fail to do things which he would judge to be right. But in general, acting from laudable motives produces more utility than acting on act-utilitarian reasoning does, and we should consider people to be acting rightly when they act on such motives. (Adams names his theory of right action ‘motive-utilitarianism’.)"
1977		J.B.Schneewind publishes Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy.
1978		"If all utilitarians had taken the same line, there might have seemed to be some justification for Stuart Hampshire’s verdict that ‘The utilitarian habit of mind has brought with it a new abstract cruelty in politics, a dull, destructive political righteousness’ (Hampshire 1978:4)."
1977	Concept development	The concept of preference utilitarianism is first proposed by John Harsanyi in Morality and the Theory of Rational Behaviour, however the concept is more commonly associated with R. M. Hare, Peter Singer, and Richard Brandt.
1979	Literature	Peter Singer publishes Practical Ethics, in which he writes: If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that the suffering be counted equally with the like suffering – in so far as rough comparisons can be made – of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account. This is why the limit of sentience...is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others.
1979		In relation to the ability of moral evaluation to be reduced to a conceptually simple matter of calculation, According to Sen, the difficulty arises when the sum-ranking idea —that one set of individual utilities is at least as good as another if, and only if, it has at least as large a sum total— is quite insensitive to the question of how the utilities are distributed.
1980		"Elizabeth Telfer has rightly remarked that being happy involves, among other things, being pleased with one’s life (Telfer 1980: 8–9)."
1981	Literature	R.M. Hare publishes Moral Thinking which attempts to provide, out of the logical and linguistic theses of his earlier books, a full-scale but readily intelligible account of moral argument.
1981		Peter Singer publishes The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, in which he writes: The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.
1981	Organization	Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales
1982	Literature	R. M. Hare publishes Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism, in which he writes: What the principle of utility requires of me is to do for each man affected by my actions what I wish were done for me in the hypothetical circumstances that I were in precisely his situation; and, if my actions affect more than one man...to do what I wish, all in all, to be done for me in the hypothetical circumstances that I occupied all their situations.
1984	Literature	British philosopher Derek Parfit publishes Reasons and Persons. Parfit writes: Classical Utilitarians...would claim, as Sidgwick did, that the destruction of mankind would be by far the greatest of all conceivable crimes. The badness of this crime would lie in the vast reduction of the possible sum of happiness.
1986		Griffin suggests that "a fairly small amount of misery will turn out to make life worse to a greater degree than a fairly large amount of happiness makes it better".If this is so , the finite energies we possess for promoting the public weal may be better directed at righting wrongs than at multiplying goods.
1990	Literature	American philosopher Alastair Norcross publishes article entitled Consequentialism and the Future. Norcross writes: Morality really is very demanding, in precisely the way utilitarianism says it is. But doesn't this fly in the face of common sense? Well, perhaps it does, but so what? Until relatively recently, moral "common sense" viewed women as having an inferior moral status to men, and some races as having an inferior status to others. These judgments were not restricted to the philosophically unsophisticated. Such illustrious philosophers as Aristotle and Hume accepted positions of this nature. Many utilitarians (myself included) believe that the interests of sentient non-human animals should be given equal consideration in moral decisions with the interests of humans. This claim certainly conflicts with the "common sense" of many (probably most) humans, and many (perhaps most) philosophers. It should not, on that account alone, be rejected.
1990		"Timothy Sprigge has noted its ‘absurd consequence that the best thing to do would be to exterminate all life in which there is any distress at all’."
1990		Brittan describes utilitarianism as ‘a member of the family of moral doctrines which judge actions neither by their motives nor their intrinsic qualities, but by their consequences’. This gives the misleading impression that utilitarians take no account of motives in the appraisal of actions.
1992	Literature	British philosopher John Broome publishes Counting the Cost of Global Warming, in which he writes: Total and average utilitarianism are very different theories, and where they differ most is over extinction. If global warming extinguishes humanity, according to total utilitarianism, that would be an inconceivably bad disaster. The loss would be all the future wellbeing of all the people who would otherwise have lived. On the other hand, according to at least some versions of average utilitarianism, extinction might not be a very bad thing at all; it might not much affect the average wellbeing of the people who do live. So the difference between these theories makes a vast difference to the attitude we should take to global warming. According to total utilitarianism, although the chance of extinction is slight, the harm extinction would do is so enormous that it may well be the dominant consideration when we think about global warming. According to average utilitarianism, the chance of extinction may well be negligible.
1993		According to Pettit, utilitarianism is a consequentialist (or, to use an older term, a ‘teleological’) doctrine in the sense that it maintains that the proper response to its values is to promote them.
1994	Literature	Necip Fikri Alican publishes Mill's Principle of Utility: A Defense of John Stuart Mill's Notorious Proof.
1995	Literature	David Pearce publishes The Hedonistic Imperative, which attempts to outline how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. Pearce writes: I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.
2002	Literature	Peter Singer publishes Animal Liberation, in which he writes: Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.
2003		Frederick Rosen warns that descriptions of utilitarianism can bear "little resemblance historically to utilitarians like Bentham and J. S. Mill" and can be more "a crude version of act utilitarianism conceived in the twentieth century as a straw man to be attacked and rejected."
2003	Concept development	Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom coins the term “astronomical waste” to describe the opportunity cost of delayed technological development. Bostrom argues that utilitarians should not aim to maximize the rate of technological progress “but rather that we ought to maximize its safety, i.e. the probability that colonization will eventually occur”. Bostrom writes: For standard utilitarians, priority number one, two, three and four should consequently be to reduce existential risk. The utilitarian imperative "Maximize expected aggregate utility!" can be simplified to the maxim "Minimize existential risk!".
2012	Literature	American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt publishes The Righteous Mind. Haidt writes: I don't know what the best normative ethical theory is for individuals in their private lives. But when we talk about making laws and implementing public policies in Western democracies that contain some degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism.
2013	Literature	American experimental psychologist Joshua Greene publishes Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Greene writes: Utilitarianism is a great idea with an awful name. It is, in my opinion, the most underrated and misunderstood idea in all of moral and political philosophy.
2015	Literature	Peter Singer publishes The Most Good You Can Do, in which he writes: Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.
2015	Literature	Robin Barrow publishes Utilitarianism: A Contemporary Statement, in which he claims that utilitarianism is the most coherent and persuasive theory available. Barrow argues succinctly and persuasively for a specific form of rule-utilitarianism.
2017	Literature	Bart Schulz publishes The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians, in which he writes: Happiness, for [the great English-language utilitarian philosophers] was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness.
2017	Notable quote	Swedish philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö states: Once we realise that utilitarianism comes with the idea of blameworthy rightdoing (such as when you push a big man onto the tracks in order to save five lives) and blameless wrongdoing (such as when you don't push a big man onto the tracks in order to save five lives), then utilitarianism all of a sudden appears to give the right answers.

Meta information on the timeline

How the timeline was built

Base literature

• Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction, by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer.
• The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism, by Joseph Persky.

The initial version of the timeline was written by Sebastian.

Funding information for this timeline is available.

Feedback and comments

Feedback for the timeline can be provided at the following places:

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What the timeline is still missing

• Two-level utilitarianism
• Utilitarianism
• List of utilitarians (under notable birth event type)
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/
• https://www.utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinkers
• https://www.utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-quotes (under literature event type)
• https://www.utilitarianism.net/books
• https://www.utilitarianism.net/glossary
• https://www.utilitarianism.net/near-utilitarian-alternatives