Quotes About Utilitarianism

It's a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant's: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die...His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such. He gives way without reserve to his most powerful passion and the wishes it engenders.

I'm not suggesting anything. People get hurt every day. This matter must be cleared up, Joseph, for everybody. The greatest good of the greatest number, as you are so fond of quoting.

John Stuart Mill, explained that happiness is nothing but pleasure and freedom from pain, and that beyond pleasure and pain there is no good and no evil. Anyone who tries to deduce good and evil from something else (such as the word of God, or the national interest) is fooling you, and perhaps fooling himself too.

I've always felt that technology can be used to our benefit and should be used to our benefit.

For example, suppose that the pain of a nose-breaking punch is equivalent to the pain of six months in jail. If we can deter one in nine such punches with the threat of three months' imprisonment, and catch half the offenders, we will wind up imposing four three-month sentences to deter one punch—a bad bargain from the utilitarian point of view.

It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.

Yellow cat, black cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat.

My only definition is that I am a pragmatist.

Conduciveness to happiness being then the test of virtue, and all happiness being composed of our own happiness and that of others, the production of our own happiness is prudence, the production of the happiness of others is effective benevolence. The tree of virtue is thus divided into to great stems, out of which grow all the other branches of virtue.

It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Utilitarianism is a philosophy from the olden days exploring the idea that whatever is best for the majority is the fairest.

It would be very interesting to design objects for everyday life, something where the ideas that are expressed can be launched into society.

He believed the best use of human beings was as compost or incubators.

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.

it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mouse

The world belongs to the unfeeling. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of any sensitivity

The idea of utilitarianism is simple: the fundamental guidelines for moral discourse are pleasure and pain. Things can be called good to the extent that they raise the amount of happiness in the world and bad to the extent that they raise the amount of suffering. The purpose of a moral code is to maximize the world's total happiness.

In the end, boundless empathy is what utilitarianism is.

You see, I'm not above helping an unfortunate soul find new purpose in life…so long as it benefits me

It's simply not the case that secular liberalism, grounded in materialist utilitarianism, is the inevitable and default worldview of anyone who isn't stupid, brainwashed, or uneducated;

No morally imperfect human being(s), born into "the double darkness of sin and ignorance" could ever qualify for the position of Master Utilitarian Manipulator that Consequentialism needs to be put into practice.