The big idea: When you weigh up 'will this do more good than harm?', you're already thinking like a consequentialist.
Teleological ethics: Teleological ethics (from the Greek for 'goal') says the right act is simply the one with the best results — the most good, the least harm. The rest is detail about what counts as 'good'.
The most famous version is utilitarianism: happiness is the good, and the right act maximises it across everyone affected.
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The founder made the idea almost mathematical.
Bentham: add up the happiness: Jeremy Bentham said the right act produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It's fair and clear: no special rules, just add up the good.
How to decide, Bentham's way
Weigh it up
Weigh the pleasure and pain an act would cause for everyone affected.
Count everyone equally
Crucially, your pleasure is worth no more than a stranger's.
Pick the most
Choose whichever option adds up to the most happiness overall.
Weigh → count everyone equally → pick the most happiness
Checkpoint — Bentham: In one line: the right act makes the greatest happiness for the greatest number, counting everyone equally. Hold that — but is ALL happiness really the same? The next thinker says no.
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Bentham's follower agreed with the goal but refused to treat all pleasures as equal.
Mill: higher and lower pleasures: John Stuart Mill worried Bentham's 'add up the pleasure' made ethics sound like counting up simple thrills. Utilitarianism still aims at the greatest happiness, but now happiness has quality, not just quantity.
Higher pleasures
- Thinking
- Art
- Friendship
Lower pleasures
- Food
- Comfort
Mill's famous line: 'Better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied' — someone who has tasted both kinds of pleasure prefers the higher kind.
A non-Western parallel: Mohist consequentialism
Long before Bentham, the Mohists in ancient China judged actions by whether they benefited society — more order, wealth and population, less waste and war. This state consequentialism measured 'good' by the welfare of all, not the pleasure of individuals — a strikingly early, non-Western results-based ethics.
Go further — higher-level insight: Spot the tension inside Mill's fix. Adding 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures rescues utilitarianism from the 'pig' objection — but it quietly imports a standard OUTSIDE happiness itself (why are art and thought 'higher'?). A pure results-counter can't easily say. Naming that as a cost of Mill's repair is a sharp evaluative point.
Checkpoint — Mill and Mozi: In one line: Mill keeps the greatest-happiness goal but ranks pleasures by quality, and the Mohists reached a results-based ethics centuries earlier in China. Results-thinking is old and widespread.