This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Child prodigy, then journalist,

administrator, economist, member of parliament and above all philosopher,

John Stuart Mill had an enormous impact on 19th century Britain. He was one of the fathers of liberalism and an early

and effective campaigner for women's rights. But his impact on philosophy has

been felt above all through his seminal work utilitarianism published in 1861.

Roger Crisp teaches philosophy at Oxford University and is new author of a book on Mill.

Roger Crisp, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for inviting me. Today we want to talk about... Roger Chris, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for inviting me.

Today we want to talk about utilitarianism.

Could we start by just explaining what utilitarianism means?

Well, the term is a piece of jargon jargon and utilitarianism has nothing to do with

utilitarian in the usual sense of the word which means something like useful as in a

useful piece of furniture. Utilitarianism is a philosophical theory I think primarily about how we should act and it has two components.

The first component is a theory of utility itself, by which I mean something like well-being, what makes life good for people.

And there are different versions of that which we might want to talk about.

The other component is a principle about what we should do about that utility.

And the usual version of utilitarianism is act utilitarianism, which says that we should produce as much of that well-being or utility as possible.

Okay, so it's an ethical theory about how we should live that says maximise happiness or maximise utility usually cashed out as

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