Utilitarianism

This is the first general overview in many years of the history and the present condition of utilitarian ethics. Unlike other introductions to the subject, which narrowly focus on the Enlightenment and Victorian eras, Utilitarianism takes a wider view. Geoffrey Scarre introduces the major utilitarian philosophers from the Chinese sage Mo Tzu in the fifth century BC through to Richard Hare in the twentieth. But Scarre not only surveys the history of the ‘doctrine of utility’; in later chapters he also enters the current debates on the viability of the theory.