Bentham gave utilitarianism its name and put it on the map, both as a philosophical theory and as a reforming social and political doctrine. In all of his philosophizing, Bentham was most fundamentally concerned with its relevance for law and, ultimately, for a distinctive kind of legal, social, and political reform. Bentham was unalterably opposed to legal and political doctrines whose only grounding was in tradition and any common sense tradition informs. This extended also to his views about morality. His defense of the principle of is not grounded, as Sidgwick will argue any moral principle must be, in intuition. But neither does Bentham ground his utilitarianism in an empiricist-naturalist metaethics, as do Cumberland and Mill, though his metaphysics certainly has that character. Bentham holds that the ultimate grounding of utilitarianism must be political. According to Bentham, the utility principle is the only one that can play the role that a moral principle must be able to play in informed noncoercive public debate. In this way, Bentham anticipates Rawls’s “political liberalism.” This chapter argues that Bentham could accept Rawls’s an emended version of Rawls’s slogan: “the principle of utility: political, not metaphysical.”

Although Mill learned Bentham’s utilitarianism literally at his father James Mill’s knee, Mill’s own version of utilitarianism departed from Bentham’s at key points. When Mill tried to live Bentham’s utilitarian doctrine as a youth, he was sent into a deep depression from which he was saved by reading the Romantic poetry and a romantic relationship with Harriet Taylor. This led him to reject Bentham’s “quantitative hedonism” in favor of a “qualitative hedonism” that emphasized intrinsic differences between different kinds of pleasures and held that some pleasures are “higher,” and therefore more valuable, than others. Here Mill’s view recalls Aristotle’s that pleasures resulting from exercising higher, distinctively human faculties and sensibilities are intrinsically better. Unlike Aristotle, however, Mill persisted in holding that his view is a version of hedonism, defended on nonteleological, empirical naturalist grounds. A second important departure from Bentham, was Mill’s holding that the deontic ideas of moral right and wrong are conceptually connected to accountability. This made him a “modern moral philosopher” by Anscombe’s definition and led him to defend, on these grounds, a utilitarian theory of rights and justice as well as a version of utilitarianism that was more like rule utilitarianism than act utilitarianism.