Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T12:57:29.941Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“Utility”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

John Broome
Affiliation:
University of Bristol

Extract

“Utility,” in plain English, means usefulness. In Australia, a ute is a useful vehicle. Jeremy Bentham specialized the meaning to a particular sort of usefulness. “By utility,” he said, “is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered” (1823, p. 2). The “principle of utility” is the principle that actions are to be judged by their usefulness in this sense: their tendency to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness. When John Stuart Mill (1969, p. 213) spoke of the “perfectly just conception of Utility or Happiness, considered as the directive rule of human conduct,” he was using “Utility” as a short name for this principle. “The greatest happiness principle” was another name for it. People who subscribed to this principle came to be known as utilitarians.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bentham, Jeremy. 1823. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. London: Pickering.Google Scholar
Bernoulli, Daniel. 1954. “Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk.” Translated by Louise Sommer. Econometrica 22:2336. Originally published in 1738.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broome, John. 1991. Weighing Goods. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Deaton, Angus, and Muellbauer, John. 1980. Economics and Consumer Behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Debreu, Gerard. 1959. Theory of Value. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Edgeworth, F. Y. 1881. Mathematical Psychics. London: Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Ellsberg, Daniel. 1954. “Classic and Current Notions of ‘Measurable Utility’.” Economic Journal 64:528–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harasanyi, John C. 1975. “Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls's Theory.” American Political Science Review 69:594606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hicks, John, and Allen, R. G. D.. 1934. “A Reconsideration of the Theory of Value.” Economica 1:5276, 196–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jevons, W. Stanley. 1871. The Theory of Political Economy. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Marshall, Alfred. 1920. Principles of Economics, 8th ed.London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. 1969. Utilitarianism. In his Collected Works, Vol. 10. Toronto: Toronto University Press.Google Scholar
Pigou, A. C. 1932. The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed.London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Robbins, Lionel. 1935. An Essay on the Scope and Nature of Economic Science, 2nd ed.London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Sen, Amartya. 1987a. On Ethics and Economics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sen, Amartya. 1987b. The Standard of Living, edited by Hawthorne, Geoffrey. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sidgwick, Henry. 1907. The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Tversky, Amos, and Kahneman, Daniel. 1986. “Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions.” Journal of Business 59:250–78. Reprinted in The Limits of Rationality, edited by Karen Cook and Margaret Levi. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1991.Google Scholar