Utilitarianism Quotes
A curated collection of the best quotes about Utilitarianism.
Top Quotes
“Insect suffering”
“Consequentialism”
“Effective altruism”
“Wild animal suffering”
“Negative utilitarianism”
“Wikipedia: Utilitarianism”
“Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance.”
“It's the flock, the grove, that matters. Our responsibility is to species, not to specimens; to communities, not to individuals.”
“All desirable things...are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”
“Utilitarianism is a great idea with an awful name. It is, in my opinion, the most underrated and misunderstood idea in all of moral and political philosophy.”
“The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end.”
“It is not human life only, not human life as such, that ought to be sacred to us, but human feelings. The human capacity of suffering is what we should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of existing.”
“The sentiment to which [the utilitarian] appeals is generalized benevolence, that is, the disposition to seek happiness, or...good consequences, for all mankind, or perhaps for all sentient beings.”
“Perfect the Will, the Mind, Feeling, their corporeal organs and their material tools; be useful to yourselves, to your own ones, and to others; and Happiness, insofar as it exists on this earth, will come of itself.”
“Critics would argue that conceiving the end of life as a perpetual cosmic orgasm is the reductio ad absurdum of classical utilitarianism. But will posthuman superintelligence respect human conceptions of absurdity?”
“The utilitarian notion...has the fatal limitation that it attempts to assign limits to what is, or may in the future become, useful, in accordance with a more or less arbitrarily restricted standard of what constitutes utility.”
“The core precept of utilitarianism is that we should make the world the best place we can. That means that, as far as it is within our power, we should bring about a world in which every individual has the highest possible level of wellbeing.”