Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss utilitarianism, a moral theory that assesses acts by their tendency to increase pleasure in the world and decrease the amount of pain.

A moral theory that emphasises ends over means, Utilitarianism holds that a good act is one that increases pleasure in the world and decreases pain. The tradition flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and has antecedents in ancient philosophy. According to Bentham, happiness is the means for assessing the utility of an act, declaring "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Mill and others went on to refine and challenge Bentham's views and to defend them from critics such as Thomas Carlyle, who termed Utilitarianism a "doctrine worthy only of swine."

With

Melissa Lane

The Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University

Janet Radcliffe Richards

Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford

and

Brad Hooker

A Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading

Producer: Simon Tillotson.