The world's first outcome-based ethics came from China, not Victorian England
Long before Jeremy Bentham tallied pleasure against pain, the Chinese thinker Mozi judged actions by whether they benefited everyone under heaven. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls his fifth-century BCE system the earliest known form of consequentialism, the idea that what makes an act right is simply what it brings about.
Consequentialism covers any theory holding that outcomes are the final test of right and wrong, omissions included. A right act is one that yields, or is likely or intended to yield, a better balance of good over harm than the alternatives. Theories differ on what counts as good: pleasure, the absence of pain, satisfied preferences or some wider general good. The main rival, deontology, judges acts by their own character and the duties involved; virtue ethics looks instead at the person acting.
Mohist thought recognised several basic goods rather than one. Order meant avoiding war and violence, which Mozi thought pointless and destabilising. Material wealth meant basics like shelter and clothing. Population growth mattered in an era of frequent war and famine. The sinologist David Nivison notes how these reinforce each other, and because the community's welfare outranked individual pleasure, Mohism was neither hedonistic nor individualistic.
In the West, hedonistic utilitarianism became the classic case. Bentham cast pain and pleasure as humanity's two sovereign masters, and J. S. Mill added a hierarchy in which some pleasures are worth more. Peter Singer shifted the focus to satisfying preferences. Rule consequentialism chooses rules by their results, which critics call incoherent: why follow a rule when breaking it would do more good? Brad Hooker answers that the theory's real strength is how well it fits and unifies our moral convictions. R. M. Hare and Singer proposed a two-level approach: reason critically when you can step back, rely on dependable rules when you cannot.
The word itself is younger than you might think. G. E. M. Anscombe coined it in 1958, and its meaning has since drifted so far that she placed Mill outside the camp, where he now sits squarely inside. The boundaries remain porous: Robert Nozick added absolute side-constraints, and Derek Parfit argued that properly understood versions of rule consequentialism, Kantian ethics and contractualism would recommend the same conduct.
Source: Consequentialism
