John Stuart Mill thought he coined utilitarian; Bentham got there first
In 1861 John Stuart Mill claimed to be the first person to put the word utilitarian into circulation, having picked it up from a novel. He seems not to have known that his predecessor Jeremy Bentham had already used it in letters decades earlier. The idea itself is far older than either man.
Utilitarianism is a family of ethical theories that judge actions by one standard: whether they maximise happiness and well-being for everyone affected, the greatest good for the greatest number. Bentham, usually named as founder, defined utility as the power of an action or object to produce pleasure and benefit or to prevent pain and unhappiness. It is a form of consequentialism, which holds that outcomes alone decide right and wrong, and in its egalitarian form it weighs the interests of all people, or all sentient beings, equally.
Its roots stretch across cultures. The Greek hedonists Aristippus and Epicurus treated happiness as the only good. In ancient China, Mozi built the first consequentialist theory, aiming to maximise benefit and remove harm, though he valued communal goods such as stability, population growth and wealth rather than individual happiness. The 8th-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva urged ending the suffering and increasing the happiness of all sentient beings.
Some earlier writers anticipated Bentham. In 1725 Francis Hutcheson argued that an action's virtue grows with the number of people it makes happy, and early editions of his book even offered mathematical formulas for computing the morality of an act, foreshadowing Bentham's hedonic calculus. Some credit John Gay, writing in 1731, with the first systematic utilitarian theory.
Mill substantially reworked Bentham's system and popularised the name, which he said came from John Galt's 1821 novel Annals of the Parish, although Bentham had written utilitarian in letters of 1781 and 1802. Later figures include Henry Sidgwick and Peter Singer. Supporters still disagree on whether to judge each act by its likely results or to follow rules that tend to maximise utility, and whether to maximise total or average well-being. The approach has been applied to welfare economics, global poverty, raising animals for food and existential risks to humanity.
Source: Utilitarianism
