Utilitarianism before Bentham

Abstract

The origins of utilitarian moral thought lie in the intellectual landscape of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, where the theory emerged through a synthesis of Protestant natural law and revived Epicureanism. Early proponents, primarily associated with the Anglican Church, formulated the fundamental theses that all value is reducible to pleasure or the mitigation of pain and that the moral quality of actions is determined by their contribution to the greatest happiness. Within this theological framework, God served as the essential legislator whose promise of eternal rewards and punishments resolved conflicts between private interest and the public good. This tradition provided a public, rule-based standard for moral reasoning that prioritized consequences over individual judgment. A subsequent shift toward secularism occurred in mid-eighteenth-century France, where thinkers replaced divine sanctions with the mechanisms of human legislation and education to align individual motives with social utility. While later Benthamite utilitarianism rejected natural law and discarded theological justifications, it maintained the hedonistic psychology and external normative standards established by these earlier proponents. The history of the movement thus reflects a transition from a religiously grounded justification of social order to a secular instrument for legal and political reform. – AI-generated abstract.