Bart Schultz

Bart Schultz argues that utilitarian philosophy must be decolonized and reimagined for the current moment: a time of new and looming existential threats, in a world desperate for social change. Where dominant ethical and political approaches have failed to adequately deal with the enormous challenges we face, utilitarianism - as a set of lived practices, not simply a theoretical construction - may hold out some hope of seriously addressing them. Drawing on alternatives to the well-known Eurocentric story of utilitarianism (and an extensive review and critique of that story) and incorporating the works of Peter Singer, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Derek Parfit, Martha Nussbaum, and other major philosophers, Schultz crafts a groundbreaking new framework of utilitarianism born of struggle and resistance.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of scholarly interest in the work of the Victorian era philosopher Henry Sidgwick, whose best-known work, The Methods of Ethics has been celebrated as “the best book on ethics ever written”. The term “Sidgwickian” now stands alongside such terms as “Kantian” and “Aristotelian” in the ethical philosophical lexicon. But rather than marking out a fixed metaethical or substantive ethical theoretical perspective, the designation is best construed as pointing to a set of characteristic ethical philosophical strategies, concerns, and problems, such as the “dualism of practical reason,” and explorations of the forms and limits of utilitarianism and of a non-metaphysical, non-Idealist but still anti-subjectivist approach to ethical truth. Moreover, Sidgwick’s life and work more generally have proved to be of considerable interest across many academic fields, from Victorian Studies to Parapsychology.

A colorful history of utilitarianism told through the lives and ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and its other founders In The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism—one of the most influential yet misunderstood and maligned philosophies of the past two centuries. Best known for arguing that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong," utilitarianism was developed by the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Together, they had a profound influence on nineteenth-century reforms, in areas ranging from law, politics, and economics to morals, education, and women's rights. Their work transformed life in ways we take for granted today. Bentham even advocated the decriminalization of same-sex acts, decades before the cause was taken up by other activists. As Bertrand Russell wrote about Bentham in the late 1920s, "There can be no doubt that nine-tenths of the people living in England in the latter part of last century were happier than they would have been if he had never lived." Yet in part because of its misleading name and the caricatures popularized by figures as varied as Dickens, Marx, and Foucault, utilitarianism is sometimes still dismissed as cold, calculating, inhuman, and simplistic. By revealing the fascinating human sides of the remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, The Happiness Philosophers provides a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives—one that also helps explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and is again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems.