Happiness and Utility: Essays Presented to Frederick Rosen

Description

Happiness and Utility brings together experts on utilitarianism to explore the concept of happiness within the utilitarian tradition, situating it in earlier eighteenth-century thinkers and working through some of its developments at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of philosophical and historical approaches to the study of the central idea of utilitarianism, the chapters provide a rich set of insights into a founding component of ethics and modern political and economic thought, as well as political and economic practice. In doing so, the chapters examine the multiple dimensions of utilitarianism and the contested interpretations of this standard for judgement in morality and public policy. Contents List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Happiness, Utility and the Republic of Letters 2 Happiness and Interests in Politics: A Late-Enlightenment Debate 3 Jeremy Bentham and the Spanish Constitution of 1812 4 Scepticism and Epicureanism: From David Hume to J. S. Mill 5 Bentham on ‘Hume’s Virtues’ 6 Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Mill on Pleasure and Virtue 7 ‘The First Article to Look to is Power’: Bentham, Happiness and the Capability Approach 8 Jeremy Bentham and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms 9 James Mill on Happiness 10 Bentham, Mill, Stoicism and Higher Pleasures 11 Individualist and Totalizing Ethical Thinking in Mill’s Utilitarianism 12 Mill and Democracy: Taking William Buckley Seriously 13 John Stuart Mill and the Jewish Question: Broadening the Utilitarian Maximand 14 The Failure of Planned Happiness: The Rise and Fall of British Home Colonies 15 Making Better Sense of Ideal Utilitarianism Index