Utilitarianism was a moral philosophy initially developed by Jeremy Bentham (15 February 1748 – 6 June 1832) and elaborated on by John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873). It is important because it attempted to put ethics on a purely rational basis, independent of religion and sentimentality and develop a rational scheme by which one could weigh the relative moral value of choices by calculating how the outcomes of said choices would create total quantities of pain and pleasure for human beings in a given community.

Utilitarianism sees pleasure as good and pain as bad. It attempts to quantify the pleasure and pain experienced by each person and by a mathematical process calculate the total pain and pleasure that would result from an action. For example, it might balance the pain of many poor people starving against the pain of a few wealthy people paying higher taxes to calculate that some forms of wealth redistribution would decrease the total pain experienced by a community.

As an ethical system, Utilitarianism is a consequentialist one. It looks at actions as not having intrinsic moral values but rather believes that the value of an action was grounded not in the intentions of the person acting or in some inherent notions of virtue and vice but rather in the total amount of pain or pleasure caused by that action to the community as a whole.