Total utilitarianism
The view that the morally best action maximises total well-being across everyone affected.
What it commits you to
Total utilitarianism aggregates every being's welfare and acts to maximise the sum, with no side constraints. It is the most internally consistent of the consequentialist options and it is also the one that most often generates the cases nobody wants to act on: one person's life against five million, a slow accumulation of small harms, one person's privacy against a modest aggregate gain.
Which realms lean on this
Ethics is where the realms argue about what counts: the parties, the pleasures, the duties, the care.
ethics · 9 realms — The Benthamite Foundry, The Care Weft, The Contractual Court, The Kantian Citadel, The Longview Foundry, The Middle Kingdom, The Stoic Ramparts, The Ubuntu Weave, The Virtue Garden.
Canon that discusses this
primary · 1863
Utilitarianism
Mill defends the intuitions Bentham's calculus was meant to replace: higher and lower pleasures, the justice principle that each person counts as one, and the liberty principle against the tyranny of the majority. Published the year after the Origin of Species, and much of the argument is a reply to the comparison.
modern · 1971
A Theory of Justice
Rawls reconstructs distributive justice as a hypothetical contract made behind a veil of ignorance, and derives two principles — equal basic liberties first, then fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle. Published in 1971 and revised in 1979, it displaced utilitarianism as the default starting point for two decades. The excerpt below paraphrases the passage in section 3 rather than quoting a translation.
See also
Average utilitarianism
ethicsThe view that the morally best action maximises average well-being per person.
Consequentialism
ethicsJudging actions solely by the outcomes they produce.
Person-affecting principle
ethicsThe view that an action is wrong only if it affects someone for the worse.
Doctrine of double effect
ethicsSome harms are permitted when foreseen but unintended, provided they are not means to the good.