Utilitarianism in the Age of Enlightenment

O’Flaherty, Niall

doi:10.1017/9781108662048

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Indeed, as O'Flaherty shows, not only did Paley not wish to trim back a scheme that Mill and later utilitarians would condemn as irrationally profligate, he wished to increase its level of provision and to initiate reforms that would remove the law's unfortunate byproduct (tied to its local rather than centralized provision of financial assistance) of inhibiting the mobility of the poor. 62 From premises of organic Christian hierarchy, Paley derived government-enforced obligations of redistribution and succor from the higher to the lower classes. From secular egalitarian first principles, on the other hand, Mill arrived at a position of seeking to keep public antipoverty spending low on the grounds that such programs were tantamount to a morally degrading paternalism.…”

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confidence: 99%

The English Utilitarians, Some Recent Reconsiderations

Conti

2022

Rev Pol

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In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians. Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previous History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. The utilitarians, Stephen was confident, could serve as a kind of synecdoche for a whole age. Further, if the utilitarians did not grasp the whole truth, there was no doubt that their “creed” would make up part of the “definitive system” that would arrive in due time.

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confidence: 99%