Happiness and Utility

Essays Presented to Frederick Rosen

Edited by Georgios Varouxakis and Mark Philp

£40.00

ISBN: 9781787350502

Publication: July 29, 2019

Hardback £40.00 Open Access PDF £0.00 Paperback £22.99

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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.

The chapters are written in celebration of the career of Professor Frederick Rosen. They follow his work by concentrating on Bentham and the two Mills, and by the subtleties and sophistication of their understanding of one of the most alluring but elusive ideas of modern times. The volume will be of interest not only to admirers of Rosen but to academics and postgraduate students in disciplines such as Philosophy, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Legal Theory and Legal History.

Georgios Varouxakis is Professor in History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London, and Co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. His books include Liberty Abroad: J.S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge, 2013).

Mark Philp is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick, and an Emeritus Fellow or Oriel College, Oxford. He has worked extensively in the history of political thought and on political corruption and realist political theory. His books include Political Conduct (Harvard, 2007) and Reforming Political Ideas in Britain (Cambridge, 2013).

1. Introduction: Happiness, Utility and the Republic of Letters
Mark Philp and Georgios Varouxakis
2. Happiness and Interests in Politics: A Late-Enlightenment Debate
Emmanuelle de Champs
3. Jeremy Bentham and the Spanish Constitution of 1812
Philip Schofield
4. Scepticism and Epicureanism: From David Hume to J. S. Mill
James Moore
5. Bentham on ‘Hume’s Virtues’
José L. Tasset
6. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Mill on Pleasure and Virtue
Roger Crisp
7. ‘The First Article to Look to is Power’: Bentham, Happiness and the Capability Approach
Michael Quinn, Bentham Project UCL
8. Jeremy Bentham and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms

Manuel Escamilla-Castillo

9. James Mill on Happiness
Antis Loizides
10. Bentham, Mill, Stoicism and Higher Pleasures
Jonathan Riley
11. Individualist and Totalizing Ethical Thinking in Mill’s Utilitarianism
John Charvet
12. Mill and Democracy: Taking William Buckley Seriously
Alan Ryan
13. John Stuart Mill and the Jewish Question: Broadening the Utilitarian Maximand
Samuel Hollander
14. The Failure of Planned Happiness: The Rise and Fall of British Home Colonies
Barbara Arneil
15. Making Better Sense of Ideal Utilitarianism
David Weinstein
Index

Format: Hardback

Size: 234 × 156 mm

332 Pages

ISBN: 9781787350502

Publication: July 29, 2019