who created utilitarianism

The ethical theory of utilitarianism was first systematically created and formulated by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century.

Quick Scoop

• Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is widely regarded as the founder of modern or classical utilitarianism, giving the theory its first full, systematic form.

• He framed morality around the “principle of utility”: actions are right if they tend to promote happiness and wrong if they tend to produce the opposite.

• Earlier thinkers (like Epicurus, Mozi, and Francis Hutcheson) had similar ideas about maximizing happiness, but they did not build the same clear, unified system Bentham did.

• John Stuart Mill later refined and popularized Bentham’s approach and also helped spread the word “utilitarianism” itself.

A tiny story version

Imagine moral philosophy in the 1700s as a messy workshop. Many thinkers had left useful tools lying around: ideas about pleasure, happiness, and the common good. Bentham walks in, gathers all these scattered tools, and builds one clear machine: a theory that judges every law and action by how much happiness it produces for everyone affected. That “machine” is what we now call utilitarianism.

TL;DR: When people ask “who created utilitarianism,” the standard answer is Jeremy Bentham, as the first to turn scattered happiness-maximizing ideas into a systematic ethical theory.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.