IN discussing the question whether any moral outlook must ultimately be concerned with human happiness, I have not supposed that question to be the same as the question whether all moral outlooks must be one or another version of utilitarianism. Obviously they are not the same question if we take the narrowest sense of ‘utilitarianism’, which holds that there is just one moral principle, to seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number; that ‘happiness’ here means pleasure and the absence of pain; and that the one moral principle – since it is the one moral principle – is to be applied to each individual situation (‘act-utilitarianism’). Obviously there are all sorts of ways in which a morality can be ultimately concerned with human happiness without being identical with that. But I think also that there are ways in which morality can be ultimately concerned with human happiness without being identical with utilitarianism even taken in a more extended sense.

A difficulty in discussing this issue is a lack of agreement about how extensively the term ‘utilitarianism’ may properly or sensibly be used. The term has sometimes been used to include moral outlooks which do not have anything specially to do with happiness or pleasure at all; in this sense, it is used to refer to any outlook which holds that the rightness or wrongness of an action always depends on the consequences of the action, on its tendency to lead to intrinsically good or bad states of affairs.