Character

Not himself a utilitarian, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) characterizes virtuous character traits as those that tend to the good, of mankind or at least of their possessor, and vicious ones as those that tend to the bad. Hume thus shares with utilitarians the view that the moral value of a character trait depends on its nonmoral value for people. Given its first widely influential formulation by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in the nineteenth century in The Principles of Morals and Legislation, utilitarianism focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions: the principle of utility deems that action right that, of the available alternatives in any given situation, tends to maximize the happiness of those affected. Utilitarianism's critics fault it for being insensitive to the importance of character evaluation for moral evaluation, but John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), a second-generation utilitarian, already stresses that acts ought to be evaluated for their consequences on character and character formation and includes as ingredients of happiness or utility such diverse intrinsic goods as friendship and virtue. A utilitarian may also subject character-traits and rules, and not only acts, to utilitarian assessment.