Editing Utilitarianism (section)

==== Hutcheson ====
[[Francis Hutcheson (philosopher)|Francis Hutcheson]] first introduced a key utilitarian phrase in ''An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue'' (1725): when choosing the most moral action, the amount of [[virtue]] in a particular action is proportionate to the number of people it brings happiness to.<ref>{{cite book|last=Hutcheson|first=Francis|title=Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2002|isbn=978-0-521-00304-9|editor-last=Schneewind|editor-first=J. B.|page=515|chapter=The Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue|orig-year=1725}}</ref> In the same way, [[moral evil]], or ''[[vice]]'', is proportionate to the number of people made to suffer. The best action is the one that procures the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers, and the worst is the one that causes the most misery. In the first three editions of the book, Hutcheson included various [[mathematical algorithm]]s "to compute the Morality of any Actions." In doing so, he echoed the later-proposed [[Felicific calculus|hedonic calculus]] of Bentham.