The Contemporary Evolution and Reform of Utilitarianism

This book is a monograph on contemporary utilitarianism, focusing on its evolving path and logic. It describes the evolution of utilitarianism from the classical model to the contemporary model and then summarizes the characteristics of contemporary utilitarianism, revealing its advantages and disadvantages. This book points out that the best characteristic of contemporary utilitarianism is to give up traditional view of individualism and take balanced attitude to the relationship between individual and community. The change makes the goal of contemporary utilitarianism from the pursuit of maximizing the sum of individual utilities to optimal social utility. Therefore, the contemporary utilitarianism gradually evolves a public philosophy with multiple interests structure, which provides a new way to solve the contradiction between personal interest and public interest.

Utilitarianism is still an important political philosophy in western society, but its existing defects actually make it difficult to have a transformative impact on western institutional structure and system. The target audience of this book are students and researchers majoring in politics and ethics.

Liu Shuyang, Assistant Professor at Peking University, engages in political theory research and national governance projects that focus on interest theory in politics. She held a Ph.D. in political science from Peking University in 2018 and served as Peking University Boya Postdoctor doing public policy research at Peking University from 2018 to 2020. She specializes in interest politics theory, producing abundant productions in this field.