Examples of utilitarianism include effective altruism, bulldozing someone’s home for a highway, and redistribution of excess money from the rich to the poor. It is an ethical theory developed to determine what we morally ought to do. It is a variety of consequentialism.

For example, environmental utilitarianism takes into account the effects of an action on the environment. Animal welfare utilitarians argue for the moral consideration of animals in addition to humans. And economists have proposed a utilitarian approach to decision-making based on cost-benefit analysis.

For utilitarians, stealing in itself is neither bad nor good; what makes it bad or good is the consequences it produces. In our example, Peter stole from one person who has less need for the money, and spent the money on three people who have more need for the money.

For example, Bentham defined benefits and harms in terms of pleasure and pain. John Stuart Mill, a great 19th century utilitarian figure, spoke of benefits and harms not in terms of pleasure and pain alone but in terms of the quality or intensity of such pleasure and pain.

For example, assume a hospital has four people whose lives depend upon receiving organ transplants: a heart, lungs, a kidney, and a liver. If a healthy person wanders into the hospital, his organs could be harvested to save four lives at the expense of one life.