Have you all noticed this neat little google page? It graphs the prevalence of words in the books in google's database, against time.

It's being used as a tracker of culture. Here's a graph that shows that people are more likely to talk about pleasure and pain than happiness and suffering, and only mention wellbeing rarely:


I'm sure you can find much more creative uses to put it to!

Wow, I love this! It's worth saying that your graph doens't tell us much about the terms people prefer to use today when expressing their moral views - wellbeing might well be the most popular but it's not a term that gets used in other areas of conversation much!



I have no idea how to insert images on here and this is probably not going to work, but it's interesting how the word "utilitarianism" received its two booms following the publications of Mill's Utilitarianism and Peter Singer's Animal Liberation

edit - Ryan: fixed your image. right click - copy image location, then paste it in

This graph is more interesting anyway: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=utilitarianism&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

This was searching for "utilitarianism". You get a very different graph if you search for "Utilitarianism".

Interesting... there's a popular claim that util had a popularity swell in the mid-20th century, and that Rawls put an end to it. Those graphs almost imply the opposite.

Thought I'd give names of ethicists a try. Marx was on there, but he was so popular he crushed the rest of the scale:

Nice one, Arepo. Very entertaining!

I have proven without a shadow of doubt that utilitarianism is much more popular than rights theories.