Hey guys, I'm Comr4de. I'm doing a project on utilitarianism for my Theories of Knowledge class, and I already have a few sources.

While I already have the required minimum for cited sources, I was wondering if there was anything else about utilitarianism that I should now that is either not on those webpages or something that is unclear.

If you fellows could help me out, that would be excellent. Anyways, thank you.

I'd disagree with the first line of that summary - we generally evaluate expected consequences rather than incidental ones.

I recommend these two utilitarianism resources:
http://www.utilitarian.net/
http://utilitarianism.com/

Also worth browsing this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=37

Hi Com4rade.

I'd say the most important thing to recognise is that a great many objections to utilitarianism demonstrate it to be unintuitive in various wild and wonderful scenarios. But few, if any objections demonstrate objections to utilitarianism demonstrate it to be unintuitive in realistic scenarios.

Do utilitarians evaluate expected consequences or incidental ones? Well, all suffering is bad. On the other hand, there's no point losing sleep over suffering that is unpredictable and random. That stuff is unpreventable. We should basically evaluate suffering that we can prevent. So yeah, I'd rather say that utilitarians maximise expected consequences than incidental ones.

Although I don't have citations for either of those points, I think they follow logically from the idea of maximising happiness and I'm happy to elaborate them.

I second Arepo's suggestion of links.

Otherwise, I'm happy to answer any questions you have, whether they're specific to your assignment or more general, and I welcome you to the site!