The Cambridge Lockians and the origins of utilitarianism

Abstract

Long before Bentham, from the 1830s onwards, a number of openly religiously oriented writers already used the principle of utility as the foundation of their ethical analyses. All of them had been educated at Cambridge University, all of them were related to each other, all of them were Anglicans and all of them were engaged in a complex work of reception and reworking of Locke's philosophical ideas. This essay aims to examine the characteristics and limits of this reception, during the proto-history of the utilitarian tradition, of Locke's moral philosophy.