History
Although utilitarian philosophy traces itself back to the nineteenth century British thinkers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the application of these principles to contemporary bioethics originated in the work of Peter Singer in the 1970s and 1980s. A second generation of utilitarian bioethicists, including Julian Savulescu, Jacob M. Appel and Thaddeus Mason Pope, advanced these arguments further in the 1990s and 2000s. Among applications of the utilitarian bioethic in policy are the Groningen Protocol in the Netherlands and the Advance Directives Act in the American state of Texas.
In the 1990s, a backlash against utilitarian bioethics emerged, led by such figures as Wesley J. Smith and novelist Dean Koontz.
Read more about this topic: Utilitarian Bioethics
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“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
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