Utilitarianism: Consequentialist Moral Philosophy

It was in the 1780s that the two most-discussed moral theories were developed. One was the deontological morality of Kant and the other was the consequentialist morality of Jeremy Bentham. Deontological means adherence to a set of universally true moral laws, and Kant appealed to our duty to obey rational moral laws that he saw as imperatives on us. Consequentialist means a moral system that assesses the consequences of actions as to their moral correctness, and this, Bentham claimed, was the only legitimate moral system.