the.com/utilitarianism

means The moral theory that an action is right if it produces the greatest overall happiness or well-being for the greatest number of people, judged by consequences rather than intentions or rules.

from Built from the Latin 'utilis' meaning 'useful,' the word rides on 'utility' — the idea that worth is measured by usefulness. It became a philosophical label in the early 1800s through thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who argued that the rightness of an act should be calculated like a sum: add up the pleasure, subtract the pain, see what's left. Bentham reportedly embraced the term partly because it sounded plain and unglamorous — a deliberate rebuff to loftier moral philosophies that talked of virtue or duty without ever doing the arithmetic.