Preference Utilitarianism and Singer's Practical Ethics

Preference utilitarianism departs from the classical hedonistic utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill by locating value not in pleasurable or painful subjective experience as such, but in the satisfaction or frustration of the preferences, interests, or desires that individuals actually hold, whatever the qualitative character of the experience involved in satisfying them. The theory's modern roots include John Harsanyi's 1955 essay "Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility," published in the Journal of Political Economy, which modeled social welfare as an aggregate of individual preference-satisfactions, and R.M. Hare's Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (1981), which combined a preference-based utilitarianism with Hare's own theory of universal prescriptivism, developed across a two-level structure distinguishing everyday intuitive moral rules from a critical level of direct utilitarian reasoning.