Excellent post! I really appreciate your proposal and framing for a book on utilitarianism. In line with your point, William MacAskill and Richard Yetter Chappell also perceived a lack of accessible, modern, and high-quality resources on utilitarianism (and related ideas), motivating the creation of utilitarianism.net, an online textbook on utilitarianism. The website has been getting a lot of traction over the past year, and it’s still under development (including plans to experiment with non-text media and translations into other languages).
Excellent post! I really appreciate your proposal and framing for a book on utilitarianism. In line with your point, William MacAskill and Richard Yetter Chappell also perceived a lack of accessible, modern, and high-quality resources on utilitarianism (and related ideas), motivating the creation of utilitarianism.net, an online textbook on utilitarianism. The website has been getting a lot of traction over the past year, and it’s still under development (including plans to experiment with non-text media and translations into other languages).
Thanks for working on this website, it’s a great idea!
Possible additions to your list of books (I’ve only read the first one so forgive me if they aren’t as good/​relevant as I think they are):
Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction (de Lazari Radek and Singer)
The Methods of Ethics (Sidgwick—I’m told quite long and dense though)
The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics (de Lazari Radek and Singer)
Utilitarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bykvist 2010)
Understanding Utilitarianism (Mulgan 2014)
Hedonistic Utilitarianism (Tännsjö 1998)
EDIT: the Very Short Introduction book recommends the other books listed (with the exception of The Methods of Ethics)
Embarrassingly wasn’t aware of the last three items on this list; thanks for flagging!
Neither was I before I looked at the bibliography in the first book!
I guess that kind of confirms the complaint that there isn’t an obvious, popular book to recommend on the topic!
Big fan of utilitarianism.net — not sure how I forgot to mention it!
As a beginner exploring normative ethics this looks very helpful. Thanks!