Which of the following are the features of the ideology of utilitarianism ? 1. Utilitarians believed that all value derives from land 2. The most celebrated spokesmen of utilitarianism were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill 3. Utilitarians were advocates of the idea that India could be ruled through indigenous laws and customs 4. Utilitarians were advocates of the idea of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number of people’ Select the correct answer using the code given below :
- (a)1 and 4 only
- (b)2 and 4 only
- (c)1, 2 and 4
- (d)2 and 3
Correct — B, statements 2 and 4 only. Utilitarianism judges every law, institution and action by a single test: does it increase happiness and reduce suffering for the largest number of people? That is statement 4, and it is the school's defining principle. Its two best-known exponents are Jeremy Bentham, who founded the doctrine and worked out the principle of utility in detail, and John Stuart Mill, who inherited and refined it and did more than anyone to popularise the name — which makes statement 2 correct as well. Statements 1 and 3 belong to entirely different schools of thought, so only 2 and 4 survive.
- (a)1 and 4 only — Keeps the correct greatest-happiness principle but pairs it with the land claim. Utilitarians located value in human well-being, not in any single factor of production; the idea that land is the sole source of wealth belongs to the eighteenth-century French physiocrats, and it also drops the true statement about Bentham and Mill.
- (c)1, 2 and 4 — The most attractive wrong option, because it keeps both true statements and adds only the land claim. Statement 1 is still false — utilitarianism is a moral and legislative theory about happiness, and it never held that all value derives from land.
- (d)2 and 3 — Statement 3 reverses the utilitarian position on India. Ruling India through its own laws and customs was the Orientalist argument; the utilitarians, led in India by James Mill, thought Indian institutions were the problem rather than the solution and pressed for codified, uniform, rationally designed law imposed from above. This option also drops the true statement 4.
Utilitarianism is the moral and political philosophy that the rightness of an action or a law is measured by the happiness it produces. Jeremy Bentham founded it, arguing that pleasure and pain are the only real standards and that legislation should be redesigned from scratch on that basis; John Stuart Mill developed it further and gave it its most famous statement. The doctrine carried directly into British policy in India, where James Mill and his followers argued that Indian society could be improved only by sweeping away what they regarded as irrational custom and replacing it with codified law, uniform courts and English education.
This item is really a three-way sorting test between schools of thought that a hurried candidate blurs together. Statement 1 is physiocracy, the French doctrine that agriculture and land are the ultimate source of all wealth. Statement 3 is the Orientalist position of men such as William Jones and H. T. Colebrooke, who wanted the Company to govern through Indian legal traditions and to patronise Sanskrit and Persian learning. Utilitarianism sat on the opposite side of that argument, alongside the Anglicists, and its most visible Indian product was the drive to codify law that ran from the first Law Commission under Macaulay to the Indian Penal Code. One point of honest detail on statement 4: the phrase about the greatest happiness of the greatest number is usually attached to Bentham, and he certainly made it the centre of his system, but its earliest formulation is credited to the earlier Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson. The examiner is testing the association with the school, which is sound.
- Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) founded utilitarianism; John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) developed it and popularised the term.
- The principle of utility judges laws and actions by whether they maximise happiness and minimise pain across all those affected.
- James Mill's History of British India (1817) supplied the utilitarian case for remaking Indian institutions rather than working through them.
- The doctrine that land is the source of all wealth is physiocracy, associated with Francois Quesnay and the eighteenth-century French economists, not with the utilitarians.
- Attaching the land-is-all-value claim to the utilitarians; that is physiocracy.
- Assuming that anyone who studied Indian tradition was a utilitarian — ruling through indigenous law and custom was the Orientalist position, which the utilitarians opposed.
NDA and the civil services both like statement-set items that mix one school's thinkers with another school's beliefs, so learn each ideology as a package of who, what and where it applied in India.
Which of the following led to the introduction of English Education in India? 1. Charter Act of 1813 2. General Committee of Public Instruction, 1823 3. Orientalist and Anglicist Controversy. Select the correct answer using the code given below:
- (a) 1 and 2 only
- (b) 2 only
- (c) 1 and 3 only
- (d) 1, 2 and 3
Answer(d) 1, 2 and 3
The controversy in which the utilitarians took the Anglicist side against the Orientalists — the debate that makes statement 3 of this NDA item false.
Which of the following statements about the Law Commission headed by Lord Macaulay is/are correct? 1. It attempted to codify the laws. 2. It was opposed to uniform system of Courts. Select the correct answer using the code given below:
- (a) 1 only
- (b) 2 only
- (c) Both 1 and 2
- (d) Neither 1 nor 2
Answer(a) 1 only
The utilitarian project in practice — codified law and a uniform court system were exactly what the school wanted in India, which is why statement 3 of this item, about ruling through indigenous custom, cannot be theirs.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The principle that a law should be judged by whether it produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number is central to
- (a)mercantilism
- (b)utilitarianism
- (c)physiocracy
- (d)syndicalism
Answer(b) utilitarianism — Bentham made the principle of utility the sole test of good legislation.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Who among the following wrote the History of British India, a work that supplied the utilitarian case for reforming Indian institutions?
- (a)William Jones
- (b)James Mill
- (c)Warren Hastings
- (d)H. T. Colebrooke
Answer(b) James Mill — his History of British India (1817) argued that Indian society needed remaking rather than preserving.