From Bentham’s pleasure calculus to modern-day effective altruism, the ethical theory of utilitarianism has had a big impact on how we think about welfare. But if happiness can be measured, can freedom? Perhaps the deeper promise of utilitarianism is not the optimisation of pleasure or material gain, but the expansion of the human capability to choose.

Stripped down to its essentials, utilitarianism is a moral principle that holds that the right course of action in any situation is the one that produces the greatest benefits for the most people. First developed by Jeremy Bentham, and later refined by John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism redefined ethics in the language of arithmetic: pleasure and pain became measurable, summable, and comparable. The moral worth of an action, they said, is determined not by intention, but by outcome. This logic has since shaped much of modern policymaking and economics. The cost-benefit analysis became one of the main mechanisms to evaluate social welfare systems, with the goal to maximise benefits, minimise harm, and do so with the greatest impact per unit of cost. 

An unconditional basic income aligns well with this logic. The empirical evidence is clear: giving money with no strings attached improves people’s physical health, increases their psychological well-being, and strengthens responsiveness to economic shocks. By any utilitarian measure of welfare, these outcomes are net positive. Yet the deeper justification for a basic income is not found in these outcomes themselves, but in the conditions that make them possible. 

From Welfare to Freedom

A common critique of basic income projects is that unconditional transfers may lead to spending on non-essentials, or choices that don’t maximise welfare. Such concerns usually come with the impulse to add conditions or rules about how people should use money that is given to them, to ensure it generates “good” outcomes.

This reach for control reflects a familiar and difficult pattern: the paternalistic impulse to decide on behalf of others what counts as “good.” Paternalism assumes that policymakers or donors can calculate welfare more accurately (and know better) than the people whose lives they want to improve.

From a narrow utilitarian perspective, such control might look efficient and tidy. If people spend as instructed, outcomes are easier to measure, and success is easier to prove – not to mention that the administrative machinery required to enforce and verify such conditions carries its own substantial cost. But from a broader utilitarian view, this approach undermines the very source of human welfare: the freedom to choose.

In contemporary philosophy, it is now often argued that well-being is not simply about what people have, but about what they can do with what they have. Utilitarianism, properly understood, is therefore not only about aggregated happiness, but about expanding the set of meaningful options available to each person. Conversely, the lack of such freedom is not just an economic deficit, but a form of deprivation in itself: a direct loss of agency, dignity, and self-determination. 

When people are denied the ability to make their own choices, even if imperfect, their well-being is limited not by material constraints alone, but by moral ones. Conditionality and control can be efficient, but they erode the very autonomy that enables human development. From this perspective, conditionality produces less good, not more. It restricts the agency that makes well-being possible in the first place.

Ethics of Trust

Evidence from around the globe has shown that when people are trusted with resources, they don’t just meet their immediate needs. They redirect, combine, and invest those resources according to their own priorities, and in forms that no external actor could predict or legitimately prescribe. Recipients gain dignity and confidence, which in turn generate broader social benefits. Such agency is durable; it persists long after any program ends because it is an internal capability, not an external instruction. 

Unconditional cash transfers, then, maximise good not by providing material security, but by expanding people’s capacity to choose. And by doing so, they can achieve what utilitarianism ultimately seeks: the greatest good for the greatest number, understood as the freedom to pursue one’s own good.

If happiness can be counted, can freedom? Perhaps not. But freedom is what gives happiness its meaning. The promise of a basic income lies not only in reducing poverty, but in restoring the agency to decide what a good life is. In that sense, unconditionality is not a departure from utilitarianism, but the recognition that the greatest good arises when people are free to pursue it for themselves.

These sources provided background and insights

Utilitarianism

BBC Radio 4

by In Our Time: Philosophy