Philosophical Dictionary

Utilitarianism says the right action is the one that produces the most happiness. Bentham wanted to calculate it, Mill insisted some pleasures count for more, and critics asked how anyone could predict the consequences in the first place. So is utilitarianism a moral theory, or a superpower nobody has?

Watch a lion eat a deer in a lion documentary and you cheer; watch it in a deer documentary and you look away. Nietzsche built a whole theory of morality on that switch, with lambs, birds of prey, debts and priests. Was he really on the lion’s side, or is the story more complicated than the meme lets on?

Is the dog a good boy? Depends on your ethical theory, says the meme. Nietzsche went further in 1873: truth itself is a mobile army of metaphors, and being truthful means lying by convention. He never published the essay, and his famous “no facts” line sits in a notebook. So did he hand us post-truth?

“Without objective morality, everything is permissible” sounds like a knockout argument, and a sandwich meme made it a joke. The sentence is usually pinned on Dostoevsky, Sartre built existentialism on it, and Nietzsche thought atheists who kept their morals were cheating. Does objective morality need God at all?

A viral line says crushing a cockroach makes you a hero and crushing a butterfly a villain. Nobody can trace it to Rumi, but the question is ancient: the Greeks fused beautiful and good into kalokagathia, Kant made beauty a symbol of morality, and psychologists tested the bias. Do our morals follow our eyes?