A building is burning and you can save only one person: the Archbishop of Cambrai, whose survival will bring peace and happiness to thousands, or his chambermaid, who happens to be your mother. Nearly everyone saves their mother. Utilitarianism says the math requires you to leave her behind. This episode traces how the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number evolved from ancient philosophy into a fiercely debated ethical algorithm that now shapes economics, animal rights, and how people decide to give.

We start with Mozi’s state consequentialism and Epicurus, move through the theological versions of John Gay and William Paley, and arrive at Jeremy Bentham’s hedonic calculus and the pig philosophy attacks from Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx. We then follow John Stuart Mill’s higher pleasures and competent judges, Henry Sidgwick’s collision with rational egoism, the split between act and rule utilitarianism, R.M. Hare’s archangel and prole, John Harsanyi’s preference utilitarianism, and the modern critiques of Shelly Kagan, Brad Hooker, John Rawls, and Dostoevsky’s tortured child.

• First- and second-order evils: why Bentham’s math still punishes a starving man who steals bread
• Is Mill rigging the system when he ranks intellectual pleasures above the pub?
• The 3 a.m. red light dilemma and why rule worship is not really utilitarianism
• The happiness pump and the demandingness objection, and Ian King’s argument that human empathy has a biological limit
• Effective altruism, welfare economics, and Bentham’s question about animals: not can they reason, but can they suffer