As a name for any ethical theory or for the class of ethical theories that evaluate actions by the value of the consequences of the actions, "consequentialism" thus refers to classical utilitarianism and other theories that share this characteristic.

Classical utilitarianism, in the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, was consequentialist, judging actions right in proportion as they tended to produce happiness, wrong as they tended to produce pain. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries much of the criticism of utilitarianism was directed at the hedonistic value theory on which the ethical theory was founded. Some philosophers, such as G. E. Moore, agreed with the claim of utilitarianism that acts are right insofar as they produce good consequences, wrong as they produce bad consequences, but put forward a richer theory of value, claiming that other things besides pleasure and pain are of intrinsic...