[The Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number] is no rule at all … but rather an enunciation of the problem to be solved. It is your ‘greatest happiness’ of which we have been so long and so fruitlessly in search; albeit we never gave it a name. You tell us nothing new; you merely give words to our want. What you call an answer, is simply our own question turned the right side up. If this is your philosophy it is surely empty, for it merely echoes the interrogation.
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of them Developed, 1861.